Re: Turning off automatic screen clanking

["Richard B. Johnson" <root@chaos.analogic.com>]

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, James Simmons wrote:

>
> > Yes. This is f*ing absurb. A default that kills the screen and the
> > requirement to send some @!_$%!@$ sequences to turn it off. This
> > is absolute crap, absolutely positively, with no possible justification
> > whatsoever. If I made an ioctl, it will probably be rejected.........
>
> Welcome to the world of ESC sequences. These are terminal standards. Sorry.
>

No. There are no ANSI, nor DEC nor AT&T nor IRIS, nor IBM, nor any
other terminals that have screen-blanking capabilities. These are
the inventions of later-date emulations. If my DEC VT-220 screen
went blank I would need to have it serviced.

This is a PC invention that was adopted by Linux. It's very poor
design to have screen blanking enabled as the default. It's a
feature that should be enabled if wanted, not forced.

If you are not on-site within 10 minutes of having a remote
system fail, you can't see what's on the screen when you
plug in your monitor because the console driver has dutifully
blanked the screen. And, you can write escape sequences from
a task that doesn't exist. If `init` or whatever substitutes
for it fails to execute, unless you are watching, or can observe
the result before the screen blanks, you can't see what happened.
It is very poor design.

If the machine had blanking disabled by default, then the
usual SYS-V startup scripts could execute setterm to enable
it IFF it was wanted.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.20 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).
            Note 96.31% of all statistics are fiction.