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termcap/terminfo Oddities to Remotely Run SCO App

From Eric Freden on Fri, 25 Dec 1998

Dear Answer Guy,

I managed to solve my keybinding problem without your help (thanks anyway). Here is a synopsis: I needed to run proprietary software (in Cobol, no less) on a PPro running SCO Unixware via telnet from a PII running RedHat 5.0. The SCO box had a limited termcap file, none of which matched type linux (Linux console) or xterm (for Linux X). Changing TERM in Linux does not alter function key bindings! The only way I could change keybindings was to mess with /usr/lib/kbd/keytables which changes bindings at boot or /usr/X11/lib/X11/xkb which alters bindings upon startx. Both of these methods are global in nature and will "break" existing applications like emacs. I read the man pages on xterm where there is an option to change to Sun style function keys bindings (which was not SCO compatible either).

Then I noticed that xterm and nxterm (i.e. color xterm) bind F1--F4 differently!?!?! By sheer luck, SCO has a termcap entry called coxterm that is compatible with nxterm keybindings. There is no termcap or terminfo entry for nxterm in Linux. Why not? For that matter, I see no effect in function keymappings after changing existing termcap entries, compiling with tic, and rebooting . Why not?

Eric Freden

Last I heard Eric S. Raymond was still maintaining the termcap file. He's also listed in the author's section in the 'terminfo' man page. So perhaps he'd be the best person to address these issues?

(I've copied him on this. Hi Eric! Missed you at LISA. Hope to see you at LinuxWorld Expo next March).

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 36 January 1999

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