Arch Linux

damjan

Member

Registered: 2006-05-30

Posts: 453

xterm vs xterm-color [SOLVED]

Hi everybody,
I was wondering why the F1-F5 keys were not working as documented in neither Konsole nor in Xterm. I then checked in the linux console and surelly those keys worked fine there.

After further inspection, I've noticed that my ~/.bashrc (that came from /etc/skel/.bashrc) contained the line:

test -n "$DISPLAY" && export TERM=xterm-color

Now this is clearly a mistake!! /etc/skel/.bashrc should be corrected.

I think the basic problem (IIRC Slackware had a similar problem once too) is that the "xterm-color" terminfo  is actually unmaintained, and not updated at all. xterm is more up-to-date.

But also, you should not set the TERM variable blindly, the terminal program itself (be it Konsole, Xterm, rxvt, gnome terminal, etc...) will set it to the correct value before starting the shell.

And surelly, after commenting that line in my ~/.bashrc everything works fine, F1-F5 in alsamixer, colors in vim and ls are also fine, and I've not encountered any other problems since then.

The filesystem-0.7.2-2 package should be corrected, please.

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: xterm vs xterm-color [SOLVED]

Use the bugtracker - the devs probably won't see this.

damjan

Member

Registered: 2006-05-30

Posts: 453

Re: xterm vs xterm-color [SOLVED]

Added as http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/5117

damjan

Member

Registered: 2006-05-30

Posts: 453

Re: xterm vs xterm-color [SOLVED]

Aaand fixed in CVS http://cvs.archlinux.org/cgi-bin/viewcv … 1.1&r2=1.2

Thanks judd. Hope to see the new package soon.

sm4tik

Member

From: Finland, Jyväskylä

Registered: 2006-11-05

Posts: 248

Website

Re: xterm vs xterm-color [SOLVED]

Thanks for this one damjan, it solved my alsamixer problems. Before commenting that line out, F1-F4 just made alsamixer quit.
..just to be a bit stupid (since I'm still a newbie with linux) what does that line actually do?

brain0

Developer

From: Aachen - Germany

Registered: 2005-01-03

Posts: 1,382

Re: xterm vs xterm-color [SOLVED]

Instead of removing it, changing it to

[ "$TERM" = "xterm" ] && export TERM=xterm-color

would have been a good idea. But moo cares, it is only the skel.

damjan

Member

Registered: 2006-05-30

Posts: 453

Re: xterm vs xterm-color [SOLVED]

@brain0:
xterm-color is WRONG... should not be used...

and the terminal program will already set the TERM environment variable corectly, so there's no need to reset it.