When booting on a power5 machine with an hvc console the livecd (http://dev.gentoo.org/~tgall/2005.0/install-ppc64-ibm-minimal-2005.0.iso.bz2) has an inittab that spawns a vt320 hvc console session. The version of nano on the livecd works fine. But after the stage1 (http://dev.gentoo.org/~tgall/2005.0/stage1-ppc64-20050310.tar.bz2) is chrooted to, that version of nano does not work. If you change the TERM variable to vt100 or xterm, it works fine. I think we can either change the inittab entry or figure out whats going on with the stage 1 nano. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot the livecd on a power5 system with an hvc console. 2. Unpack stage1. 3. chroot 4. run nano Actual Results: # nano /etc/resolv.conf Error opening terminal: vt320. Expected Results: Nano should run as expected.
Have you tried using the actual release items and not the stuff in someone's home directory?
According to Tom Gall, the stuff in his ppc64 directory is the actual release for ppc64. I also tried a stage three and the problem did NOT exist.
I'm sure the stage1 entry is due to the system being built extremely minimally at that point. It is very likely that the system simply doesn't understand vt320 properly via a minimal ncurses. As for not using something from someone's home directory, it is a matter of logistics. The dev.gentoo.org server is donated to us and should not be used as a distribution point. We have been asked repeatedly to not host files off that server. Please use the mirrors for any downloads that you may need, as that it their purpose. Now, what I'm curious about is what functionality would be lost by switching the vt320 to vt100 for PPC64?
general comment. Sure there's a difference between VT100 and VT340. Having been around in the day and used physical versions of these terminals from DEC, there was a good reason why people flocked to the VT3xx tubes. But that's not really important. IIRC tho the hvc is built to be vt320. I'll verify this will the author tomorrow. The fix here looks tivial. To add support of a vt320 we're talking 1k bytes so even in a minimal environment, I see no reason not to add it.
current portage now contains the fix to base layout. I'll generate an update livecd.
Tom: exactly what changed in current portage to support this? I am removing all of the livecd stuff from baselayout and into livecd-tools to make it easier to manage, so I really need to know where this fix came about.
