SHEESH, stupid. The problem was ncurses. As part of my installation, I've
been copying software from the machine that this machine is going to
replace--including /usr/local/bin. On that machine, ncurses had installed a
/usr/local/bin/tset which, instead of referencing /etc/termcap referenced
/usr/local/share/terminfo. Well, I didn't install /usr/local/share/terminfo
and /usr/local/bin was coming before /usr/bin in my path.
The thing that snagged me was a reliance on the 'which' command which
consistently showed /usr/bin/tset. When I looked at 'which' I discovered that
it assumes you are using csh. I'm not. The first thing 'which' does is read
in your .cshrc to get the PATH. Since I'm not using csh, I never added
/usr/local/bin to the path in .cshrc so which wasn't using my real path. I
commented out the lines that source .cshrc and it seems much better behaved
now. It uses the PATH that I'm actually using.
Sorry to waste everyone's time with such a silly mistake.
--Rick Beebe
>I have a wierd one. I'm setting up two brand new Alpha 1200's with DU 4.0D.
>I'm doing most of the work on one of them--later to be cloned to the other.
>The problem: yesterday, for some unknown reason, tset broke on the working
>machine. Whenever it runs I get:
>tset: unknown terminal type xterm
>Terminal type?
>It doesn't matter what I type in there, nor what my terminal actually is,
>nor whether I run it as me or root.
>Tset on the other virgin machine still works fine.
>I've compared contents and permissions of /usr/bin/tset, /etc/termcap,
>/usr/share/lib/termcap and /usr/share/lib/terminfo/*. They are identical
>between the two machines.
>Does anyone have any idea of what I possibly could have done to break this?
> _______________________________________________________________________
> Rick Beebe (203) 785-4566
> Network Engineering Manager FAX: (203) 737-4037
> ITS-Med Technology Operations Richard.Beebe_at_yale.edu
> Yale University School of Medicine
> P.O. Box 208089, New Haven, CT 06520-8089
> _______________________________________________________________________
Received on Thu Jun 04 1998 - 20:28:41 NZST