[Techtalk] connecting a dumb terminal

[Katie Bechtold]

On Sun, Aug 25, 2002 at 10:56:57AM +0100, Conor Daly wrote:
> > The only thing that's less than perfect about it is that the
> > terminal screen is printing some characters around text that would
> > normally (on my PC's Gnome terminals) appear in color.  But I assume
> > I'll be able to figure out how to fix that.
> That would be the machine assuming your terminal is a colour term.  The
> characters are the escape codes used to make the terminal switch colours.  
> I have a suspicion that gets fixed by setting $TERM to an appropriate value
> (maybe even "VT52"!).  

In my /etc/inittab, I had been using xterm-mono as the 'term'
argument to agetty.  After I changed it to vt52, it stopped trying
to print things in color (or maybe it had been trying to do italic
or bold text or other things that perhaps a monochrome xterm can do
that a generic vt52 can't).  So that's an improvement!  I also tried
a $TERM of ifmr (for Informer, the brand of this terminal), but that
didn't yield much improvement: my computer didn't seem to be getting
the right information about the number of columns and rows on this
terminal, so a lot of formatting looked bad.  The thing I don't
think I realized before was that I needed to restart my terminal for
the changes in /etc/inittab to take effect (in addition to doing
'telinit q').  Now that I understand that, life is making more
sense. 

I'd never realized just how many of the command-line apps that I use
(ls, lynx, mutt...) require information about the terminal.  My next
move, I think, will be to add a new, custom /etc/termcap entry for
my terminal, once I learn how to encode such an entry.  'man
termcap' is my new friend.
 
-- 
Katie Bechtold
http://katie-and-rob.org/