These are some of the more frequently asked questions and hopefully some good answers to them. Q: I want to log into another Unix box via ssh, telnet, or rlogin from my MiNT box in a Toswin2 window. I get stuck because the remote party insults me with something like `unknown terminal tw52, using dumb instead' or `your terminal lacks required capabilities'. A: Read the file `README.terminfo'. Q: What is the recommended value for the "TERM" environment variable on remote machines? A: Read the file `README.terminfo'. Q: I don't see anything at all in my window, looks like black characters on black background. A: If this happens when you open a window you have messed up your color settings (foreground color = background color). Reconfigure your window to sane settings. If this happens in the middle of a session, some program has modified the foreground and background color. Type `tput sgr0' (turn off all attributes), `tput op' (original color pair) or `tput oc' (original colors) into your shell. Q: The display is completely messed up. A: Reset the terminal to sane settings using either `tput sgr0' or even stronger `tput is2' or `tput rs2'. This is _not_ the same as `stty sane'. Q: I see a lot of garbage on the screen, no characters at all but rather line graphics A: You have enabled the alternate character set which activates PC graphics. Type `tput rmacs' into your shell (of course you have to do that blindly). Q: How can I configure something for all windows? A: Close or iconify all windows and configure the window then. This will manipulate the default settings. Q: When I display manual pages, long lines are split by an ugly looking `' in reverse video mode. A: `AD' is the hexadecimal representation for decimal 173. Whenever the program `less' (which is usually the pager used by the `man' command) encounters a special (or 8 bit) character it assumes that the terminal cannot display it and outputs the hex code in reverse video instead. The copyright sign would be displayed as `' according to that rule. Fix: First make sure that your terminal is capable of displaying ISO-8859-1 (aka Latin-1) correctly. Either select a font that is coded in Latin-1 and configure your window for charset `AtariST' or - if you select an ordinary GDOS font or the default system font - let Toswin2 map your characters from AtariST to Latin-1 by configuring your window with the codeset `ISO-8859-1'. The trick is now to tell less about that capability: You have to set the environment variable `LESSCHARSET' to `Latin1'. In the Bourne shell (or bash or ksh) you do that by: LESSCHARSET="Latin1" export LESSCHARSET In the C shell (csh or tcsh) you do it with setenv LESSCHARSET "Latin1" You can do that in your shell startup scripts (/etc/profile for sh/bash/ksh or /etc/cshrc for csh/tcsh). Q: Why is white suddenly gray? A: The terminal capability `bold' was silently re-interpreted along the years to `bright'. You can for instance display the pure color red (RGB #ff0000) by using bright red. The `normal' red is somewhat darker. All colors in `dim' (or half-bright) mode are a little darker again). The problem with white is that you cannot make it any brighter. In ANSI mode white is therefore really some light gray. In order to have a white background you have to choose bright (bold) white in the window configuration dialog. Alternatively you can edit your `toswin2.cnf' for the particular window to: WinColorBG=7 WinColorFG=0 WinFGEffects=256 WinBGEffects=0 This may seem strange but many advanced curses applications draw tiny white lines on gray blackground and achieve this by using bright (resp. bold) white on normal white (which is really gray background). This wouldn't work if white is really white. A similar problem applies to black. A brighter black would actually tend to gray. However, the `bold' (bright) attribute is usually employed to emphasize a particular part of the text. Bold (bright) black is therefore really displayed in a bold font instead of changing the color. By the way, if your video hardware cannot display enough colors (at least 20 are required to define distinguishable colors for all ANSI modes in all colors) Toswin2 is smart enough to detect that and fall back to really using bold resp. dimmed fonts instead of changing the color rgb values. Q: I have an application that uses colors but the colors are not at all what the application says they should look like. A: There is no easy answer to that one. First possibility: At startup Toswin2 will inspect the current color map and pick the colors that come closest to the ones desired. If another application changes the color map afterwards, Toswin2 will currently not detect that and there is no other possibility than restarting Toswin2 to make it re-read the color map. Second possibility: You use some legacy application for Toswin2 that doesn't use the terminfo database. Try to configure `VDI colors' for that application in the window configuration dialog. Alternatively you may edit your toswin2.cnf: WinVDIColors=1 This is _not_ recommended as a default setting since applications that use the terminfo database will look very ugly in these windows. Third possibility: You are talking about the color yellow. The Linux console (which is somewhat the `opinion leader' in terms of color interpretation) has decided that yellow should rather be some kind of dirty orange. Toswin2 follows this convention, merely because it makes `yellow' readable even on white background. Another reason is that many, many curses applications are optimized for looking nice on the Linux console. They will also look nice in Toswin2 windows then. Q: What is this `tput'? Where can I learn more about all that terminal stuff? A: Take a week off from your job and start reading `man 5 terminfo'. This manual page is installed with the `ncurses' package on your system. The programs `tput' (enable/disable some named terminal capability), `tic' (compile and install a terminfo description file) and `tack' (convert a compiled terminfo description into `/etc/termcap' for legacy termcap applications) also belong to `ncurses'.