If you understand swedish, Jan, let me know and we could go through all 
this in private.

But to give a brief answer. Way back when this all came about, you had 
lots of different terminal manufacturers, and no standard way on how to 
make a terminal do tricky things. Simple stuff like showing characters, 
and getting a new line were standardized. But then people started to 
want terminals to have more capabilities, like moving the cursor to a 
random place on the screen, show different attributes, and have more 
special keys, and so on.
Every manufacturer devised their own way of doing these things, and thus 
you have different terminal types in Unix, so that programs in Unix can 
know exactly how to do these things on *your* terminal.

And that obviously also means that it is important that you set the 
correct terminal type, or no advanced screen handling will work as you 
might expect.

	Johnny


Jan Danielsson skrev:
> Rhialto wrote:
>>> seems to be printing OOPSx and PSx all over the left part of the screen.
>> That usually indicates a problem where the program tries to send some
>> terminal command string with the curses library but the string is not
>> known. Maybe you can try another terminal type setting. (vt100 instead
>> of xterm, etc).
> 
>    Ok, here's a dumb question: What does vt100, xterm, etc mean?
> 
>    All I know is that in the old BBS days, I set "Terminal Emulation" to
> ANSI most of the time, and that meant colors and sometimes annoying menus.
> 
>    In Unix, it seems that terminal types are important for some reason.
> No matter what system, it seems to output terminal type when you log in.
> 
>    When I run midnight commander in a full screen session on NetBSD, I
> get no blue colors, and all the function keys are shifted -1 (F10
> becomes F9, etc). When I run midnight commander from screen through an
> ssh login, I get a blue colored background, and the function keys work
> as expected. Same thing when I run midnight commander from a
> wterm-window i X.
> 
>    I have tried to understand what all this means, but to no avail. I
> read that vt100 is some old standard from DEC serial terminals, blah,
> blah, blah.. vt220 is the same thing, but it supports more keys, blah,
> blah, blah..
> 
>    But I haven't figured out what a terminal type *is*, and how they can
> explain the midnight commander behavior. (But I believe it could).
> 
>    Could someone point me to a good resource that explains terminal
> types? What they are, what types there are, how they differ, and why
> there isn't a Universial Solution Which Everyone Uses.
> 
>    This is one of those things that is about go give me a serious
> bleeding in my brain:
> 
>    From /etc/wscons.conf:
> ------------------------------
> # screens to create
> #       idx     screen  emul
> # Screen 0 is already configured as console in most cases.
> #  Uncomment if a serial console is used.
> #screen 0       -       vt100
> screen  1       80x50   vt100
> screen  2       80x50   vt100
> screen  3       80x50   vt100
> screen  4       -       -
> #screen 4       80x25bf vt100
> ------------------------------
> 
>    From /etc/ttys:
> ------------------------------
> #console        "/usr/libexec/getty Pc"         vt100   on secure
> console "/usr/libexec/getty Pc"         vt220   on secure
> ttyE0   "/usr/libexec/getty Pc"         vt220   off secure
> ttyE1   "/usr/libexec/getty Pc"         vt220   on secure
> ttyE2   "/usr/libexec/getty Pc"         vt220   on secure
> ttyE3   "/usr/libexec/getty Pc"         vt220   on secure
> ------------------------------
> 
>    One file says vt100, and another vt220. Is this a problem? What do
> they mean?
>