termcap problem on a Sun 3

[Casey Leedom]

| From: rja at edison.GE.COM (rja)
| X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 300, message 14 of 15
| 
| I regularly use a Sun-3 via an Internet TAC (terminal access controller).
| Sometimes but not always the Sun gets into a weird state where it believes
| that a vt100 has only 7 lines.

The kernel maintains two variable describing the number of rows and
columns of the tty.  You can see what it thinks these values are by ``stty
all''.  You can change those values by ``stty rows ### cols ###''.

These kernel variables are normally initialized to zero by login(1), but
an incoming rlogin can provide window size information which rlogind(8)
will use to initialize these variables.  Tset(1) will also initialize
these variables from their corresponding termcap values ("li" and "co") if
the kernel variables are zero.

When most applications start up they interogate the kernel for what it
thinks the window size is, and if either of those values are zero, the
applications use the corresponding values from termcap.

Casey