As you may have noticed by now, most telnet clients designed for use with
ANSI BBSes do not display full-screen Unix programs correctly. Included with
Synchronet is a pair of terminal capability definition files that enable you
to run native full-screen Unix programs and have the output displayed correctly
in a standard ANSI-BBS terminal. These files are termcap and terminfo,
located in your Synchronet install directory. Your system will use one or the
other, and it won't hurt to install both. You will need to be logged in as
root to install the files.
1) Get the Synchronet ANSI-BBS termcap file from here.
2) Enter the command:
# cat termcap >> /etc/termcap
3) FreeBSD Only run the command:
# cap_mkdb -f /usr/share/misc/termcap /etc/termcap
Once the terminal capability files are installed, edit the ExternalTermANSI
value in the [BBS] section of your sbbs.ini file to read:
ExternalTermANSI=ansi-bbs
Note: The default value of the ExternalTermANSI sbbs.ini key is pc3. If you get an error Unknown terminal: pc3 from external programs, it means that this key value has not been set to a valid terminal type.
Note: Once again, many Linux distros do not have a termcap. This is fine.
You do NOT need to install the termcap-compat package. If termcap
isn't installed, it means nothing uses it. Only if there is a
termcap do you need to add the ansi-bbs termcap definition.