screen and curses problem

[Miroslaw Dach]

Dear All,

        I am having a problem with screen program which uses ncurses 
library. I have cross-compiled screen and ncurses library for powerpc405
processor. 

I am able to start my server (which uses stdin and stdout) by means of 
screen program to run it in the background:

./screen -t MYSERVER  -d -m ./myServer

When I want to attache to my server I use the command:

screen -r

When I use the TERM set to vt100 I am able to attache to my server but I 
can attache and detach only few times.
  
My observation is as following:

I have recompiled the ncurses library version 5.4 with options which I 
have figured out from ELDK4.1 (Embedded Linux development Kit by Denx):

./configure --host=i386-linux --with-normal --with-shared --without-debug 
--without-profile --with-cxx --without-ada --enable-sigwinch 
--enable-hard-tabs '--with-ospeed=unsigned int' 
'--with-build-cc=/usr/bin/gcc -B/usr/bin/' --enable-termcap  
--enable-termcap --with-shared  CC=powerpc-405-linux-gnu-gcc 
CXX=powerpc-405-linux-gnu-g++

The latest version of ncurses did cross compile but it does not work 
properly on my system so I turned to ncurses 5.4 with some patches.

Unfortunately I am able to reattach to the server only twice.
The third time when I attache to the server the screen prints the text as 
it was a wrong definition of characters per line.

When I detach from screen and attache again with screen -r 
I get a message:

You can't run screen on a hardcopy terminal.

When I try screen -r few time more I get a message:

Cannot find termcap entry for 'vt100'.


To sum up all above the situation is like that:

./screen -t MYSERVER  -d -m ./myServer         [OK]

screen -r                                      [OK]
CTRL-A D
screen -r                                      [OK]
CTRL-A D
screen -r                                      [wrong nr of char per line]
CTRL-A D
screen -r
You can't run screen on a hardcopy terminal.
screen -r
You can't run screen on a hardcopy terminal.
screen -r
Cannot find termcap entry for 'vt100'
screen -r
Cannot find termcap entry for 'vt100'
screen -r
Cannot find termcap entry for 'vt100'
screen -r
Cannot find termcap entry for 'vt100'
screen -r
Cannot find termcap entry for 'vt100'


Do you have any idea what could be wrong?
I use the terminal definitions in the /ete/termcap. Maybe it is more 
convenient to use terminfo instead? What is the advantage of terminfo over 
termcap?



Best Regards

Mierk