Terminal Emulation

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Wednesday 10 March 2004, at 10 h 27, the keyboard of Mark Cartwright 
<sirloper at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I know well that currently console emulation on
> freebsd/sparc64 more or less doesn't exist,

It has been reported as sparc64/62448 but, unfortunately, immediately closed 
(not even downgraded to wishlist, closed, as if the problem didn't exist).

> I am not a developer, but I can't
> imagine it would be that difficult to borrow some code
> from the other BSD's (opena and net) which both are
> capable of running X locally and have full support for
> the sun terminal type.

I confirm that NetBSD installation program works fine on the Sun console.

There was another report that it may be sufficient to copy the termcap:

Subject: Re: sparc64/62448: Terminal Type during install
From: Ilya Varlashkin <ilya at samara.net>
To: Kris Kennaway <kris at freebsd.org>
Cc: liddle at thphys.ox.ac.uk
Cc: freebsd-sparc64 at freebsd.org
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2004 13:37:05 +0000

On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 06:29:12PM -0800, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> Synopsis: Terminal Type during install
>
> State-Changed-From-To: open->closed
> State-Changed-By: kris
> State-Changed-When: Fri Feb 6 18:28:01 PST 2004
> State-Changed-Why:
> It's documented in the release notes, and discussed extensively on the
> mailing list, that installing via the system console is not yet supported.
> Use a serial console instead for now.
>

Kris,

is there copyright problem with termcap? After the installation of FreeBSD
on my Ultra-10 I'd just copied definition from Solaris and normal console
(not serial) works just fine. If Sun didn't copyright/patent their termcap
could it just be incorporated into FreeBSD? By the way, file id appeared
to be the same on Solaris and FreeBSD, but content is different.

Kind regards,
Ilya Varlashkin