[comp.unix.questions] How to set TERM for Televideo?

daisy@mavrick.UUCP (daisy basto) (03/24/90)

Hello, can someone shed a little light on how to set up a terminal?
I'm trying to use an old Televideo connected to tty0 on a serial port.
After I logged on and set TERM=tvi950, the system still cannot run any
screen-oriented programs such as vi. When I try to edit a file with vi
it will respond with  [Using open mode]. Most other commands run fine.

I can see the termcap entry for the Televideo in /etc/termcap. Is there 
something else that I need to do to make it understand the new TERM entry?

Thanks, Daisy.

gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) (03/25/90)

In article <251@mavrick.UUCP> daisy@mavrick.UUCP (daisy basto) writes:
>After I logged on and set TERM=tvi950, the system still cannot run any
>screen-oriented programs such as vi.
>I can see the termcap entry for the Televideo in /etc/termcap. Is there 
>something else that I need to do to make it understand the new TERM entry?

Yes, you need to affect the environment so that subprocess such as the
vi process you invoke will be able to get at the changed TERM variable.
In the Bourne shell, this means that besides setting
	TERM=tvi950
you also need to invoke
	export TERM
Also be aware that newer systems user the terminfo binary database
instead of /etc/termcap, and it is possible that "tvi950" has no entry
in the terminfo database.

ad@cat.UUCP (Axel Dunkel) (03/25/90)

>
> Hello, can someone shed a little light on how to set up a terminal?
> I'm trying to use an old Televideo connected to tty0 on a serial port.
> After I logged on and set TERM=tvi950, the system still cannot run any
> screen-oriented programs such as vi. When I try to edit a file with vi
> it will respond with  [Using open mode]. Most other commands run fine.
>
> I can see the termcap entry for the Televideo in /etc/termcap. Is there
> something else that I need to do to make it understand the new TERM entry?

Did you use the command 'tput init' after setting TERM=tvi950? And did
you export the TERM variable?

Hope this may help...

Axel Dunkel (ad@cat.UUCP, ...!unido!cat!ad)

daisy@mavrick.UUCP (daisy basto) (03/28/90)

Thanks for everyone who emailed. It's working now (more or less). I'm not
sure whether it's using termcap or terminfo. There is one LARGE /etc/termcap
file with lots of terminals defined and about 30 files in /usr/lib/terminfo/t.
I think it's using terminfo though. When I tried compiling a C program with
-ltermcap it couldn't find that library. And, by the way, I'm using SysV.
 
Thanks, Daisy