tn5250 0.15.7 problem?

[jsanchez@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Hello everyone,

First, my heartfelt thanks for such a useful program...recently a 
project was thrown my way, which I will try to explain in a few lines 
below, and for which the only solution I could find was tn5250. 
Secondly, my apologies for such a long post...I'm only trying to 
give you, the tn5250 wizards out there, as much info as possible 
so that maybe someone can help me out.

Anyway, here's my problem: I'm kind of new to the Linux 
environment (don't worry, I've read FAQs, HOW-TOs and all kinds 
of documentation I've been able to find...) and was given the task of 
connecting some IBM 3151 terminals to an AS/400 through a Linux 
machine. We're accomplishing this by connecting said 3151's to 
the Linux machine via a MaxSpeed card (an ISA card with 8 RJ11 
(RJ12?) ports which in turn connect to the serial port on each 3151) 
After much troubleshooting, we were finally able to connect to the 
AS/400 using a regular telnet session. Of course, it doesn't work 
quite well, and that's where tn5250 steps in. 

To make a long story short, the only way I could make the 3151s 
display any screen properly was by emulating a TVI920, setting the 
TERM variable to TVI920 and running tn5250 thusly: tn5250 -m 37 -
u -y IBM-3196-A1 s10b0001 (where s10b0001 is the host name.) 
BTW, this was version 0.15.6 of tn5250. Success! We're able to 
login to the AS/400 and every screen displays nicely (too bad I had 
to use the -u parm...oh well!)

My next quest was to get the AS/400 to print to the local printer in 
the Linux machine. Unfortunately, version 0.15.6 of tn5250 doesn't 
work quite well when trying to make a printer connection. Waited a 
couple of weeks and 0.15.7 finally solved the problem. Downloaded 
the RPM (remember, I'm a Linux newbie...), installed it and tried a 
printer session. Success! We're able to print to our Epson LX-300 
(yes, a 9-pin Dot Matrix printer...oh well...) but for some reason, 
some columns are not aligned properly, and there are spaces 
between some words (example: Qua rterly Report). So I 
downloaded/installed apsfilter, recode and a2ps. Lets try it again 
with the following command line:  tn5250 -P "lpr -Plp" -s RPRT0000 
-T *IBM6412EP s10b0001. Once again, it works...kind of. Still have 
a problem with the alignment...but it sure looks better than by 
using the -T *EPLX810 parm. 

Okay, let's try to print from a session running on a 3151. We get 
the logon screen, type in the username, tab over to the password 
field, enter password and then hit the Enter key. Nothing 
happens...I mean, the cursor moves down, so I hit Enter 
again...moves down one more time. Hmm...I hit ESC and then 
Enter. It works this time. What the??? I monitor the mailing list 
archive. No reports of such a problem, so maybe I'm missing 
something. Looked at the ChangeLog file which I found in the 
source code tar of 0.15.7. It says something about giving configure 
the parm --enable-old-keys, so I give that a shot. Still the same 
problem.

So, there it is...I said it was a long post, and accept my humble 
apologies if this is something very simple I missed in the 
documentation, but I've tried almost everything and still nothing. 
So, I went back to 0.15.6 to get the terminal emulation to work at 
least, and am waiting to see an RPM of lp5250d sometime in the 
future...unless someone can give me a push in the right direction!

Thanks in advance for your help...

Jose Sanchez
Tech. Support Specialist (yeah, right!)
Don Roberto Jewelers, Inc.
San Clemente, CA USA
(Yeah, why not add more crap to this already long message...)
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