[vox-tech] Xterm and terminal types

[Shwaine]

On Thu, 9 Dec 2004, Rod Roark wrote:

> So, the good news is that my sister, an MD in Tennessee,
> wants me to switch most of the computers in her clinic from
> Windows to Linux.
>
> They have a practice management system running on an SCO
> server (yeah, I know...) and it seems the clients currently
> connect to it via telnet with a Windows terminal emulation
> program.  I'm told by the vendor that the terminal program
> needs to support "SCO ANSI" as the terminal type.
>
> The upgraded clients will run KDE, so the obvious terminal
> program is Konsole; I think it works a lot like xterm and
> may even be based on it.
>
> Anyway, I don't really understand all the nuances of termcap,
> terminfo, setterm, stty, etc. and what, if anything I might
> need to do to make the terminal emulation work properly.
> I did some googling but it was not very helpful.
>
> Does anyone understand this stuff enough to enlighten me?
>

>From my experiences (which was over 5 years ago), getting fully compliant 
client programs that can successfully interpret all of SCO's stuff is 
rather dicey. I can't remember what I did for Linux (or if I even got it 
working on Linux or not) since it was so long ago. I do remember several 
weeks of trying to access FoxPro for SCO to only get a mess on screen 
(that program had a curses-like gui interface, so it really tested the 
limits of compatability). I also remember that only one Windows program 
was able to access it correctly, although I don't remember which, and that 
using ANSI terminals did not work. So for everyone that thinks SCO ANSI is 
just an extension of ANSI, I can tell you from experience that it's a very 
BIG extension such that you should not expect an ANSI terminal to get you 
much beyond the basic command line.

I would suggest that you take a laptop or test machine to your sister's 
now (if possible) and test out all the ideas offered here on their 
particular application. Even terminals which claim to support SCO ANSI 
might not for their program, depending on how well it supports SCO ANSI. 
My general thought is if it's still tied to SCO even now, that it probably 
does make extensive use of SCO specific extensions, otherwise it probably 
would have been ported to another *nix long ago, so you need something 
which is almost flawless in emulation. You might want to ask your sister 
why they only use the one Windows program and if it's because others 
didn't work, then that's another point in evidence that you'll need a 
terminal which fully supports SCO ANSI.

Good luck, try not to pull out your hair (although that would be a common 
response to having to deal with a SCO server).