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At Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:54:30 +1000, Carl Brewer wrote:
Subject: emulating SCO-TERM on NetBSD console?
>=20
> The app is running a text UI that looks like it's written in
> curses or similar. If I didn't know better I'd have sworn it
> was tn3270.

If that app running on the SCO UNIX box is indeed written using the
native SysV curses code then it will honour TERM with any "valid"
terminal type available in the system terminfo library (or any
user-installed terminfo file).

The _right_ thing to do in that case is to teach the SCO box about the
"terminal type" that you're using to access the app(s) running on it.

I.e. you need to find or install a terminfo entry on the SCO box which
describes the capabilities of the NetBSD console terminal emulator.

The easiest way to do that is probably to take the complete canonical
wsvt25m TERMCAP entry from NetBSD and use the infocmp utility on SCO to
convert it into a terminfo entry.  You can then install that terminfo
entry in the system terminfo directories, or in a file each user's home
directory, etc. (pointing the environment variable TERMINFO at that file
in the latter case)

Step one is to get shell access to the SCO box, one way or another.

Screen cannot help you unless you can run it directly on the SCO box
_AND_ you also can get a terminfo entry for wsvt25m on there too for
screen to use.  I.e. Screen on the SCO box may be able to provide a
virtual terminal emulator for the application and present it to your
NetBSD connection as whatever type of emulation you need on that end
(e.g. wsvt25m from the bare console, or xterm from X11, etc., etc.)

Forget all the other crap.  You want to teach the application about the
terminal/emulator you're using, not the other way around (which is
usually basically impossible).

There is of course some chance the application is "dumb" and not using
curses and thus not able to drive anything but the type of terminal it
was implemented to drive.  It may also be using TERMCAP style terminal
descriptions despite having been built for SCO UNIX (there are _many_
like this).  In the former case you'll simply have to find a terminal
emulator that can work with the app (running screen on the SCO box may
work in this case).  In the latter case you may be able to directly use
the wsvt25m TERMCAP entry from NetBSD, though you may need to rename
some of the attributes as many such apps use custom attribute names.

--=20
						Greg A. Woods

H:+1 416 218-0098 W:+1 416 489-5852 x122 VE3TCP RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>       Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>

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