Problems in the virtual terminal on an Asus eeePC

[kilgota at banach.math.auburn.edu]

On Wed, 14 Jan 2009, Tim Johnson wrote:

> On Tuesday 13 January 2009, kilgota at banach.math.auburn.edu wrote:
>> I have just obtained a eeePC,
> I have an Asus EEE PC 900. Xandros OS..
>> one of the first things I had to do was to learn how to get into a
>> terminal window (Cntrl-Alt-t) and I checked whether Midnight Commander is
>> there. No. So I installed it.
> Mine came with MC installed.

Perhaps if I got a copy which was compiled for the distro, then, it might 
work. We both have Xandros, but I am pretty sure I tried to type "mc" in 
the xterm, and nothing happened. We do have two different models of 
eeePC, so we might have two different releases of Xandros.

>>
>> MC works fine in the xterm, as described above. But it does not do so well
>> in the terminal (you can get back to one terminal from X by doing
>> Cntrl-Alt-F3).
> Hmm! Can't get a terminal on mine with any Cntrl-Alt-Fn chord.
> I swapped the capslock and control keys, but I don't think that should
> make a difference as I've done the same on my 'big' workstation with
> kubuntu 7.10.

Well, I just got the thing yesterday, so I do not know much yet. Your 
problem might be a difference due to the model. Mine is a 1000, which I 
bought because I have old eyes and also wanted a keyboard big enough to 
type on.

I have not decided what to do about the distro on it. I don't like Xandros 
very much after seeing it in action, but underneath the funny GUI there 
actually is a Linux system underneath. My wife oohed and aahed over it. 
She is put off by my down-to-the-metal Slackware and my refusal to use a 
fancy desktop (I use a rather individualistically configured FVWM 
instead). I want her to like the machine and be impressed. But I also 
sorely miss my usual environment when using it. Therefore, what I am 
trying to figure out how to do right now is to make the machine do more of 
my kind of Linuxy things, without wiping the system. If left entirely to 
my own choices, I would probably blow the whole OS away and start from 
zero. But I do feel constrained, at least for now.

In any event, as I said, one can get an xterm with Cntrl-Alt-t, and at 
least on my machine there is one single VT which can be reached by doing 
Cntrl-Alt-F3, and if one has gone to the VT then Cntrl-Alt-F2 (or perhaps 
even just plain Alt-F2) takes one back to the X session.

Other problems:

If you log out in the terminal it does not give you a login prompt again. 
It just hangs. That's bad. The only way to recover the terminal from that 
is to reboot the machine.

The fix for the funny characters in X does not work here. I had this 
problem in the xterm. So I created an .Xdefaults file with the contents

XTerm*metaSendsEscape:  true

This cures the problem on my big computer, and recently there has been 
a thread about this topic here, too. But that .Xdefaults file has 
absolutely no effect on the same problem on the eeePC, alas.

Then, of course, the fact that it acts funny when one starts MC in that 
text terminal is vexing, too.

Well, I guess I just have to keep working on it, figure out what I can, 
and hope that someone else is working on it, too.

Thanks for answering.

Theodore Kilgore