RE: help with seting up a dumb terminal to Linux please

[Chris Peterson <chrisp@citilink.com>]

On Saturday, January 10, 1998 6:36 PM, L. C. Robinson 
[SMTP:lcr@draken.localnet] wrote		Hmmmmmmm...  The adduser script is 
text-based.  There's also setup.tty, netconfig.tty... well... just about 
any administration tool I've needed to use has a .tty equivilant which is 
usually sufficient.  And, of course, you can just edit files manually too 
as you already pointed out.  I haven't been doing this for a long time, 
I'm still learning, but Redhat was basically out of the question for me. 
 I tried it and it was just to much of a paine to even try to use the gui 
and I didn't find anything text-based as an equivilant.

Slackware uses .tgz packages instead of rpms.  There is an rpm2tgz utility 
available but I don't know how well it works.

The way I figure it, any distribution is just like any other distribution 
because, since it's all the same os you can steel parts from the ones you 
like.

Oh, and btw, thanks for the Caldera info.  I visit that site quite often 
in fact.  They've got some interesting products.

Chris:
> On Sat, 10 Jan 1998, Chris Peterson wrote:
>
> > 3. Slackware's pkgtool.tty, installpkg, and removepkg are far easier
> > for
> > someone who requires speech than any gui utils.
>
> Then these are the Slackware equivalent, I suppose, of "rpm"
> which is the RedHat command line installer?  Does Slackware have
> any text based system administration utilities beyond these
> installation utilities?  RedHat's rpm system is well known
> to be a superior installation system, and should be very easy
> for blind users to use.  But the graphical Glint front end is
> a real pain most of the time, in my opinion, even if you can
> see fine, though there are rare situations where I use it.
>
> > 4. A smart terminal will eventually be required to use most
> > applications
> > anyway so why not get it configured off the bat rather than have to
> > switch
> > later.  So what if something draws a box.  It's better than not being
> > able
> > to run it at all because it doesn't understand a dumb terminal.
>
> I see your point.  In case it's any help, I might point out that
> it's possible to have it both ways, so that programs that work better
> with a dumb terminal interface can run that way automatically.  Just
> put this in your .zshrc file (assuming you use zsh, not bash):
> alias trn='TERM=dumb trn'
> and then trn will run with the "dumb" terminal description,
> but everything else will run with say, vt100.
> Probably someone should create a a special terminal description
> that is optimized for blind users: call it "linux-blind" or something,
> and then, where appropriate, people could have an alias like:
> alias les='TERM=linux-blind less'
>
> I have worked with modifying terminal descriptions a bit, and if
> anyone is interested, would be willing to help anyway I can in this.
> But, while I do have a print disability, I am not blind, so I don't
> know what is needed.  It would be easy to take a vt100 terminal
> description, and strip out whatever features blind users
> find most annoying or useless, or stick bells in instead, for,
> say, hilighting or underlined text, but I would need to be told
> what to change, if I was to help.
>
> L. C. Robinson
> reply to infynity@cyberhighway.net (a family account)

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