topic Re: vt100 term in Operating System - HP-UX

vt100 term

Grad Student — Tue, 14 Jan 2003 20:43:28 GMT

Hi,
We have one HP-UX machine in our lab along with several Tru64 machines. The HP is a great computer, but nobody here knows how to use it. One of the simple problems is that when somebody SSH's to the HP-UX machine (from a Tru64 machine, or a vt100 emulator on a PC), the prompt says:
TERM = (hp)
If the person types:
vt100
Then everything is okay. And, of course, if you except the default then the key mappings are all messed up. Why doesn't the HP machine automatically set the terminal type to vt100? Why does it have to ask?

Thanks,

Nici Ames
MIT, Mech Eng Dept
PhD candidate

Re: vt100 term

Ken Hubnik_2 — Tue, 14 Jan 2003 20:46:05 GMT

There is an if statement in either /etc/profile or the users .profile that ask the question. Comment is out or change it to vt100.

Re: vt100 term

James R. Ferguson — Tue, 14 Jan 2003 20:52:39 GMT

Hi:

If you look at your '.profile' (as processed by the login sequence) you will see 'tset' commands. 'tset' is responsible for interrogating the terminal in an attempt to determine "what" it thinks it is. The man pages for 'tset' provide a fairly good overview. I have seen instances where timing issues prevent proper interpretation of the dialog leading to situations such as you describe.

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: vt100 term

Shannon Petry — Tue, 14 Jan 2003 20:56:01 GMT

The default login file ".login" for HP-UX force the term type to default to hp. Just change the term type defined after the tset command to vt100, or whatever you want it to be. (personally I use xterm).

Regards,
Shannon

Re: vt100 term

Grad Student — Tue, 14 Jan 2003 21:26:50 GMT

Thanks!
It was actually in the .login file since we were using csh

Re: vt100 term

Bill Hassell — Wed, 15 Jan 2003 01:39:53 GMT

There's actually a feature in telnet that carries the TERM value from the incoming system. If TERM is set to vt100 on the source machine, then the standard /etc/profile and /etc/csh.login will skip the testing of the termnal. For /etc/csh.login, it blindly sets TERM=hp. The correct method is to run ttytype or tset to query the remote terminal.

HP has been designing/using smart terminals since the mid 70's and vt100 emulators are assumed to be too clunky for running tools like SAM and swinstall, although they will work OK. Change your /etc/csh.login to run tset to identify the incoming terminal. If tset (or ttytype) fails, then the emulator is really dumb and you'll have to hardcode the vt100 value for TERM. There may be other incompatibilities with vt100 emulation. See the man page for untic and terminfo.

Re: vt100 term

magicdog — Wed, 15 Jan 2003 10:58:51 GMT

test please ignore this -- Thanks