On Mon Aug 9, 1999, John Carline wrote:
> Immanuel Yap wrote:
>
> > On Mon Aug 9, 1999, John Carline wrote:
> > > Executing 'dselect' now gives me the error 'Error opening
> > > terminal: unknown', and in addition many other commands give
> > > similar messages. For example, if I use a pipe to less (ls |
> > > less) I get the following: WARNING: Terminal is not fully
> > > functional.
> >
> > What does 'echo $TERM' say?
>
> Thump! Thump! Thump! <sound of user banging head against desk> :)
>
> Now why didn't I check that??
>
>
> Thanks Noel. You asked the right question, the $TERM variable was
> blank. I ran an env command and compared it to my hamm disk. All
> the other variables looked ok. I then added "TERM=linux" and "export
> TERM" to my root .profile to see if that fixed it. It did.
>
> However I'm sure that that's not the correct place for TERM to be
> set. Sooooo! I've been checking files on my hamm disk in an attempt
> to find the correct spot. so far I've looked at /etc/inittab,
> .profile, .bashrc and any file I could find that said getty, login
> or init. No luck yet.
>
> You wouldn't by any chance have another hint in you, would you? :)
Sorry, I don't have a clue. I've never had this particular problem of
$TERM not being set at all. I always thought it was hardwired when
you log into the console. A quick check of 'man login' yields:
On some installations, the environmental variable $TERM
will be initialize to the terminal type on your tty line,
as specified in /etc/ttytype.
but '/etc/ttytype' doesn't exist on my system.
Noel
