Terminal Capabilities via telnet Sessions

[James R Purdon]

In article <50578 at lanl.gov> jrr at lanl.gov (John R. Red-horse) writes:
>Hello,
>We often use windows out of a variety of workstations (e.g. HP, SUN, etc.)
>to initiate a session on our Cray 1-S running the UNICOS OS.  I believe
>it's version 5.1.18.  At any rate we do this by using telnet between the
>two machines.  Our problem: quite often our terminal characteristics are
>not interpreted correctly and various full screen utilities such as more,
>vi,... don't work.  On the surface, this appears to be an easy question,

I've seen this problem - it is considerably diminished if you use rlogin
rather than telnet.  If you're runing X11 and have GNUemacs, the problem
goes away completely (if you let emacs put its own window on your display).
With just rlogin and vi, I frequently use ^L to refresh the screen.

>yet the obvious answer, setting the capabilities using tset don't always
>work.  Would someone mind giving me the rundown on how telnet interfaces
>the terminal driver with the end user?  I mean, where the heck does stty
>enter into things.
>
>Also, does anyone out there in
>netland have the source code for a variety, or for that matter just one,
>terminal in the form of input to tic (?) from which we can build additional
>terminfo formatted files.  Lastly, must this interface always be used?

I'm sure there's stuff out there.  Ask your AIC.  I also recommend the
Nutshell handbook "termcap & terminfo".

>What if I have a vt100 emulator that has 48 lines---can I change my terminal
>characteristics on the fly?

The resize command can evaluate the size of your window, and produces commands
which when executed will change the default line and column settings.  To
configure a 48 line terminal, the command "setenv LINES 48" needs to be issued.

Jim

--
James Purdon
purdon at cons1.mit.edu