[pups] Figured some things out.

[kelli217@gmail.com (Kelli Halliburton)]

On Wednesday 08 March 2006 04:15 pm, Warren Toomey wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 02:27:52PM -0600, Kelli Halliburton wrote:
> > Well, as it turns out, I stumbled across the method of getting to
> > multi-user mode. ^D, imagine that. Dropping out of single-user mode
> > starts multi-user mode. That's not something I would have been able to
> > use logic to figure out.
>
> It's documented in the original V7 installation instructions. Effectively,
> you start in single-user mode with a shell attached to the keyboard.
> You have to disconnect the keyboard with ctrl-D, which then kills the shell
> and starts running /etc/rc.

The site where I got the v7 image was a bit short on instructions. It just had 
the RL image. I was stuck trying to read man pages from within the booted 
system. However, your message has prompted me to try to dig up the manual. I 
have found a set of 3 PDF files, and I have been poking around in them.

> > Of course, now my problem is that the console is presumed to be a TTY and
> > not a CRT terminal. And so, man pages just scroll right up and off the
> > screen. Oh well. I'm sure I'll figure out something. Eventually.
>
> In V7, everything was a dumb terminal: termcap and curses did not exist
> yet. And you were expected to have a paper-based terminal too :)

I was not expecting termcap or curses; I was... *hoping* (still not expecting) 
that perhaps v7 was new enough that the 'simple' type of CRT terminals, the 
ones that were basically just glass TTYs, were in common use. That it would 
be possible to use stty to set the number of rows to n, and that just maybe 
there would be a 'more' command that would only printout the next n lines. 
You know, simple stuff. Nothing about cursor addressable displays, no special 
codes for clearing the screen, or text attributes, just screen paging. At any 
rate, I may sit down at some point and write a 'more' utility of my own. Not 
that I need it for man pages now that I have the offline version of the 
manual, but there are still things like long directory listings that it would 
be useful for.