bsdinstall(8) line drawing characters

[Thomas Dickey]

On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 04:03:31PM +0100, David Lazaro Saz wrote:
> 
> On Jan 20, 2013, at 2:50 PM, Devin Teske <devin.teske at fisglobal.com> wrote:
> 
> > Of interest I would think is the output of:
> > 
> > dialog --version
> > echo $TERM
> > 
> > and whether (if possible) sysinstall produces similar results (what release are you running?)
> 
> I'm still running 8.3 in production. I've noticed this while playing with 9.0 and 9.1 both on vmware and older machines.
> 
> I think that you are right and it has to do with the TERM variable and how it is set in the system console. In 8.3, the system console is defined as "cons25" while on 9.1 it is defined as "xterm". If I execute the following command:
> 
>     # TERM=cons25 bsdinstall
> 
> Then the line drawing characters are show correctly on the system console. If I do the opposite on 8.3, defining TERM as xterm, then the results are even worse than on 9.1.
> 
> dialog(1) is on version 1.1-20100428 on 9.1 and on version 0.3 on 8.3.
> 
> I can't find neither when nor why the system console was changed to xterm
> looking at the release notes of FreeBSD 9.0, but this seem to be the reason. 
> The TERM variable is defined on /etc/ttys, so I'll try to find the change on
> the svn repository to shed some light.

TERM is one thing, the driver is another.

Since the "xterm" terminal description supports line-drawing characters,
it sounds as if the underlying problem is in the console driver.

ncurses would use ASCII characters if it is told that the terminal
cannot use line-drawing characters.  However, it uses the VT100
line-drawing characters if possible.

Running vttest establishes that the issue is not in ncurses
(menu item 3, character sets).  That shows only ASCII characters.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net
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