terminal in Centos5.10

[Brian K. White]

On 9/9/2017 9:26 PM, scooter6--- via Filepro-list wrote:
"the terminal icon in CentOS 5.10 (the one on the desktop)"
doesn't mean anything. There are 20 different xterm-alikes out there.
Is it: xterm? lxterm? xfce4-terminal? gnome-terminal? konsole?

They all claim to be "xterm" by setting TERM=xterm or TERM=xterm-color 
etc, but they are all a little different from each other.

I'm guessing that the default desktop is either gnome or kde, and so the 
thing you're actually using is either gnome-terminal or konsole.

You have a couple different problems. One, the "xterm" terminal emulated 
by gnome-terminal is not the same "xterm" terminal described by the 
filepro "xterm" termcap entry, and amazingly, neither filepro nor 
gnome-terminal are in the wrong. There have been a few different 
definitions of "xterm" over the decades. Another is that the terminal is 
most likely configured to use Unicode/UTF-8 (multi-byte) character 
encoding, while filepro is strictly (single byte) CP-437 or Latin-1 etc.

What I usually do is install my own known-behavior terminal and use that 
everywhere rather than expect whatever terminal the desktop happens to 
provide to actually work. IE, I install rxvt or Sakura usually, and I 
have "rxvt" and "xterm" termcaps I fixed up myself which work with 
those. Then it doesn't matter if the desktop is Enlightenment with it's 
own "eterm" or KDE with "konsole" etc etc... I'm always using the same 
"rxvt".

And you have to make a little launcher script that disables UTF-8 in 
that session. There is a tset command which I forget that turns utf-8 
off, and you might also want to set LANG=C in the environment (to make 
other apps like mc and vi work in the now-non-utf-8 terminal)

If the desktop were kde, there is a simpler answer. I know that konsole 
has a "linux console" mode right in it's preferences/profiles menu. You 
can click that, and then set TERM=linux, and then fp should work pretty 
well just from that.

-- 
bkw