FreeBSD 4.10 and terminal woes

[Geert Hendrickx]

On Sat, May 29, 2004 at 03:04:36PM +0300, Odhiambo Washington wrote:
> I decided to upgrade the box that I read my mail on (using mutt) to
> FreeBSD 4.10-STABLE. It has been running 4.9-STABLE since those days ;)
> 
> Now all too suddenly, I have a mad terminal, display getting messed up
> when I read my mail, edit a file, almost anything. The only change was
> the upgrade. To give a little more details I can gather, when I ssh to
> the box from another Unix terminal, this madness is not there at all.
> But before I upgraded, I was using Microshit windows for a couple of
> days, connecting to this box using Telneat (aka ShellGuard) and there
> was no problem.
> IIRC, there was no change at all to /etc/termcap during mergemaster.
> 
> I'll appreciate any clues.
> 
> Not that I desperately need to run on Windows, but just so that I can
> know what happened and how to fix it. In my .bash_profile, I init my
> terminal as cons25.
> 
> I checked UPDATING to see if anything is mentioned, but no. 
> 
> 
> Thank you in adv.
> 
> 
> -Wash

Check your $TERM variable.  Make it "cons25".  

For /bin/sh or bash: 
TERM=cons25; export TERM
You can make this permanent putting it in /etc/profile

For csh: 
setenv TERM cons25
You can make this permanent putting it in /etc/csh.cshrc

Probably the upgrade replaced one of these files so you lost your TERM.
By default, it's set to "dumb" and then you can't use vi, mutt, ...

Having no problems with ssh means that your client automatically uses
vt100 or xterm as $TERM, which works fine for those programs.  

GH