freebsd stable - Oct 2007 - single user mode broken on RELENG_7

Since I switched to RELENG_7 I cannot use /rescue/vi in single user mode any
more. It will just print everything in the bottom line of the screen, so
it's
impossible to navigate in a document or see what you're doing.

Mounting /usr and starting vim displays everything properly, but none of the
keys work. The screen is just frozen until I hack a couple of :q! into the
keyboard.

It's kinda tedious to fix my misconfigurations with cat and sed. I wish for
the RELENG_6 behaviour to return (that is, being able to use vi).

On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 09:22:03AM +0100, [LoN]Kamikaze
wrote:
> Since I switched to RELENG_7 I cannot use /rescue/vi in single user mode
any
> more. It will just print everything in the bottom line of the screen, so
it's
> impossible to navigate in a document or see what you're doing.
Are you on from a serial console or something like that?  (E.g. ssh'd
into a machine, then using console or a Portmaster or cu/tip).

The reason I mention this: I see what you do when I'm on a machine
remotely via serial console in single-user mode (e.g. using Windows XP
with PuTTY to ssh into a machine and use console or cu to connect to
another box via serial console).

The solution for this is to run "stty rows XX columns YY" and specify
the size of your terminal window.  Also (in the case of PuTTY) saying
"setenv TERM xterm" should help too.

If you're doing all of this from the actual VGA console itself, make
sure your TERM is cons25 and not something else.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                    jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                           http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                  PGP: 4BD6C0CB |