Re: screen, PuTTY, and kernel config

[Micah Cowan]

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Chris Lieb wrote:
> Florian Bender wrote:
>> Chris Lieb wrote:
>>> I have run into two issues getting screen to work with the Linux kernel
>>> configuration utility (make config).
>>>
>>> First, in PuTTY, the display is garbled when the config utility is
>>> running.  I have attached screenshots of the output I am getting
>>> (PuTTY-garbled.png) and what I get when I'm not running in screen
>>> (PuTTY-good.png).  This problem does not affect me if I do a console login.
>>>
>>> Second, if I am in a screen session and SSH into another server running
>>> screen (resulting in a 'nested' screen session), the arrow keys do not
>>> work in the kernel configuration utility.  Other keys seem to work ok,
>>> just not the arrow keys.  The arrow keys work fine when I am at a
>>> prompt.  This problem does not seem to be associated with PuTTY since a
>>> console login exhibits the same behavior.
>>>
>>> Does anyone know how to fix these?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Chris Lieb
>> Hi,
>> when using Curses dialogs (I assume that eLinks has the same problem)
>> within screen, changing the character encoding in PuTTY to UTF-8 usually
>> works. I'm sure this depends on $LANG on the linux machine.
> 
>> Regards,
> 
> Thanks, that solved my first problem.  Now to figure out how to get the
> arrow keys to work in a curses application.  It's probably some cryptic
> incantation of termcap that I need.

IIRC, PuTTY claims to be an "xterm" in $TERM by default, without
actually being 100% compatible with true xterm (this same problem exists
with other terminals, such as Terminal.app and gnome-terminal).

GNU ncurses has a specific entry for putty, so you might want to "tic"
the latest terminfo definitions from ncurses (it's in a file named
misc/terminfo.src, IIRC). And then, of course, have PuTTY set TERM to
"putty". (You'd need to compile these terminfo descriptions on each
system you use screen on.)

As a quick-fix solution, you may find that placing "termcapinfo xterm*
ks@:ke@" in your ~/.screenrc's will help. It certainly did for a
different (but similar) problem that cropped up on IRC.

Otherwise, typing your cursor keys while running
cat-under-screen-under-putty, and comparing with what terminfo/termcap
say about what the cursor keys should be, is often illuminating.

- --
HTH,
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer.
Maintainer of GNU Wget and GNU Teseq
http://micah.cowan.name/
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