>I just thought you guys might want to know that I think (whoever did the
>pc console - Mycroft?) and Hellmuth did a good job.. I just got DG/Linux
>recently and catted a binary file (mostly by accident)... apparently printing
>a ^N R put the tty in some funky alt charset state, which stty -sane and clear
>couldn't reset... blech... Anyway, back to the real matters at hand...

Sorry, but i can't echo your sentiments.

The i386 'pccons' console driver may not support the same excape
sequences that happened to cause your problems, but they're vulnerable
to similar problems, and, as far as i can tell, there's no 'easy' way
to reset them.


for instance, on an i386 console, do:

echo '<ESC>[1;0x<ESC>[2;0x'

where <ESC> is an actual escape character, which in all likelyhood you
can generate by hitting contro-V followed by the escape key or
control-[ .


Anyway, what that'll do is set your backgound and foreground text
colors to black (i.e. black on black).

as far as i can tell, with both experience and looking at the source,
there's no way to fix that, or other similar problems, without either:
	(1) issuing the correct escape sequences to change things
	    back, or
	(2) rebooting.

I'd say that there should be an easy way to do this, and that, at
minimum, it should happen when the device is closed...  However, it
doesn't.


Problems like this caused me to have to reboot my home machine several
times...  it turns out that because of lost serial characters, when
reading a manual page (or maybe it was just the printf about them
being interleaved with 'other' output), "bold" (?) characters were
"showing up" as invisible, i.e. black on black, or invisible for some
other reason...  And the only solution, as far as i can tell, was to
reboot.  certainly, no stty command fixed it, and clear didn't, and
loggin out didn't...


I dunno about pcvt, but pccons is DEFINITELY buggy in this regard.


cgd