Re: tn5250 0.15.7 problem? -- LINUX5250

"Jason M. Felice" wrote:

> You've just lost me.. serial port to what?  What kind of protocol?  What
> are you doing?!?

Sorry about that...I looked at the original message and it doesn't make much
sense...unless you've previously worked with a setup such as ours.  =-(

Anyway, the Linux machine contains an ISA card made by MaxSpeed, which has 8 
RJ-11
ports which in turn it treats as serial ports through a device driver (is that 
what
its called in Unix?) For each RJ-11 port, the driver creates a /dev/ttyxy, 
where x
is a letter identifying the MaxSpeed card (such as 'a') and y is the actual 
RJ-11
port (letters 'a' through 'h') So the first port on the card is seen as 
/dev/ttyaf.
Once we change a setting from 'off' to 'respawn' in inittab, any 3151 attached 
to a
tty port will get a login prompt.

> What's a 3151?  A 'nix dumb terminal of some sort?  A thin client?  (Why can't
> IBM *name* anything?

It's a text-only dumb terminal...I guess at one time or another it was used to
connect to 370 systems, but in our actual business setup (the company I work for
owns about 50+ jewelry stores) the 3151s are being driven by a DOS Point of Sale
program that has its own built-in drivers to access a local database containing
customer information.

> No offense, but this seems like a _really_ weird setup.  I'm assuming it's a
> 'nix dumb terminal unless told otherwise.

No offense taken...believe (sp?) me, it is a weird setup...but I guess that 
since
the company owns something akin to 300+ 3151s, they want to save as much as they
can by connecting them to the AS/400 through a Linux box. Thanks to your 
program,
I've been able to do this...so my (our?) thanks are in order...

> I'm as confused as you are here.  First, if you are using a dumb terminal
> and setting 'TERM', make sure you next run 'tput init' to send the terminal
> a set of terminal initialization strings specified in it's termcap entry.

Ah...I didn't know about that...I will try this first thing in the morning on
Monday.

> See if that helps..  It could power on with a really awful keyboard map, or
> enter and newline are switched (sometimes happens).  Also, with a dumb 
>terminal
> and a serial line, you have to make sure the terminal and Linux agree on
> stop-bits, parity, and data word length.  There is such a thing as an 8-bit
> versus 7-bit termcap entry, see if there's a TVI920-7 or TVI920-8 termcap
> entry.

Will check for the existence of a TVI920-7 or -8 termcap entry. The terminals 
and
their respective entries in inittab are set accordingly. The funny thing is 
that if
I go to a shell prompt through one of the 3151 terminals, I'm able to see the
underlining and highlighting used by some man pages. I will try your 
recommendation
in regard to the 'tput init' command, see if that makes a difference.

> Other than that, I've only set up dumb terminals in theory (read: I just
> thought about it now, and that *should* work :)

Hehehe...sounds like what my boss told me when he gave me this project: "Oh 
yeah,
Jose...I've heard of some companies that have made this work, so I know it's
feasible." Yeah right...if it wasn't because of tn5250, I wouldn't even get a 
login
screen that looked decent!

> I hope this helps.

I hope so too...and again thanks for your time and help....

> -Jay 'Eraserhead' Felice

Jose


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