Pick and Liberty terminals ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 14:17:12 -0700 From: David Lawyer To: Pickle Cc: "Richard Shuford" Subject: Re: Linux terminal how-to Thanks for the info. I don't have room in my HOWTO for any info on the Liberty terminals. But I think that it belongs on Shuford's website on text-terminals. Is it OK for him to keep it there? I'll put a little of the Wyse info into my HOWTO but perhaps the Wyse info here also belongs on Shuford's website. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ On Thu, Jun 22, 2000 at 10:40:39PM +1000, Pickle (Simon Butcher) wrote: David, I have some information you might be interested in... A few years ago I came across a fellow who had a garage full of terminals. I arrived to buy what I thought was one terminal for $2. I ended up paying $50 for around 45 terminals. One of them included a VT220, with an unfortunate problem involving a large black burnt out hole around 2cm (just under an inch) in the circuit board. It obviously wasn't going anywhere. I also got a WYSE 370 from 1990 (colour, but from my tests no graphics capabilities, and soft-fonts didn't work). The WYSE 370 has a very confusing half backwards menu system like the WYSE 150 you described in the Appendix of the HOW-TO. It has two serial ports and allows multi-paging and split screen (halves, vertical and horizontal) capabilities. Along with two WYSE 60's, and a WYSE 50, I picked up about 15 WYSE 85's.. The WYSE 50 was the most annoying thing to set up.. And I had read that they were prone to not lasting very long in a newsgroup somewhere. Sure enough, before I had a chance to open it up and fix it before it killed itself off.. It died, in a wonderful show of a bright light and plenty of blue/grey smoke. Unfortunately I can't tell you much about it because it only lasted about 30 minutes, but I can tell you about the WYSE 85's. To setup the WYSE 85, you press F3. Options are listed down the bottom, and it's pretty much straight forward. You move left/right to select a menu option, then press SPACE (dispite it saying "press enter" at the top of the screen). You can also scroll through the setup pages by pressing up and down, and if you ever get lost, pressing F3 will take you to the top without loosing any of the settings. It's a typical WYSE maze :) The WYSE 85 mainly seems to be a VT52/VT100/VT200 emualtor, since the mode settings don't seem to include WYSE. The WYSE 370 can emulate the whole VT set, along with WY60, and WY150. They're bizarre beasts. The WYSE 85 has the 20mA port as well as a printer and serial port. My WYSE 85's has a label that says the fuse should be 1A. A one amp fuse constantly blows, so I've assumed that it's a one amp fuse for 110/120volt, except in Australia we use a 240 volt system, so maybe there was a mislabeling.. People might want to be aware of that :) Now onto the rest of them. A truck load of "Liberty" brand terminals. I love these things, apart from the fact that half of these have faults somewhere, and apart from the a handful of logic boards being faulty, they seem pretty good. I've asked around, and nobody seems to have heard of these terminals ever before! That surprises me; have you heard of them? The "Liberty 120" terminals age from mid-1992, made by Liberty-Electronics in San Francisco have a serial port and a parallel port. They're very basic, and designed similar to the WYSE 85's. From what I can tell, they were internationally released, and emulated many terminal types. Because of this, there are some confusing things to the Liberty terminals, and still several things I don't know about. I've tested them for all the graphic formats I know of, and nothing works. They don't respond to any soft-font commands either. It can emulate VT-52, VT-100, VT-200, VT-300, Freedom ONE, TeleVideo 950, TeleVideo 925, Lear Siegler ADM 31, ADDS Viewpoint A2, Dumb Terminal/PC Terminal, WYSE 50, WYSE 60, WYSE 120, WYSE 150. The WYSE emulations are not complete, and I haven't been able to test anything else other than the VT specifications, which seem complete except for the escape codes that DEC didn't tell anyone about, and since I don't know any of them I can't tell you if even they work or not. Keyboard setup is dependant on the emulation settings, and so are the options in the setup menus as well, so that should always be set up first. In the VT modes, Pressing control-escape brings you into a "simple" setup mode, where the options are all on a single simple line down the bottom of the screen. Pressing Shift-Escape takes you into a larger full-screen setup on several pages. In any other modes, pressing scroll lock will open the simple setup system, pressing shift-scroll lock will bring up the full-screen setup system. Shift-break resets the system. If you ever get completely stuck, you can open up the bottom and on the circuit board there is a little button-battery (like in a watch) that holds the settings. If you take that out for about 15 minutes, the terminal will be completely reset. In the full-screen setup mode, there are some additional functions you can access. Since I don't have the documentation, and Liberty-Electronics haven't replied with any help, I can't be sure. One day my cat sat on my keyboard while I was in setup mode one day. Something happened and the terminal reset. I tried to continue my setup-session, but I kept being asked for a password, and I could never work out ever again how to get in to set a password! That required removal of the battery... There is one function I'm confident about. It's a full screen and keyboard test. This helps aligning the screen if you're into fiddling with the trimpots in the back of the video section of the terminal. Before you start this function, be warned.. You have to remove the battery to stop the terminal from forever testing itself! The test doesn't stop, and cannot be stopped by pressing a key combination (AFAIK). To access it, get into the full-screen setup mode, then press shift-F1. There is another test accessible via shift-F2. Well, I hope this slab of information helps someone out there.. These terminals are fantastic and have been the easiest for us to use with Linux. Cheers! Simon Butcher Alien Internet Services http://www.alien.net.au/ David Lawyer //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////