'linux' terminal support in HP UX 11.23

[John O'Neill_6]

Hi,

We've recently just migrated from PA-RISC HP U 11.22 to ITANIUM HP UX 11.23.

However an issue we've found is that some of our legacy clients which are based on LINUX are unable to work properly due to the fact that the terminal type of 'linux' is unknown.

It worked just fine in HP UX 11.22, but it seems that HP UX 11.23 doesn't recognise this terminal type.

When they log on they get a terminal type of 'UNKNOWN'.

Our application environment (Progress OpenEdge 10.1C) DOES understand the terminal of 'linux' (and has its own termcap dubbed protermcap entries for it).

What can I do?
Why does HP UX 11.23 NOT support this terminal type whilst the older 11.22 did?!

This is causing me some real grief. I don't want to throw out the old thin client terminals as they're still very good.

We have a workaround in place for now using a PC instead of the thin clients but our users prefer the Linux based terminals.

Any ideas?

-John

[Dennis Handly]

There was no PA version of 11.22, did you mean 11.11?

>When they log on they get a terminal type of 'UNKNOWN'.

What caused it to be "linux" before? Hard coded in .profile? Or the terminals returned that string?

>What can I do?

Set the value of TERM to linux?

[John O'Neill_6]

Hi,

Sorry, it was 11.11 U 9000/9000 on the PA-RISC machine.

The terminals are based on LTSP, running off Red Had 9.

They just open a TELNET session to the designated host.

They identify themselves are type 'Linux'.

-John

[Dennis Handly]

Here are some old threads about ttytype(1) to identify the terminal type:
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1155618
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1033501

[John O'Neill_6]

No Joy i'm affraid...

The UNIX system (11.23) comes back with 'Unknown Terminal type linux'.

My Progress application comes up and the screen/menu appear ok even with bolding and highlighting etc.

But my Function keys and backspace keys don't work...I have to use CTRL-X to achieve same thing as a 'F1' key.

I was wondering..

Could I put something in the .profile to set up the F1, F2, F4 and BACKSPACE/DEL keys for 'unknown' terminal tpes.

We're going to be retiring these LTSP based consoles later this year with HP thin clients that use SSH anyway.

That would get my LTSP based Linux clients up and running.

[John O'Neill_6]

I know we're not supposed to set any hard coded TERM values in the .profile, i've tried evaluating $TERM after terminal identification takes place to various things:

xterm
vt100
wy60
linux (Progress has a terminal type in its PROTERMCAP file for 'linux').

No joy... can get progress application to run, seems to dispaly everything correctly, just need to sort out the Function keys, backspace and delete and good to go.

-John

[Dennis Handly]

>The UNIX system (11.23) comes back with 'Unknown Terminal type linux'.

What command gives this error?

I'm not sure if ttytype(4) would help? (I guess your system returns the type but not recognized?)

If you still have your 11.11 system around, you may be able to copy your old terminfo(4) files for linux?

[Bill Hassell]

There is no need to dump the "Linux" terminals. They belong to a very large family of character-mode terminals and terminal emulators. HP-UX is one of the very few Unix's that understands hundreds of different models. The reason you see TERM=linux is that you are using the default /etc/profile where the (archaic) code checks to see if the TERM value was preset when the terminal logged in. This code assumes that 100% of all incoming connections come from HP-UX systems. It turns out that protocols such as telnet have subcodes that communicate certain features between systems. One of these options presets the TERM variable. As long as the incoming system is using one the hundreds of terminal models listed in the terminfo database (see: ll /usr/lib/terminfo/terminfo/*/*) then it may work.

I say "may work" because an incoming system may say it uses a certain terminal protocol but may not. HP recognized this problem a long time ago and created a terminal identifier program: ttytype. What the program does is to query the terminal with the 3 most common terminal categories. If one query fails, the program times out and tries another. Once a response is seen, some additional codes are sent to further identify the exact model and set TERM, LINES, COLUMNS and ERASE. Try this:

ttytype -s

You'll see that the terminal is queried and for your Linux terminals, some version of vt100 series will be returned.

The problem is that the default code in /etc/profile bypasses this critical setup if TERM is already set. This makes no sense because there is no reason to expect that other systems set the TERM value correctly in the communication protocol.

So replace all this archaic code in /etc/profile:

# set term if it's not set



if [ "$TERM" = "" -o "$TERM" = "unknown" -o "$TERM" = "dialup" \
-o "$TERM" = "network" ]
then
eval `ttytype -s -a`
fi

export TERM

# set erase to ^H, if ERASE is not set
if [ "$ERASE" = "" ]
then
ERASE="^H"
export ERASE
fi
stty erase $ERASE



with this one line:

eval $(ttytype -sa)

Now, every terminal will be identified at login and the appropriate settings will be in force.

[John O'Neill_6]

Hi,

Really appreciate the help so far :) However i am still stuck :(

Here's what my profile has to say about terminals.

# Be sure that VUE does not invoke tty commands
if ! "$VUE" ];then # set term if it's not set
if [ "$TERM" = "" -o "$TERM" = "unknown" -o "$TERM" = "dialup" -o "$TERM" = "network" ]

then
eval `ttytype -a`
fi
export TERM

So I don't get it... when the login process runs I see 'Unknown Terminal type linux' appearing before I get the odd output.

Yet when i set another user which doesn't run the application and get a shell.. then type ttytype -s -a' it reports
VT100
Columns 80
Lines 24
DELETE=^?

Which is odd.

Any more ideas?

[Dennis Handly]

>when the login process runs I see 'Unknown Terminal type linux' appearing before I get the odd output.

What odd output? You may have to add echo statements in your /etc/profile or .profile to track this down.

>Yet when I set another user which doesn't run the application and get a shell. then type ttytype -s -a' it reports: VT100 ..

So this isn't linux.
What happens if you do: eval `ttytype -s -a`
Then invoke your application?

[Matti_Kurkela]

Adding support for terminal type "linux" is fairly easy.

First, go to a Linux machine. On it, run the command:

infocmp linux > linux.terminfo

This produces an ASCII-formatted description of terminal type "linux" and stores it into file named "linux.terminfo".

Now copy that file to the HP-UX 11.23 machine, become root and execute:

tic linux.terminfo

This translates the ASCII terminfo description into binary format and stores it into its proper location, namely /usr/share/lib/terminfo/l/linux.

Now the terminal type "linux" should be useable in HP-UX.

As far as I know, no HP-UX has supported terminal type "linux" out of the box... however, I haven't had access to any 11.22 machine so I cannot be sure. Perhaps the procedure described above was done to your 11.22 machines when your environment was originally set up?

MK

[John O'Neill_6]

Hi people,

Again, thankyou for your support and help on this one, i've tried everything but no joy, still get exactly the same issues as I started out with.

Business is screaming for a solution, so i'm ditching our Linux based thin clients and putting small form factor PC's in their place.

I know, I 'should' be able to find a solution with your help and advise, but I need to get a solution sorted out ASAP and I know that the PC's with a terminal emulator will do the job.

Closing this one, maybe i'll come back to it in the future when i've not got so many Drama's to deal with :(

-John