James Gardner: Home > Blog > 2008 > GNU Screen with no Wuff! on Mac OS X

GNU Screen with no Wuff! on Mac OS X

Posted:2008-08-11 15:47
Tags:Debian, Mac OS X

I've switched back from Ubuntu to Mac OS X again. The lack of hardware support was just too frustrating (eg: touchpad without right click, having to reboot to use the CD-ROM, dual screen not working properly, keyboard maps incorrect, no microphone etc) so I instead decided to try to fix some of the problems which made me unhappy with Mac OS X in the first place. The main one is the inability to use GNU Screen with the Terminal because it gives Wuff! messages.

This is actually easy to fix as described here:

http://www.dansanderson.com/blog/2004/07/newbie-linuxmac.html

Full background information is described here:

http://www.ibb.net/~anne/keyboard.html

The tip is duplicated below:

Terminal uses "xterm-color" as its TERM, which, in my Debian Etch installation, had undesired (but common) values for kbs (backspace) and kdch1 (delete). I was able to fix it with:

  1. Log in to the affected Linux box.
  2. echo $TERM to confirm the terminfo setting. (Mac OS X Terminal should be using xterm-color.)
  3. infocmp >xterm-color
  4. Edit xterm-color, find kbs and make sure it reads kbs=\177, and find kdch1 and make sure it reads kdch1=\E[3~. Save.
  5. mkdir -p ~/.terminfo/x
  6. Temporarily set the TERMINFO environment variable to ~/.terminfo. In bash/zsh: export TERMINFO=~/.terminfo
  7. Test-compile the new terminfo file: tic xterm-color If successful, ~/.terminfo/x/xterm-color will be the compiled terminfo file.
  8. unset TERMINFO
  9. If desired, back up the original compiled terminfo file. Look for it as /etc/terminfo/x/xterm-color or /usr/lib/terminfo/x/xterm-color.
  10. Run tic xterm-color again as root (using su or sudo) to compile and install the new version in the official location.

I've tested this and it seems to work well.

(view source)

James Gardner: Home > Blog > 2008 > GNU Screen with no Wuff! on Mac OS X