Terminal Capabilities

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.

Installing the terminfo file

1) Get the Synchronet ANSI-BBS terminfo file from here.

2) Enter the command:

# tic terminfo

Installing the termcap file

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.

See Also

install/nix/termcaps.txt · Last modified: 2023/01/27 10:25 by digital man
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