Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2002 14:31:01 -0800 From: Bill Fenner <fenner@research.att.com> To: current@freebsd.org Subject: sysinstall and serial consoles Message-ID: <200212112231.OAA07442@windsor.research.att.com>
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I installed 5.0-RC1 on a Sun Ultra-60 a couple of days ago. The biggest problem that I ran into was terminal emulation inside sysinstall. I normally do most tasks inside screen, so I tried selecting the vt100 emulation (since that's what screen tries to be). However, it uses something that screen doesn't emulate, so the screen was full of "OOPS" where screen didn't know what to do. Fine, that's screen's problem. I tried ANSI, and had two problems: 1. There was no reverse video, so it was impossible to determine which option was selected. 2. Using the arrow keys resulted in sysinstall asking me if I really wanted to abort the install (presumably it thought I hit escape). Ok, so that one might have been screen's problem too, so I'll just do it outside of screen. Since I was running tip from an xterm, I figured it made most sense to choose the "xterm" terminal type. Nope, no luck, it was nice and colorful and drew the lines, but the menu did not line up so the screen got pretty much filled with gibberish after a couple of attempts. Someone said that the problem was the oxtabs stty setting, so I tried xterm with both oxtabs and -oxtabs and had the same experience with columns not lining up. So, I tried ANSI from within the xterm. That had the same problems as screen -- no reverse video and arrow keys asked if I wanted to exit. So, finally, I tried vt100 from within the xterm. That worked. I think it's fairly likely that people will be installing FreeBSD on headless suns; I think it's fairly likely that most of these people will go through one or more of the painful iterations that I went through before happening upon the magic correct combination. My suggestions: 1. Look into the reverse video problem when selecting ANSI terminal. 2. Look into the escape character problem with arrow keys and ANSI terminal. 3. Remove the xterm option, and call vt100 "vt100 or xterm". (Or fix what is wrong with the xterm termcap). Bill To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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