Hello.


I briefly read about using tic to compile termcap and terminfo, which I
presume is included with Slackware 10.2's ncurses package. I need to know
step-by-step information on how to set up termcap and terminfo correctly
so that terminal uses color highlights. I have no idea on how to use
ncurses installation to correct this problem.

Thanks in advance.

zotkara <zotkara@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
>Hello.
>
>I briefly read about using tic to compile termcap and terminfo, which I
>presume is included with Slackware 10.2's ncurses package. I need to know
>step-by-step information on how to set up termcap and terminfo correctly
>so that terminal uses color highlights. I have no idea on how to use
>ncurses installation to correct this problem.

What is the problem you want to correct? Describe what you want
to do, because "step-by-step ... to set up termcap and terminfo"
could mean a lot of things, depending on what you are doing.

--
Floyd L. Davidson <http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@apaflo.com

zotkara wrote:
> Hello.
>
>
> I briefly read about using tic to compile termcap and terminfo, which I
> presume is included with Slackware 10.2's ncurses package. I need to know
> step-by-step information on how to set up termcap and terminfo correctly
> so that terminal uses color highlights. I have no idea on how to use
> ncurses installation to correct this problem.
>
> Thanks in advance.

Slackware should be using file and directory colors in terminal
windows by default.

Have you made changes to /etc/profile, or do you have a ~/.profile
that overides the 'eval dircolors' part of /etc/profile?

The dircolors program is part of the coreutils package, have you
made any changes to that?

Starting a new term window you need to supply the -ls (login shell)
switch for dircolors to be invoked...

Thanks CRS. You have solved my problem. Although I think I will read
more about termcap and ncurses library anyway. rxvt -ls comes with
dircolor support as you've said.

On Wed, 04 Jan 2006
21:24:35 -0600, Chris Sorenson wrote:

> zotkara wrote:
>> Hello.
>>
>>
>> I briefly read about using tic to compile termcap and terminfo, which I
>> presume is included with Slackware 10.2's ncurses package. I need to know
>> step-by-step information on how to set up termcap and terminfo correctly
>> so that terminal uses color highlights. I have no idea on how to use
>> ncurses installation to correct this problem.
>>
>> Thanks in advance.
>
> Slackware should be using file and directory colors in terminal
> windows by default.
>
> Have you made changes to /etc/profile, or do you have a ~/.profile
> that overides the 'eval dircolors' part of /etc/profile?
>
> The dircolors program is part of the coreutils package, have you
> made any changes to that?
>
> Starting a new term window you need to supply the -ls (login shell)
> switch for dircolors to be invoked...

Floyd L. Davidson <floyd@apaflo.com> wrote:
> What is the problem you want to correct? Describe what you want
> to do, because "step-by-step ... to set up termcap and terminfo"
> could mean a lot of things, depending on what you are doing.

Especially as termcap (BSD unix) and terminfo (SysV) are two
different ways of doing it, tic and "compiling terminal info"
only applies to terminfo (which is a database of separate files),
not termcap, and programs are EITHER using the one (older, BSD type
programs) or the other (most anything that was compiled using ncurses).

To the original poster, /etc/termcap is just a big ASCII file with
all the definitions of each terminal type:
$ ls -l /etc/termcap
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8969 2004-02-16 05:04 /etc/termcap
but terminfo is a tree of dirs with compiled terminal info files:
$ ls -l /usr/share/terminfo
total 84
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 2004-07-02 14:02 1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 2004-07-02 14:02 2
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 2004-07-02 14:02 3
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 2004-07-02 14:02 4
(etc. with all the capital and lower case letters), the dir is the
first char of the terminal name, the files themselves are binary:
$ ls -l /usr/share/terminfo/v/vt1*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1147 2004-02-18 00:22 vt100
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2004-12-03 11:18 vt100+ -> ../m/ms-vt100+
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 450 2004-02-18 00:22 vt100+fnkeys
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 368 2004-02-18 00:22 vt100+keypad
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 422 2004-02-18 00:22 vt100+pfkeys
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2003-09-29 22:26 vt100-am -> ../v/vt100
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 2003-09-29 22:26 vt100-bm -> ../n/nwp512
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2003-09-29 22:26 vt100-bm-o -> ../n/nwp512-o
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 2003-09-29 22:26 vt100-bot-s -> ../v/vt100-s-bot
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2003-09-29 22:26 vt100-nam -> ../v/vt100nam
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 2003-09-29 22:26 vt100-nam-w -> ../v/vt100-w-nam
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1012 2004-02-18 00:22 vt100-nav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1044 2004-02-18 00:22 vt100-nav-w
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1223 2004-02-18 00:22 vt100-s
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1209 2004-02-18 00:22 vt100-s-bot
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 2003-09-29 22:26 vt100-s-top -> ../v/vt100-s
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 2003-09-29 22:26 vt100-top-s -> ../v/vt100-s
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1160 2004-02-18 00:22 vt100-vb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1154 2004-02-18 00:22 vt100-w
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 2003-09-29 22:26 vt100-w-am -> ../v/vt100-w
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1174 2004-02-18 00:22 vt100-w-nam
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 2003-09-29 22:26 vt100-w-nav -> ../v/vt100-nav-w
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1143 2004-02-18 00:22 vt100nam
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1141 2004-02-18 00:22 vt102
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1120 2004-02-18 00:22 vt102-nsgr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1161 2004-02-18 00:22 vt102-w
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1143 2004-02-18 00:22 vt125
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 658 2004-02-18 00:22 vt131
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1165 2004-02-18 00:22 vt132

PS: in X-windows the normal terminal is "xterm", which is an expanded
vt100 definition, the text consoles are "linux", which is another one
(expanded vt100 definition, I mean).

With the "infocmp" program you can look at existing terminfo entries.
--
************************************************** ******************
** Eef Hartman, Delft University of Technology, dept. EWI/TW **
** e-mail: E.J.M.Hartman@math.tudelft.nl, fax: +31-15-278 7295 **
** snail-mail: P.O. Box 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands **
************************************************** ******************

Eef Hartman <E.J.M.Hartman@math.tudelft.nl> wrote:
>Floyd L. Davidson <floyd@apaflo.com> wrote:
>> What is the problem you want to correct? Describe what you want
>> to do, because "step-by-step ... to set up termcap and terminfo"
>> could mean a lot of things, depending on what you are doing.
>
>Especially as termcap (BSD unix) and terminfo (SysV) are two
>different ways of doing it, tic and "compiling terminal info"
....

All true... but alas the configuration of termcap/terminfo was
pretty obviously not the problem (as it turned out, colorizing
/ls/ was).

>PS: in X-windows the normal terminal is "xterm", which is an expanded
>vt100 definition, the text consoles are "linux", which is another one
>(expanded vt100 definition, I mean).
>
>With the "infocmp" program you can look at existing terminfo entries.

In regard to "xterm" and the X Window System that is an
interesting one and is probably worth a more accurate
description, given that the OP mentioned colors! The terminfo
entry for "xterm" does *not* include color capability! Here's
the output from /infocmp/ for "xterm" and "xterm-color", with
only the first 5 lines displayed,

>infocmp xterm
# Reconstructed via infocmp from file: /usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm
xterm|xterm terminal emulator (X Window System),
am, km, mir, msgr, xenl,
cols#80, it#8, lines#24,
acsc=``aaffggiijjkkllmmnnooppqqrrssttuuvvwwxxyyzz{ {||}}~~,
...

>infocmp xterm-color
# Reconstructed via infocmp from file: /usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm-color
xterm-color|nxterm|generic color xterm,
am, km, mir, msgr, xenl,
colors#8, cols#80, it#8, lines#24, ncv@, pairs#64,
acsc=``aaffggiijjkkllmmnnooppqqrrssttuuvvwwxxyyzz{ {||}}~~,
...


Sometimes people new to Unix/Linux/X assume that terminfo
entries enable the actual capabilities of the terminal itself,
which of course is not the case. The /xterm/ terminal emulator
will display colors when TERM is set to "xterm" just as well as
it will when TERM=xterm-color.

However, any program that actually checks to see if the current
terminal can use colors (which programs should, but usually do
not), will assume that the terminal cannot do colors if
TERM=xterm, and will switch to a monochrome mode.

Hence while it might be said that the _normal_ TERM entry for
X is "xterm", that is by no means the best one. Indeed, depending
on which version of the X server is running, several others might
be better: "xterm-xf86-v40", "xterm-xf86-v43", "xterm-xfree86".

A quick check with /infocmp/ shows that "xterm-xf86-v43" has
significantly more support for color than "xterm-color".

--
Floyd L. Davidson <http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@apaflo.com

"zotkara" <zotkara@optusnet.com.au> wrote in message
newsan.2006.01.05.00.16.25.61701@optusnet.com.au ...
> Hello.
>
>
> I briefly read about using tic to compile termcap and terminfo, which I
> presume is included with Slackware 10.2's ncurses package. I need to know
> step-by-step information on how to set up termcap and terminfo correctly
> so that terminal uses color highlights. I have no idea on how to use
> ncurses installation to correct this problem.

OT, but I was just compiling the latest ncurses package (5.5) from
ftp.gnu.org and the tarball appears to be corrupt :S

Just running a test compile to see if it really is corrupt, or if its just
an error at the end of the tarball or that (and compiles ok).

"Martin J. Green" <martin.green@NOSPAM.firstinternetservices.com> wrote in
message news:43bd3ad9$1@news1.homechoice.co.uk...

> OT, but I was just compiling the latest ncurses package (5.5) from
> ftp.gnu.org and the tarball appears to be corrupt :S
>
> Just running a test compile to see if it really is corrupt, or if its just
> an error at the end of the tarball or that (and compiles ok).

Scrub that. Not quite sure what happened. I downloaded it again after
realising it was giving crc errors, but accidentally rm -rf'd everything and
when I redownloaded I realised it was ok.