Properly Configuring Terminal Emulation in Unix?

Jobe_br asks: "I've recently come across a need for a way of connecting to a SCO Unix box with full SCO-ANSI emulation (so that I can send F1-F12 commands and ASCII line art appears as lines, not strange foreign letters). After checking out the Terminal-HOWTO at linuxdoc.org I came away with no clearer understanding of what I need to do. I can pretty much pick any 'ole terminal emulator for win32 and get what I need, but no matter what I do to fiddle with my xterms/eterms/vts I can't get things to go. Is this not facilitated under Linux?"

Comments

I had this problem too

[wang33]

We had this problem too at work, our solution run CRT in wine. It was a pain to configure but works really well now after some trouble shooting. Found one other package that claims to do what you want out of the box but couldn't even get the software to run for me, it was from Pericom-Software.com. Crappy install and just all around seems like pretty poor software but your mileage may vary.

You might try this

[xiox]

Found this on google.

Re:You might try this

[ksheff]

After getting the correct termcap entries, to make xterm have the correct function key mappings, you can put the following in your ~/.Xdefaults file if you are going to use the scoansi terminal type:

SCOTerm.vt100.translations:#override\
<Key>F1: string(0x1b) string("[M")\n\
<Key>F2: string(0x1b) string("[N")\n\
<Key>F3: string(0x1b) string("[O")\n\
<Key>F4: string(0x1b) string("[P")\n\
<Key>F5: string(0x1b) string("[Q")\n\
<Key>F6: string(0x1b) string("[R")\n\
<Key>F7: string(0x1b) string("[S")\n\
<Key>F8: string(0x1b) string("[T")\n\
<Key>F9: string(0x1b) string("[U")\n\
<Key>F10: string(0x1b) string("[V")\n

When you run an xterm that you want to have those keybindings, just run it as xterm -name SCOTerm. If you need to send different function key sequences, look at the /etc/termcap or the terminfo stuff to determine what the function keys are to send.

How to figure out key translation ?

[RGRistroph]

I have been trying to get full (i.e., all F-keys, escape and backspace/delete etc) terminal emulation going on a DOS machine connected to a linux machine over a serial cable. I can specify what terminal type that the getty should use on that line in /etc/inittab.

On the DOS machine I am using kermit. There is a vt300.ini file which puts it into vt300 emulation mode. Except that if I connect to the linux machine, I have to do "set term type ansi-bbs" to be able to see any text, and if I start up midnight commander not all of the F-keys work.

I looked the various "set key" commands in the vt300.ini file, and I had the hope that I could look at the termcap definition of vt300 (actually vt320) on the linux machine and somehow figure out how to set the F-keys to send the right thing.

But no luck so far. How do you figure out exactly what mc is expecting for a certain key ? Isn't this somehow in the ncurses library related stuff ? Should I try a different terminal type -- perhaps midnight commander wouldn't work correctly even if I had a real hardware vt320 ?

In general, how do you debug stuff like this ? Is there a program in the ncurses package, or that uses it, that I can run, press a key, and it will show me what the terminal emulator should send (in terms of what binary combination) to emulate that key ? Then I could generate the key-to-binary mapping by hand, and then use that to generate a file of "set key" commands to configure kermit correctly. If I was trying to emulate something with more F-keys than my keyboard, I could look into using shift-Fkey to emulate the higher ones, or whatever. But I would at least know what I needed to send, and that's the part I'm having trouble figuring out.

By the way, the /etc/termcap file has some interesting reading in the comments. Check it out next time you are waiting for a compile to finish.

Re:How to figure out key translation ?

[RGRistroph]

Sure it does. It does a lot more, but it definitely does that. Look at the What is Kermit page and do a page search on "terminal emulation."

A "terminal" is a keyboard and monitor (or in the old days, a teletype machine (that's where "tty" comes from), basically a keyboard and line printer) with a wire connection to a host computer. For each such piece of hardware built, there was a protocol for how the host computer could tell the screen what to display and what bytes would be sent with each keystroke. (Actually some terminals allowed you edit an entire line and then send it at once.)

When I take one computer and hook it to another with a piece of wire, the software that causes the first computer to send exactly the same things to make it look like the terminal hardware is on the other end is naturally enough called a "terminal emulator."

You can take an old PDP11, disconnect it's vt220 or vt100 terminal, hook up the wire to a computer instead, run kermit connected to that port, tell kermit to pretend to be a vt100 or vt220 or whatever, and the PDP11 should not be able to figure out that there isn't a real hardware terminal on the other end.

These days you don't have to have a separate hardware port for each terminal, you can connect many at once via Linux's virtual terminals or networks or whatever.

I had (possibly this) problem with AIX.

[BocaLoca]

I had a similar problem with AIX. If you do a CTRL^Left-Click (of an xterm), you will see the option 'Old Function-Keys'. --try it

If it works, then add this line to your ~/.Xdefaults file:

XTerm*oldXtermFKeys: true