When replacing a dedicated (dumb) terminal with a PC, TinyTERM version may not connect over the known good serial connection. This usually means you need a null modem adapter on one end of the cable.

On a terminal, the pins line up 2-2 and 3-3. A PC uses the same hardware as the server, rather than the reversed version common to terminals. Thus, the pins need to line up 3-2 and 2-3. A null modem adapter corrects this without requiring a new data cable.

In this situation, TinyTERM connects to a host via serial cable successfully. Another application on the PC then makes a modem connection. This causes the system to lock up completely.

Check the IRQs used by the serial port and modem. If both are trying to use one IRQ — or worse, one COM port — that will cause the lockup. Assign the modem its own IRQ.

In TinyTERM 4.00-4.13, there is no flow control setting in the user interface. To set flow control for those versions, go through Windows Device Manager and set it directly on the serial port.

A user interface for this was added in TinyTERM 4.20.

CR 25

Using TERM for UNIX on a tty port, it may fail even though cu can see the port. When this happens, first verify the port permissions are 666 (-rw-rw-rw-). If that’s correct, launch TERM with the -i parameter:

term -i -l/dev/tty04

This will ignore any lockfiles on the tty port. Please be aware that if another application is using the port, it will be interrupted when you do this.

You may run into a situation where transparent printing works for a few pages of text, then gives a print error. After that the job may fail, or it may print one line per page.This is a flow control issue. Disable flow control on both the PC and the server port. Printing should work properly after that.

Using TinyTERM 3.2 on Windows 95 via a serial line, TinyTERM will fail to get a login prompt. HyperTerminal works on the same connection.To fix this, edit the .tap file with any text editor. Search for the line:

rts=OFF

Change OFF to ON.  This is a bug in the handling of DTR on and off commands.

Installing TinyTERM on Windows 3.1, it may ask for an IP address, even if you plan a serial connection. When this happens, click the Back button and deselect the network installation.

Using TERM or TinyTERM over a serial connection, with the emulation set to ANSI, the display is OK, but the arrow keys don’t work. With the emulation set to VT100, the arrow keys work, but instead of lines, it displays the letter d repeatedly.

To solve both the arrow key and line draw problems, check to see if the UNIX tty port is set to a word length of 7. If it is, set the port for a word lengthy of 8, 1 stop bit and no parity. The host application is sending 8-bit sequences for the line draw characters. With these changes, VT100 emulation will work.

Using TinyTERM 3.3 on Windows 3.1 with a serial connection, if you put TinyTERM in the Startup program group, you’ll get an error:

Error (4514) Bad argument to function vsetoption: expected vector, got integer

This will happen any time you use anything on the File menu. You also won’t be able to exit Windows unless you use Ctrl-Alt-Delete.

To fix this, change the icon properties to remove us.tap from the command line. Switch to default.tap instead.

Using TERM for UNIX, you may see a locked device error when connecting to a tty port. The port permissions are usually reset to 600 (-rw——-) when this happens, even if you’ve changed it to 666 (-rw-rw-rw-).

The following is a sample script. It will not execute on all UNIX systems. You will need to adjust it for your particular flavor of UNIX. It will resolve the inability of callin and callout being unable to enable and disable ports that use port monitors.

1. Place the script in /usr/bin.
2. Do a chmod 777 to make it executable and accessible to all users.

The script is very simple. It disables the port, makes it accessible to TERM, starts TERM, then re-enables the port after TERM exits.

/usr/sbin/pmadm -d -pttymon0 -s00
sleep5
chmod 0666/dev/term/00
term
/usr/sbin/pmadm -e -pttymon0 -s00


Please note: This script is from Unisys U6000 SVR4 UNIX. Other flavors of UNIX will have commands that do the same thing, but the syntax will be different.

CR 572