Re: Extended chars. + other newbie questions

["James Campbell Haggerty" <j.h@softhome.net> writes:]

>However, there's one serious problem - none of the non-terminal
>characters on my keyboard work - e.g. arrow keys, ins, del, etc. I
>also can't use CAPS-LOCK (no effect and no light) and NUM-LOCK
>(this appears to work, but the light doesn't change).

CAPS LOCK I disabled intentionally. See vsta/src/srv/mach/cons2; I think I
left the code for it under an ifdef. But I hate caps lock... it seems to do
more damage than good.

>For example, if I enter an arrow key at the shell prompt I get
><beep>A, or <beep>B etc. At the login prompt I get OA, OB etc.
>However, enter the ANSI codes manually - ESC[A - works fine, but
>this is a pain.

That stuff at least used to work. Again, if you take a peek in the console
server you can find the code which would--delta bugs--generate exactly the
same sequence.

>Is this a problems with cons? termcap? Can someone explain how
>VSTa implements its keyboard handling?

The source I named is a process which takes keyboard interrupts and extracts
the typed characters. Any process using a TTY accesses bytes through the
usual read()/write() interface. Code in libc turns this into a simple I/O
protocol, which is what cons2/rw.c expects as it takes I/O requests. So you
should be able to follow the code as it takes the special key event, puts
data in the typing buffer, and later extracts this to complete TTY reads.

>- How can I change the background in MGR?

Don't know that you can!

>- What does "cons3" do, and can you replace the one on the
>website with one that isn't corrupted?

cons3 was a chunk of code which also appeared in Linux to implement a full
ANSI terminal emulator, including neat stuff like color, enhanced
attributes, and so forth. But it was somewhat less efficient, and nobody
seemed to be using it, so cons2 is the default one. At this point, I think
there are a couple features missing from it--like ^C handling.

>- What happened to the mailing list archives? The last message
>was in Oct. 98 on the web site, but it says it is automatically
>updated daily. Has the address of the updater been deleted from
>the mailing list?

Hmmm... looks like a bug in hypermail. I'll update and debug it if it still
doesn't work its way through the whole archive.

Andy
Received on Sat May 22 06:47:42 1999