Jan Danielsson wrote:
>    As Bernard asks while flying back in time in a Cron-o-John: "But what
> does it all mean?".

It has nothing to do with tentacles, really.

>    I tried setting TERM=xterm in a wscons[1] console, and then started
> "mc". Funny. All black. Doesn't seem to respond to anything I do.

Under wscons <Control>-<Alt>-<Backspace> resets the terminal display
after "cat /dev/urandom" for example. "stty sane" resets the terminal input
e.g., if you type in your terminal and the commands are accepted but you
don't see anything, that's what you need. That happens sometimes if a terminal
application crashes or does odd things. Also <Control>-<Alt>-<Backslash> is
more powerful than <Control>-C for killing processes from the
terminal session because the latter is often caught.
 
> [1] The official name of full screen text mode sessions in i386/amd64 is
> "wscons console"?

It's short for workstation console. I think it handles more than just
x86 nowadays.

-- 
Christian