Re: tlug: serial line login

[Craig Oda <craig@example.com>]

On Sun, 28 Dec 1997, John Little wrote:

>    I'm using 19200 baud with a network preferences service I created
>    called "Linux" with the magic telephone number of "00", an empty
>    script and a hard coded IP address.

Thanks, I didn't know about the magic phone number. 

>    On the Linux box I do:-
> 
> 	pppd 19200 /dev/pilot -detach local passive \
> 				172.17.172.70:172.17.172.69

Again, thanks.  I got this to work after I compiled ppp 
support into the kernel.   I solved my other problem with
  T1:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS0 9600 vt100
in my /etc/inittab and doing an
  init q

This is all kind of nostalgic for me since I haven't worked
with serial software in a year or two.  Something tells me
I should have remembered about the respawn.

One big problem I have is that Debian is based on terminfo,
which has been giving me problems for some time.  I guess the
guy at ISAAC was using termcap.  I wonder if I can just
uninstall terminfo?  This is all a strange land to me.  My kterm
TERM settings don't work either, so I set it to vt102 manually.
I always intended to fix this one day.  Maybe the time is 
now.  I would like to get the tgtelnet terminal to work.  Anyone
have any thoughts on terminfo or termcap?  

Also, my opinion which I would like to bring up for discussion
on telnet vs. a serial terminal emulator.  Telnet is running in TCP/IP
which is putting quite a bit of overhead on the line.  If it 
is just interactive stuff, maybe a serial terminal emulator is
better?  Of course, with telnet, you can access any telnet host
on the Internet, but maybe most of the connections with the pilot
would be to that first hop host?  I'm not sure.  For me, 
robustness, readibility of the screen, vt100 emulation, speed
of login, and speed of interactive characters would be the important
things in that order.  

Anyway, I'm pretty addicted to this little pilot right now, 
so if anyone could comment on my terminfo problem, it would
be nice.  :-)


Other little things.

I'm using both AportisDoc and J-Doc (Japanese) to read compressed
document, books, Linux Gazette mags in the Pilot.  Very nice.
Since I didn't want to mess with the DOSEMU package, I set up
the Java MakeDoc under Linux and it works fine.
Here's the MakeDoc page:
     http://pc-28134.on.rogers.wave.ca/MakeDocJ.htm

I put this in my .bash_profile
 alias MakeDoc='/usr/local/classes/MakeDoc/MakeDocJ.class'
along with a 
  CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:/usr/local/classes/MakeDoc

then I can execute MakeDoc from the bash shell like any other
program.  I compiled misc_binfmt (or something like that
into the kernel.)

When I recompiled the kernel, I got the new bzip2 format
source  which is considerably smaller than the gzip format source.  
The Linux binaries for bzip2 are all over the place.  Here's
the first paragraph of the manpage. 

       Bzip2  compresses  files  using the Burrows-Wheeler block-
       sorting text compression algorithm,  and  Huffman  coding.
       Compression  is  generally  considerably  better than that
       achieved by more conventional LZ77/LZ78-based compressors,
       and  approaches  the performance of the PPM family of sta-
       tistical compressors.


There appears to be a freely available Pilot Desktop for Solaris
Sparc and ix86.  It is based on CDE, Perl, ect.  I have not
looked at it yet.  Too busy.  ;-)  If anyone gets it running on
Linux, tell me.  

I downloaded Jump, a Java byte code to Motorola dragonball 68x
assembler convertor.  I thought I would try some development
in Java and then run it on the Pilot.  I've only found a Windows
version, which is not that useful to me.  Is there is Linux
version, or does Linux community use C all the time?

Regards,
Craig  (typing on a keyboard, for now.)


------
craig@example.com    
PGP Public Key   http://www.twics.com/~craig/personal/pgp/

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