OSR5 FAQ

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

Graphical characters don't work (Old Sco Unix)

OSR5 uses the IBM characters set by default. Try mapchan -n. If that cures the problem, comment out the appropriate line in /etc/rc.d/6/kinit - and make sure you make a note of this change so that you can remake it, if necessary, after a future upgrade.

Bela Lubkin offered a slightly longer explanation:

(as explained by Bela)
SCO added a new alias for the console terminal emulation. The old one, "ansi", is still recognized. However, the new one, "scoansi", is used by default. There is no difference in the two terminal descriptions as long as your application uses the standard sources of terminal information: termcap (/etc/termcap) and terminfo (/usr/lib/terminfo/?/terminalname).

However, many older applications are shipped with their own private terminal files. For instance, SCO FoxPlus comes with /usr/lib/foxplus/termcap. These private terminal descriptions are usually a superset of the normal information, plus other stuff that the application may use for its own purposes.

Your problem is probably happening because your application provides its own termcap file with added information about line drawing. When the console terminal was called "ansi", the app looked up "ansi" in its private termcap and found out how to draw nice lines. Now that the console is called "scoansi", it looks that up and doesn't find it, so it falls back to the OS's public terminal description. That description actually *does* say how to draw nice boxes, but perhaps not in the same language that the application is expecting.

Solution: the easiest one is to just call your console terminals "ansi". You can do that by editing the console entries in /etc/ttytype. Next easiest: find the app's private terminal database and teach it that "scoansi" is the same as "ansi".

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