Terminal Emulation for N4000 11.0

[Andrew Dutton]

I am currently in the market to replace reflections which we use as a terminal emulator. All I need is something that can allow me to program keys, ssh, 11.0 and will run on Windows 2k, xp. I would like it to be freeware but if it was really cheap I might also like to use it. We have MFGpro running on the box and I need character access to the system. All help appreciated.

[Mel Burslan]

When you say softkeys definitions, you are stepping into the expensive category as none of the free terminal emulators can successfully emulate an hp term. As a matter of fact other than reflection-x I do not remeber any terminal suite that has a semi decent HP terminal emulator. And the soft keys, most of the time requires this emulation.

[TwoProc]

Check out "putty" as one alternative.
ww.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

Check out the Cygwin project as the other.
www.cygwin.com

I use both.

[Andrew Dutton]

John I did check out putty and I use it all the time for my admin jobs. But for the users there are two issues. One is that it stores everything in the registry, second you can not change the keymappings. So how do you deploy it to a bunch of clients if it doesn't have config files to make easy setup icons for the users to use and how do I change the mapping of a key to be a different keystroke.

I just had an idea though... Ok i want F1 to equal XYZ... instead of change the terminal emulator can I chnage the default key mapping on the HP 11.0 box to interpret a key differently? Like does it have some sort of termcap or something.

I am clutching at straws as I don't have any idea what I am doing in this area. Just something I haven't had to deal with before.
thanks

[Mel Burslan]

Andrew,

Not free but relatively cheap (US$ 99 for one user and goes down with volume pricing from this point on) terminal emulator is SecureCRT from VanDyke software. In the configuration section, it says, "Configuration Extensive session and keyboard customization." but to what extent you may believe advertising is upto you. There is a 30 day evaluation if you want to try before you buy.

Here is the URL:

http://www.vandyke.com/products/securecrt/index.html

hope this helps

[Andrew Dutton]

Mel Cheap for you but my company that is alot of money when I need around 200 users :-)

[Andrew Dutton]

John I checked out cygwin and it is way more than I need... I just need a terminal client. thanks though

[Mel Burslan · Accepted solution]

Andrew,

I said relatively cheap. Which was compared to licensing of one reflection-X suite in the north of $300 per station. Otherwise securecrt is too expensive for my personal taste. Again for 200 copies, per seat cost is less than $75 which will sum up to $15,000. Unless you are working for a mom and pop shop, it is not that much of money considering the alternative of you reinventing the wheel with custom (and most probably unsupportable) termcaps and such.

I personally am a cheap person when it comes to my own spending, but in business dealings, I learnt the hard way that money which is exorbitant to me is sometimes an expense item to the bean counters at the companies. Keep that in mind when calculating the sums.

[Andrew Dutton]

I would agree with you Mel but right now we are on a spending overhaul. Trying to get everything in line. My bosses could probably go for something like $25 a license but even $75 might be too much. Let me take a look at it though and see if it might fly. You never know :-)

[Torsten.]

A working, but very slow and experimental solution:

use cygwin as a x-server on the pc and run hpterm directly from the server.

I don't like this at all in this case.

... 2 cents ...

[TwoProc]

Andrew, when you load Cygwin, you don't have to take all of the components it offers. You can just have it load ssh and the xterminal. If you've got x over ssh, you're secure, and then you can run the "/usr/bin/X11/hpterm" executable.

That program (hpterm) has programmable softkeys that work much like an actual HPTerminal. The soft-keys can be saved in resource files to be called up. I've not used them, but I see them in the man page right now while I'm typing this response.

I've got to admit though, it doesn't look too user-friendly, but keymapping never really is (to me anyways).

[Mel Burslan]

To be perfectly honest, I like Torsten's idea the best. Yeah, it is not the most effective way but heck, cygwin is free, so is hpterm coming with hpux does not require an additional licensing fee.

If your users are killing and restarting the terminals every minute, I can see this being a viable solution, as once you launch the executable, its processor overhead should be relatively low.

[Bill Hassell]

Softkeys (aka, programmable function keys) are defined by the application program. Your favorites (where softkeys make navigation infinitely easier) SAM, swinstall, Glance, etc define the key contents, then watch for the tsrings as input. In the good old days of HP terminals (like the 2645A, 2624A, etc) it was common to load the HP softkeys with actual commands like ll or pwd or bdf, then just one button gives you instant information.

The 'dumb' terminals have no softkeys so no amount of keymapping will change that. If you have a terminal emulator that offers softwakeys and says it is a vt100, it is non-compliant, period. There were many, many models in the DEC VT terminal series. Here is everything you'd like to know about the VT series: http://vt100.net/

So keymapping in HP-UX won't do anything. The reason is that the program defines the content and action to be taken.

Now the cheapest (and best at that price) is QCTerm, found at: http://www.aics-research.com/qcterm/ which gives you a complete HP smart terminal emulation for free. Works great with SAM, swinstall, Glance but does not offer SSH.

If you can find a cheap Xwindow emulator for your PC, then you can 'borrow' the hpterm program from your HP-UX boxes. hpterm is much clunkier than QCTerm or Reflection/1 but it does give you most of the HP terminal emulation features including loadable softkeys.

[TwoProc]

I can't get to it, but a search on the internet turned "Tera Term" several times under different combo searches for free stuff.

Might want to try downloading that if you can get to a download site.

This showed up as a search result ...

Another good terminal emulation package that supports SSH is Tera Term Pro. ...
Either program will generate a public key file and a private key file. ...

http://www.jfitz.com/tips/ssh_for_windows.html


I see others when searching Google for:

terminal emulator programmable keys free

[Andrew Dutton]

Yea I think that xserver is not viable in my situation though. I did look at tera term and got a working download version. Problem is this... I said before I can use putty but can't get keymappings and putty looks fine like this which is a standard menu...

â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â SPACELABS PRODUCTION DB : qaddbâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â
â mfmenu Main Menu 09/19/05â
â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â
â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â
â DISTRIBUTION MANUFACTURING FINANCIAL â
â 1. 13. 25. â
â 2. 14. 26. â
â 3. 15. 27. â
â 4. 16. 28. â
â 5. 17. 29. â
â 6. 18. 30. â

but if I use teraterm it comes out like this whic is just ugly and users won't use it, even if I get the key mapped correctly.

qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqSPACELABS PRODUCTION DB : qaddbqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqk
xmfmenu Main Menu 09/19/05x
mqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqj
lqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqk
x DISTRIBUTION MANUFACTURING FINANCIAL x
x 1. 13. 25. x

and in reflection it looks the best ...


+-----------------------SPACELABS PRODUCTION DB : qaddb------------------------+
|mfmenu Main Menu 09/19/05|
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| DISTRIBUTION MANUFACTURING FINANCIAL |
| 1. 13. 25. |

[Torsten.]

That's the problem we are talking about ...

[Andrew Dutton]

You mean it is a problem with softkeys? is that what you are saying? I am sorry all if I seem lost but I really am :-)

[Bill Hassell]

In all cases, your TERM value must match your terminal. NEVER hardcode the TERM value, Use ttytype -s to set the terminal type and then start MFGpro. Of course, if MFGpro does not pay any attention to TERM then you'll have to configure MFGpro to use a different terminal. When you run Reflection, is it the local terminal emulator called rwin1.exe? The correct way to set your TERM is in /etc/profile:

eval $(ttytype -s)

[Andrew Dutton]

I checked my TERM in reflections and changed teraterm to match... i changed the TERM values in reflection to other things including vt100. But reflection draws the lines correctly adn the other do not do that. I don't think it is a problem with the TERM but something else that I am missing. If both are running vt100, I log in with both and htey draw differently on the screen...what is up with that? I haven't even got to the key maps yet.

[Torsten.]

there is always trouble with the emulation. some emulators doesn't make it right.

Just an example:

I telnet to hp-ux using windows standard telnet. I run ttytype -s and resize. All values seems to be fine. Now I run sam. Looks good. Now I hit TAB and Return key. Still good. But now I hit 4 times the right arrow key. Everything is fine until i reached the HELP menu.
No problem with reflection, hp- or vt100 emulation.

[Bill Hassell]

It's confusing. TERM has no meaning outside HP-UX (well, curses library to be more specific) so there is nothing to check in Reflection. You select the terminal emulation in Reflection by selecting Setup -> Terminal. Select HP2392A or HP70092. Now, if you do not have a Setup menu at the top of your terminal window, but it says something like hpterm, then we are not talking about a PC-based terminal emulator--hpterm is an HP-UX program and you're running Reflection/X, an Xwindows emulator. There is no comparison to something like putty or QCTerm or TeraTerm because the emulator isn't running on your PC.

And as I mentioned before, vt100 has no softkeys so setting that emulation mode in Reflection disables the keys. Use vt220 in Reflection/1 or Reflection for HP.

As far as lines, there is no character in ASCII that corresponds to lines. These are alternate character sets and in the terminal, they are stored in ROMs. In the emulator, the line drawing set must be selected by the software (MFGpro) so this must be a configurable feature. And based on the website mentioned above, a vt100 has not such capability. So you don't want a vt100 emulator, ever. If you don't use an HP terminal, then you need at least a vt220, but all of this depends on MFGpro. If MFGpro ignores $TERM setting in your shell and simply writes HP terminal sequences to your vt220 terminal, you'll just get garbage characters.

MFGpro must have whole chapters on useable terminals and emulators. What does it say about non-HP terminals? Have you tried QCTerm yet?

[Andrew Dutton]

Ok I see now... let me clear it up a little bit. I am not using reflectionX which is the Xwindows version. I am using the standard production for terminal emulation. It runs on your PC and connects to a remote hosts ust like QCterm, putty, teraterm. This is why Bill you are saying that TERM value doesn't matter and I think you are right. I tired QCterm and it doesn't support ssh and when I used it it was way gobblygook and couldn't even read it.

I did find out that the applicaiton has a termcap. I am not sure if it has anythign to do with my issue or not though as I think that would only come into play on the keymappings. It might be that I am just having issues with font slection in the terminal emulator.

[Bill Hassell]

OK, then all the above applies as far as setting TERM. It must be set automatically though. As I mentioned, this line must be run in your /etc/profile or .profile:

eval $(ttytype -s)

To see what it does, just type the command by itself: ttytype -s

So it very much matters that TERM is set so that it matches your emulator because TERM is used to translate curses library codes. But alas, there are a number of applications that simply ignore TERM because they think they have a better way of doing things--the very reason that the curses library and TERM were created in the first place.

Now termcap is a BSD concept, while terminfo is the SysV HP-UX way of handling terminal codes. Termcap is a series of definitions of selected terminal features and HP-UX has the same thing with terminfo (man terminfo and man curses). While a termcap file is just plain ASCII, terminfo is a series of binary files that must be encoded and decoded with tic and untic respectively.

Now all this is just background to show how a terminal-based application can be transparent to various terminals (like SAM, swinstall and Glance) or can be painfully incompatible because the misguided programmers decided that there are only vt100 terminals in the known world.

In the case of line drawing characters, the waters get quite muddy. This is because most programs will assume that the alternate character set (nothing to do with key mappings) is correct for their program. HP started using line drawing characters in the late 1970's and had two versions, the extensive line drawing set, and the less used large character drawing set. The large character set allowed building images on the screen that were 3x larger than the normal font by using various 1-character shapes.

The problem was that the line drawing set was usually alternate font C, while the math set (Greek letters and math drawing primitives) was A and the large character drawing set was set B. The letters A B C correspond to the special escape sequence for HP terminals to select the alternate character set. The default was always A (math) and you would select the alternate set with ShiftOut (CTRL-N) and then return to the normal font with ShiftIn (CTRL-O). Note that ShiftIn/Out have nothing to do with the shift key, these are defined ASCII characters.

Now if MFGpro uses the curses library and uses the alternate character set primitives, then the 'right' codes should come out--BUT in the HP terminal case, the A, B, and C character sets were plugin ROMs and therefore may not always be in that specific order. My guess is that other terminals may have a similar situation. Ideally, the MFGpro program has a terminal customization section that can provide this setting for specific terminals. In the case of QCTerm, the alternate character set is indeed the line drawing set. You can demonstrate this with:

echo "abcdefgh^Nabcdefgh^Oabcdefgh"

where ^N is CTRL-N and ^O is CTRL-O.

So now the thing you need is terminal configuration data from MFGpro.