sysinstall and the Right Terminal

[Martin McCormick]

Dale Scott writes:
> I don't have a solution but can report I regularily login to my fbsd 7 
> and 8 boxes from an Ubuntu laptop using ssh in
> Terminal and run sysinstall. I've never encountered this problem though.

Thank you for responding.

If you type

echo $TERM 

or just the command 

env

Is TERM = "linux" or something else?

	As I write this message, I have cons25l1 as the
environment variable for TERM and sysinstall came up with no
issues at all. I could make that my default terminal except for
the fact that a few of the escape codes for formatting the
screen quit working for applications like vi. In vi, for
instance, one can join two lines together by typing a J in
command mode. That works under a linux or VT100 terminal but it
doesn't work when using cons25.

	It may end up being one of those things I just remember
to do when necessary.

	One interesting thing I notice is that when in "linux"
or "VT100" emulation, I always lost the Bell that rings during
vi when you hit Escape more than once or try to move the cursor
past the end of the text. The bell works in cons25. The
formatting issues are more of an issue than the bell so I will
need to go back to a more VT100-like terminal.

	What we may be dealing with is the fact that some
programs do their own emulation based on what they think the
terminal should be. There is something called "raw" mode and
"cooked" mode. The shell and a lot of applications use "cooked"
mode and rely on the shell to do the addressing.  Other
full-screen programs like vi turn off the shell's processing and
use their own. This is only bad if it isn't what works with your
display device. What is even more interesting is that vi under
Linux, itself, has all the bells, so to speak.

	I am getting in to an area in which I know less than I
should so I will stop here.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group