[systemd-devel] Question about 'vt100-nav' : unknown terminal type

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 23.12.10 18:37, fykcee1 at gmail.com (fykcee1 at gmail.com) wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I tried systemd v15 on debian squeeze, and got message "'vt100-nav' :
> unknown terminal type.". It seems default_term_for_tty(src/util.c) returns
> 'TERM=vt100-nav' for input arg tty='console'. After forcing
> default_term_for_tty
> to return 'TERM=linux', the message goes away.

This function will set TERM=linux for /dev/tty[0-9]* and TERM=vt100-nav
for everything else. This means that the local VT should get TERM=linux
(which is the right choice) and everything else gets TERM=vt100-nav,
which is a conservative choice, but should work fine on most serial
terminals and suchlike.

"vt100-nav" is the default TERM value that Fedora has been using for
serial terminals since about when time began. It's mostly vt100 plus
support for navigation keys. We hard-coded that into systemd under the
assumption that this ws universally available on Linuxes. Apparently, in
your case it isn't. COuld somebody from the DEbian camp please figure
out if this is really not supported? I see little reason to deviate in
this regard between distributions and hence I'd very much appreciate if
a) Debian would adopt the same terminfo package as everybody else or
b) we find an equally suitable default TERM value that is known on both
Debian and everything else.

> Also I got a warning message "Starting Serial Getty on tty failed.".  Is
> that something to do with serial tty? I passed "console=tty" in kernel
> cmdline.

"console=tty" doesn't really make sense to me, since /dev/tty is a
pseudo-device always referring to the controlling terminal of the
calling process. Is there any officual documentation available
explaining what this is supposed to mean? If this is officially
documented, then we probably need to special case this to handle this
properly.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.