I would like to discuss, with anyone interested, the way that dos-emu
handles the keyboard from terminals. I think that making it easy for people
to use dos-emu through a terminal will add great market appeal (to Linux AND
dos-emu), and enhance it usefulness. On top of that, it will allow many
companies to choose software other than Microsoft.
In my industry, 90% of the people who use the software I do are switching
from Novell to MS Terminal Server. This is a terrible shame, and is exactly
what the Free Software Foundation is trying to fight.
It seems to me that the current keyboard functions require a terminal
emulator to support macros, which can then be assigned to a key sequence.
So if you wish to send the key sequence Alt+F1 to a program you need to do
this- Ctrl + ^ then "a" then Ctrl + ^ then 1. This is very laborious, and
most terminal emulators don't allow you to program the keys to do this.
Therefore, the users that want to do this must spend about $200 per
workstation for a high end telnet client.
Interestingly enough, that is about the same as the licensing fee for
Windows NT TE per workstation. Does that mean that dos-emu is trying to
compete with WinNT TE at the same price point? I don't think it will win.
I think that there is another option, but I am not capable of doing it. I
think that dos-emu could be modified to make it friendlier to terminals.
That would allow it to be the best of all worlds. I don't know the
reasoning behind the current way of doing things; I looked through the
source code of 0.98.8 and found where the definitions are
(src/base/keyboard/keyb_slang.c), but no comments explaining why they were
done that way. If we look at the way most terminal emulators do things (not
power term, it does things differently and is too expensive) and then
modeled dos-emu after that way of doing things, we could make [life easier
and] dos-emu more accessible to everyone.
Thanks for reading this, and if you have an opinion, please let me know. I
am very passionate about this.
Matthew E. Nuzum
IS Director
Florida Vacation Accommodations
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Matthew Nuzum
Sent: Friday, October 22, 1999 7:11 PM
To: 'Alejandro Nestor Vargas'; 'Dosemu (E-mail)'
Subject: RE: keyboard mapping
Your right. I had no problem with my telnet software running Unix programs
like emacs and pico and lynx, but DOS-EMU changes all that. It breaks the
keys and makes them not work. I am willing to try anything to get these
working, but I think your solution fixes just Linux, and not DOS-EMU.
Matthew E. Nuzum
IS Director
Florida Vacation Accommodations
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
From: Alejandro Nestor Vargas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, October 22, 1999 6:14 PM
To: Matthew Nuzum; Dosemu (E-mail)
Subject: RE: keyboard mapping
> Is there anyone out there using DOS-EMU with a telnet client other than
> Power-Term that has full access to their keyboard including the Alt+F? and
> Ctrl+F? keys? I would like to use one of the many free, open source
> terminal emulators out there instead of paying US$60 to $150 dollars per
> workstation for terminals.
Linux (or any unix) can run fine with ANY terminal. You only need to build
the correct terminfo and termcap files. I recently posted a mail with an
explanation about it, if you need, I can resend it to you.
