🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <881003-055901-3134@Xerox> "Hugh_Messenger.EuroPARC"@Xerox.COM writes:
>Hi,

Hello.

>I'm having hassle with the VT52 emulator DA.

My immediate impulse is to tell you to get a better program, such as
the shareware "Uniterm" program.

>It all works just fine for a while, then the Atari seems to to chuck out a
>massively long string of nuls (^@'s), interspersed with everything I have
>typed so far in the session.  Once it finishes outputting everything I have
>typed (including my password in legible format!) it carries on working just
>fine, for a few minutes, then .... you guessed it ...
>^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@1itscambsitshippo********yyy12,45,67nnn^@^@^@^@

Sounds to me like a ring buffer is being overrun, causing pointers to
cross and point into memory where they shouldn't.  It's a bug, you
can't fix it except by dropping the baud rate to 1200 or less.

>Another slight annoyance is that when I log in to any Un*x systems (most
>often a Sun 3/140 running SunOs 3.4), the terminal type is not recognised
>and defaults to DM2500.  set term=vt52 works OK, but surely the emulation
>should answer Un*x's request for terminal identification?  Or is SunOs
>getting it wrong, after all, we all know what terrible machines Suns are

[ smiley at end of the above deleted.  Just so's you know. ]

No Un*x that I know of queries for terminal type, since most dumb
terminals wouldn't respond anyway.  The terminal type on SunOs 3.4 can
be set in several ways.  In the file "/etc/ttytype", there is a list
of terminal ports, and the associated terminal type (taken from an
entry in the "/etc/termcap" file).  For example, you might see a line
that says, "vt100 ttya".  This would determine the default terminal
type for that port.

You can override this in your ".login" file using the "stty" command,
with a few lines like:

set t=(`tset -S -m 'dialup:?vt52' -m 'unknown:?vt52' -m 'network:?vt52'`)
setenv TERM $t[1]
setenv TERMCAP "$t[2]"
unset t

This does several things.  First, if the default terminal type (from
/etc/ttytype) is "dialup", "unknown", or "network" (this is
undocumented, but what you get when you do "rlogin" over ethernet),
the terminal type is set to "vt52".  It also causes the shell variable
"t" to be set to contain two strings; one is the terminal type (in
this case "vt52", and the second is the /etc/termcap entry data for
that terminal.  Then it sets the environment variables TERM and
TERMCAP to the appropriate strings, and un-sets "t".  This will make
programs that use termcap capabilites start up much quicker, since
they get the TERMCAP string from the environment, instead of from the
/etc/termcap file, which can be huge.

Hope this helps.



Greg Wageman			ARPA:  greg%sentry@spar.slb.com
Schlumberger Technologies	BIX:   gwage
1601 Technology Drive		CIS:   74016,352
San Jose, CA 95110		GEnie: GWAGEMAN
(408) 437-5198			UUCP: ...!decwrl!spar!sentry!greg
------------------
Opinions expressed herein are solely the responsibility of the author.