Hi, Rick.

> I recently installed ncurses 1.9.9e under NetBSD 1.2.  It works great in
> vt100 or xterm mode, but doesn't work properly in pc3 mode (Default pc
> terminal).  It doesn't detect the arrow key properly, and the new ncftp
> (which is why I installed ncurses), can't even tell I'm hitting enter (it
> scrolls through previous commands or something).  I did noticed some
> differences between the pc3 termcap entry supplied with netbsd, and the
> terminfo entry supplied with ncurses.

It's not your version of ncurses, it's the very own PCCONS driver/
pc3 settings.  When I used it, arrows didn't work even in vi.

I think that PCCONS is not to be used frequently.  It's more a
solution to when you need a smaller kernel, such as installation
kernels or kernels suited to machines with little RAM.

> Both files say that the bsdos info should be updated.  I decided to try the
> pcvt console drivers instead of pccons, but I had more problems with them.
> First of all, I got some failure messages on bootup (and the background text
> colour changed to red).

With PCVT, messages coming from the kernel will be shown in a red
background.  I think that this is good, because it makes easier
to monitor how your kernel's going.

You can change colors for kernel messages in one of the header files
for PCVT, or even by setting the apropriate option line in your
kernel config file.

I don't know why you got failures on bootup.  However, among all
console drivers I've already used, I think that PCVT is the best
(and this is not only for NetBSD, but for FreeBSD and Linux as
well).  Did you remember to change your /etc/ttys to reflect your
new terminal type?  You should have your ttyv* to be of type
vt220, and not pc3 anymore.

> My Question is this - are there any more up to date - pc console driver
> available for NetBSD, or atleast how can I modify the ncurses info to work
> properly with pccons?  I'd like to have something that supports colour as
> well...

I think PCVT is good enough, so good that I abandoned FreeBSD's syscons
in favour of PCVT at work (fortunately, PCVT works under FreeBSD too).
PCVT does color, but the applications will have to deal with properly
using colors, since termcap has no information about them (but only
escape sequences for highlight, underline and normal attributes).

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	Pappires