*BSD News Article 4464


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From: terry@thisbe.Eng.Sandy.Novell.COM (Terry Lambert)
Subject: Re: com port and more
Message-ID: <1992Sep3.174401.9436@gateway.novell.com>
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Organization: Novell NPD -- Sandy, UT
References: <sedU9q600WAtMJ3WVW@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1992 17:44:01 GMT
Lines: 37

In article <sedU9q600WAtMJ3WVW@andrew.cmu.edu> "Alex R.N. Wetmore" <aw2t+@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
>I just installed 386bsd last night.  Anyway, here are a few of my
>questions that have popped up early:
>  1) I have a terminal on com1 (telix running vt100), and com2 (z29 in
>ansi mode).  On the PC running telix, whenever I run an application that
>uses curses (vi) it locks the terminal.  If I drop dtr 4 times I will
>eventully kill vi and get a prompt back, but I was wondering what could
>be wrong here.  The terminal is set up as std.9600 in /etc/ttys. 
>According to telix I am at 9600,e,7,1,xon/xoff,no cts/rts though.  I
>haven't tried this with another terminal package yet.

Telix is brain damaged... or at least it doesn't quite emulate the terminal
it says it's emulating.

When "vi" (really "elVIs") starts up, it "sizes" the screen in the same
way that the X command "resize" does:  by addresing the cursor to a
ridiculously large location (usually 999 999).  On a normal ANSI compliant
terminal, this will locate the cursor in the lower right hand corner of the
screen, unless you are unfortunate enoug to have > 999 character cells in
either direction.  Telix does not do this.  You may want to use VTERM,
TERM, TinyTERM, VTKermit, or something else which works (I know these 4
and the console driver and the xterm program do).  That Telix doesn't at
least trap the "move cursor to invalid location" and locks up insteas is
real bad.  It may actually do this, but not relocate the cursor to the
lower right hand corner... if this is the case, issuing the move to 999 999
after homing the curser will also result in what "elVIs" believes is a 0x0
screen, which will also seem to "lock up", since none of the messages can
be printed.  In either case, you want to run something other than Telix.


					Terry Lambert
					terry_lambert@gateway.novell.com
					terry@icarus.weber.edu

---
Disclaimer:  Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of
my present or previous employers.