HPTerm & vt220

[Dan Skrove_1]

Can anyone tell me if vt220 terminal emulation is a full feature replacement for HPTerm emulation. I have a situation where I need to use a terminal server for a group of 9000's and it does not support HPTerm but insists that vt220 will provide me with full admin capibilities.

Thanks
Dan Skrove

[A. Clay Stephenson]

A term setting of vt220 will certainly provide you with an adequate character-based interface for SAM, swinstall, swremove, ... . Your arrow-keys, line graphics, ... will work. A vt220 is, of course, no substitute for a GUI interface but anything that you can do in hpterm you can pretty much do in vt220. This does assume that whatever terminal server you are using does emulate a vt220 well.

[Dan Skrove_1]

Thanks for the quick reply. I should have included the following info in the first thread. VT220 seems to work fine untill I before this sequense:

Start the TUI (not the X version) with swinstall -i. Find your bundle in the Specify Source screen, enter OK. The next screen will be SD Install - Software Selection. Go to View -> Change Software View -> Start with Products. Then go to Actions -> Manage Patch Selection. It's the Manage Patch Selection screen that is garbled.

I cannot seem to get the last screen to display properly. The 9000 is set to TERM=vt200 and the terminal server is set for vt220.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Well, I just tried using a vt220 emulator for swinstall with your commands and all was well but I did a very radical thing and set TERM=vt220 rather than vt200. I admit that is a very whacky thing to do but most of the time it proves useful to match TERM to the actual emulation setting.

On the other hand, even with terminal settings matching, it's possible that you may still have problems because there are terminal emulators and there are terminal emulators.

[Dan Skrove_1]

My thread had a little typo.... The server is set to vt220. I'm glad to hear you did not have a problem with the 'Manage Patch Selection', I will look into another possible cause for the garbled screen.

Thanks

[Bill Hassell]

A couple of things: the value for TERM *must* match the terminal you are using to display information.There is no magic in $TERM where it changes the way that a terminal (or emulator) runs. Instead, it is a flag to application programs that use terminfo (the Curses library) to perform common tasks which are implemented differently on different terminals. There are 3 parts to a terminal's environment: TERM (which is a text index into the terminfo database), LINES and COLUMNS. The DEC VT series had many, many models (see http://www.cs.utk.edu/~shuford/terminal/dec.html) starting with the VT05. I believe most of them all had answerback and/or terminal-ID capability which is how ttytype identifies a terminal automnatically.

However, there is a bug in the ttytype code (first reported in the mid 1990's) for VT terminals. The bug is that the returned character string for identifying the number of lines is off by 20 for a real VT220 and you'll get LINES=4 from ttytype -s. This bug affects the real VT200 (and other similar models) and also affects Reflection terminal emulators set to VT220-8 mode. (the bug goes away if you use VT220-7 in Reflection terminal settings).

So, to answer the question, the ideal support for HP menuing programs such as SAM and swinstall is an HP smart terminal such as the 700/92 (700/9x family) or the 239x family. These terminals have full 2-line function keys and video enhancements that make the CUI version much easier (and faster) to use than the GUI versions.

For menuing features that don't work quite right for a specific model, the terminfo database may have a wrong or missing element. If you use the command: untic vt220 you'll see what the Curses library expects a VT220 to support and the codes that correspond to the feature (man terminfo). One workaround may be to override $TERM to a lower level of implementation such as TERM=vt100 versus TERM=vt220. If this works, check the patch databse for curses patches.