On 9/10/07, Douglas A. Tutty  wrote:

quoted text
> Hello,

>

> I have a box that runs OpenBSD that sshes into my Debian box.  On

> OpenBSD, the default colour term is vt220 so when I ssh to debian, TERM

> is set to vt220.

>

> When I run mc, all is well; colour, line draw, whatever.

>

> When I run lynx or mutt, I get black on white with no colour.  On Lynx

> this means that my blue on gray ends up as white on black; with mutt I

> don't get the blue top and bottom lines or the red thread lines.

>

> If I ssh in from an xterm, with TERM=xterm, everything is fine.

termcap/termlib db's are different between openbsd and debian.

curses implementations are different between openbsd and debian.
some apps (like vim off the top of my head?), don't use

termcap/termlib or curses, they got their own thing going on. They

read TERM and do their own capabilities on it. Terminals lie (You're

not using a vt220 afterall, are you?), and terminal capabilities lie.

There are kilo's of documentation for termincal capabilities and

sequences out there, and they conflict each other.
curses has a .hascolor() boolean apps will read. You can print colors,

but curses will snuff them if .hascolor() returns false. I've seen

xterm-color return false, but xterm-256color return true! what??
Anyway, wsvt25 from console works great from openbsd on openbsd. If

you're on net and freebsd, pcvt25 works fairly well. Logging into

linux, I generaly use vt220 or vt102.
keep these aliases handy:

alias vt220='export TERM=vt220; tset -I -Q'

alias vt102='export TERM=vt102; tset -I -Q'

alias wsvt25='export TERM=wsvt25; tset -I -Q'

alias pcvt25='export TERM=pcvt25; tset -I -Q'

alias xterm256='export TERM=xterm-256color; tset -I -Q'

alias xtermcolor='export TERM=xterm-color; tset -I -Q'