Andy,
>
>As Micheal says, the termcap from -current (i.e. what will be 1.5) 
>contains the 'rcons' entry. In 1.4 the most compatible entry is 'sun-il'. 

Ok, with you guys lifting my spirits a bit, I have gotten things settled
quite a bit now.  Managed to get that 2nd disk on it and sorted out, so
the filesystems have more room and are spread across the two disks...

What happened to me was the failed attempts to install packages had 
filled up the / partition...left all that crap in /var/tmp, filling it
up, and since several attempts resulted in near panics (reboots) the 
stuff remained under /var...so obviously, /var was one that was moved
and now uses a partition itself...just in case it happens again, and its
plenty big...  :)

Pico still doesn't work tho'...the executable issues some damn error and
blows up...so I've been using joe.

But the console is still screwed...no editor works on the console, so 
I have to do anything in an X window to have it work, even joe.

and that leads me to this question; if I enable wscons, will that help?
what does it really do?  does it give me virtual consoles, so I have more
than one available, without using X?

I tried what someone suggested, that sun-1l, and thought it was ok, until
I tried to use vi...that resulted in a crash...

Now, just so you guys understand what this config is, I have a real DEC
keyboard and mouse (the mouse sucks!), not a serial console...in fact this
one is complete with even the DEC (Sony) monitor...

thanks
Paul