On Sep 14,  7:32pm, Tony Houghton wrote:
> Subject: Re: Getting started, and using X
> In message <E0xAIUk-0004FM-00@taurus.cus.cam.ac.uk>
>           prlw1@cam.ac.uk (Patrick Welche) wrote:
>
> > Paul Whiting wrote:
> > >
> > > A small but annoying problem is that I can't delete things that I
> > > mistype. Often the 'Delete' key does not work, displaying '^?'.
> > > Typing 'stty erase ^h' does not help at these times. The problem is
> > > however intermittent - and seems not to affect me so much if I log
> > > on as 'root'.
> >
> > Instead of ^h, try actually pressing the delete key. (As from your
> > description ^? rather than ^h would be more suitable). so
> > stty erase <delete key>
>
> Whenever you're trying to do that, you hit one of the rare occasions
> when Delete is deleting :-/.

Right, time for some Magic.

Three things which might help:

stty echoe
stty erase <ctrl-V><delete>
tset <terminal type>

The explanation is as follows:

'stty echoe' switches on the echoe flag in the terminal driver. The echoe flag
makes backspace get echoed as backspace-space-backspace (note this may do odd
things if the last character was a tab).

'stty erase <ctrl-V><delete>' sets the erase character to <delete>. <ctrl-V>
tells your computer not to try to interpret the next character (ie when you
press delete it adds the delete character to the command line rather than
deleting something).

'tset <terminal type>' can be used to change terminal emulation mode. The
current console code does vaguely vt100 emulation with some bits of vt220. The
problem with setting the terminal type to vt100 is that it tends to get the
size of the screen wrong. Other terminal types you can use include xterm and
vt220. Each has a slightly different set of problems. Talking of which I shall
be putting another new experimental console driver kernel up later in the week
with some of the bugs from the last edition fixed. Eventually this console code
will replace the current console and everything should behave like an xterm.

Now some general notes:

The documentation for RiscBSD does make a lot of assumptions about things
working first time and if they don't it provides very little assistance for
people who have no knowledge of UNIX(R) and I have to admit that getting a
system up from scratch can be a little bit daunting. What is really needed in
addition to the RiscBSD documentation is a good book on UNIX. My ex-girlfriend
learnt from a combination of manual pages (type 'man man' for further details)
and 'UNIX POWER TOOLS' (Random House / Jerry Peek, Tim O'Reilly and Mike
Loukides / ISBN 0-679-79073-X) - chapters 1 & 2 being a particularly good
introduction to the concept of a UNIX shell. Some people may find this book too
scary. This doesn't cover X.

X has two ways of starting it.

1) startx

This is the simple way to start things. It requires the Xarm binary to be
setuid root, which it isn't by default. This can be arranged using rcm (or see
regular postings on the subject by Mike Pumford et al).

2) xdm

This has to be run as root and it starts an X login screen. This does not
require a setuid root Xarm.

If things go horribly wrong check that the devices for the mouse and keyboard
exist in /dev ('cd /dev; MAKEDEV all' will fix it if they don't). Also check
that your path contains /usr/X11R6.1/bin or /usr/X11R6.3/bin depending on which
version of X you are using (if in doubt 'ls /usr').

Another thing to bear in mind when you are installing is that the installation
instructions apply to a particular version of RiscBSD(TM) and there are quite a
few variants flying around with most of the variation being in the installation
procedure. This is particularly true of 3rd-party CDROM distributions where
people may have had to munge filenames and things to fit them on an ISO9660
filesystem if they can't handle RockRidge extensions. Whilst we will do our
best to help you get up and running we may never have seen the installer you
are trying to use so a certain amount of patience is handy :-)

Don't try to mix and match stuff from the ftp site with a CDROM until you have
the beast installed (unless it is patches for the CDROM of course).

Cheers

Rob