Unix oddity

[cellio]

I have a shell account with a Unix provider. I use this for mail, web storage, news (when I do news), etc. I talk to it through SSH. Life is happy.

A few months ago my provider brought up a newer, faster, more reliable, spiffier machine, and they reccomended that we migrate to it. I took the final step last night of changing my mail delivery to go to the new machine. Life is still happy.

Except I've noticed a glitch, and I haven't a clue what's causing it. It may seem minor, but I seem to be more susceptable than average to minor visual-presentation quirks, and this one is bugging me.

When I use pine or emacs (presumably this a general characteristic, not about these two programs), text that is in reverse video -- the emacs mode line, the current-message info in pine, etc -- is in bold on the old machine and in the non-bold (regular) face on the new machine. It turns out that this bothers me.

What's the same: SSH client settings (I copied and renamed the profile, so I *know* the font and color settings are the same), .emacs, .pinerc, .profile, TERM=vt100. What's different: flavors of Unix, though I don't know what specifically they are. (How do I query that?) I assume that there's an environment setting that applies in one of the Unixes but not the other, but damned if I know what it is.

Comments

[geekosaur]

To determine the unix variant:

uname -a

The real difference, though, is that the terminal definitions on the new system don't match those on the old. Fixing that can get "interesting"....

[cellio]

uname -a

On the machine with the good behavior:
SunOS io 5.5.1 Generic_103640-24 sun4m sparc SUNW,SPARCstation-5

On the other machine:
OpenBSD callisto 3.0 GENERIC#0 i386

The real difference, though, is that the terminal definitions on the new system don't match those on the old. Fixing that can get "interesting"....

Presumably I'm getting system defaults, as to the best of my knowledge I have done nothing to configure these. I assume the answer is not so simple as finding the relevant definition file on machine #1 and copying it to machine #2 (in a way that doesn't disrupt other users).

[geekosaur]

Um. I bet the Solaris mutt uses terminfo for terminal descriptions, whereas the OpenBSD one uses termcap. There may not be a clean fix for it.

But, you can try this:

On io, run "infocmp >termcap.vt100". Copy that file to callisto.

The next step depends on which shell you're using. If the command "setenv" prints out a bunch of variable settings, then you run

setenv TERMCAP ~/termcap.vt100

If you get "setenv: not found", then you type

TERMCAP=$HOME/termcap.vt100; export TERMCAP

Then see if mutt behaves differently.

If this works, then you want to save that command for future login sessions. If you used "setenv", then you want to append it to ~/.login; if you used "export", it should be appended to $HOME/.profile.

[cellio]

Thanks for the advice! Sadly, this did not cause a behavior change on the new machine. Would editing that termcap file help? If so, any idea where to find documentation? ("man termcap" gets me information on the library, not the settings in this file -- which is what I expected, but it was worth a try.)

[geekosaur]

Hrm.

Oh! I just checked the ports collection on my FreeBSD machine; mutt needs to be built with S-Lang support to do bold, etc. You'll have to talk to your sysadmin about that. (Probably "cd /usr/pkgsrc/mail/mutt; make -DWITH_SLANG -DWITH_SSL", but I don't know what build options OpenBSD normally uses for it.)