[tlug] Slackware 9.1, zsh, rxvt problem

[Scott <scottro@example.com>]

I'm wondering if anyone can tell me what causes this.

I tend to use zsh, and in Slack 9.1, (and Vector Linux, an offshoot of
Slack--not a bad little distro by the way) I found that zsh didn't
recognize rxvt.

In bash, when I opened an rxvt terminal in X, everything worked
normally. However, in zsh, neither backspace, ^H or delete worked, and
there were various other peculiarities.  Some googling indicated various
contradictory solutions, with termcap, terminfo and xmodmap, but anyway
the problem seemed to be that when, in zsh if I did

export TERM=rxvt (also tried with a few variations, Rxvt RXVT, etc) I
would get 
can't locate terminal rxvt.

The problem was solved by changing .Xdefaults to read xterm-color.
Everything works, and I can still input Japanese.  However, I'm curious
as to what the problem is.  (Various experiments with stty didn't work
either.)

This has only been an issue in Slack and Vector, no other flavors.  Just
wondering if anyone ever came across it, and if they could explain why
it happens.

I tried various haphazard solutions (which is why I'm breaking my own
rule about not stating what I tried to do to fix the problem) but
primarily tried a few different settings in .Xdefaults, played with
xmodmap, tried the script they mention in man xmodmap to get the
backspace key to delete, but didn't get anywhere till I started doing
some export TERM tests and found that zsh didn't recognize rxvt.  (In
contrast, if I do that in bash it simply exported the variable.)

Thanks for any help--although the problem is solved by changing term
name in .Xdefaults, I'm curious as to the cause.



-- 

Scott Robbins

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