Re: Setting up tn5250?

Hi Chris,

On Thu, 17 Aug 2000, Chris Whisonant wrote:

> Hi, I'm sort of new to all of this and I could use some help.  Right now
> I have Caldera E-Desktop 2.4, video resolution at 1024x768, on a separate
> partition and I have several releases of the tn5250 downloaded.  The one
> I installed is the 15.8.  I can run the xt5250 from a terminal window by
> cd to the directory and then just typing xt5250.  I am having a couple
> problems with this, though.  First of all, the window is extremely small
> and if I enlarge it nothing happens to the size of the text.  Secondly,
> the control (reset) key won't work, so if I use a wrong function key I
> can't reset it.  When I try to run the tn5250 I have the same problems as
> well as I retain text from previous screens on the current one and
> ultimately the tn5250 will no longer work.
> 

xt5250 is just a shell script.  This is what it does:  

1) attempts to load your keyboard settings from the file "XTerm" which on
    most systems is kept in /usr/local/share/tn5250 (after installation)    
2) changes your terminal type to xterm-5250 so that the colors are set
    up properly, and the keys are recognized appropriately.
3) starts another xterm running tn5250.

FONT SIZE:

So...  to change the size of the font in my xterm on my system, I can
hold down the "control" key, and right click the window.  Pick "huge"
from the list of font sizes.  

If you wanted to make this change more permanent, you could edit the
xt5250 script, and change the font it starts up with.  

For example, if I change:

exec xterm -name "xt5250" -bg black -fg white -T "xt5250 - $XT5250_HOST" \
  +sb -tn xterm-5250 -geometry 80x25 -e "$0" -BOOT "$@"

to:

exec xterm -name "xt5250" -bg black -fg white -T "xt5250 - $XT5250_HOST" \
  -fn '-misc-fixed-*-*-*-*-20-*-*-*-*-*-*-*' \
  +sb -tn xterm-5250 -geometry 80x25 -e "$0" -BOOT "$@"

It starts up with a much bigger font.   Change the 20 to a larger number
for a bigger font, smaller number for a smaller font, etc. 
My system has a program called "xfontsel" that I can run to browse through
fonts and find one that I like.

KEYBOARD SETTINGS:

Again, tn5250 does not interface directly to the keyboard.  The xterm
that you're running it in takes your key presses and sends terminal 
escape sequences to your system.   The system then interprets those
escape sequences to arrive at which keys you've pressed, and sends that
information to tn5250.

As you'll see in the xt5250 script, it tries to enable a file called
/usr/local/share/tn5250/XTerm which will change the way some of your
keys work.  You can edit this file if you want your own custom keyboard
map.  For example, you might try adding a line like this:

        <Key>Control_L: string("\022") \n\

Which tells the xterm to send a Ctrl-R (Octal ASCII code 022) to the
program when the Left Control key (Control_L) is pressed.  


> My major concern in all of this is that I cannot find documentation on
> how to get it actually installed right and configured.  Can anyone give
> me the installation for a Linux newbie?  I've sort of taken it on myself
> to get this working properly, if I can't get it working properly and I
> have computer knowledge, how could I convince anyone above me that Linux
> may be a viable solution for the future?  I am satisfied with Linux so
> far and see great things ahead for it.  Any help is greatly appreciated.
> 

By now its probably becoming clear to you that most of the things that
you're trying to figure out are actually part of X, or part of Linux,
rather than being part of tn5250.

Please read the man pages for X(1), xterm(1) and of course, tn5250(1).  
they should help you out.  

Good luck!


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