Re: LYNX-DEV bug

[David Hardy]

Anya Sanko <address@hidden> wrote:
>Our university gives all of its students computer accounts on OpenVMS =
>VAX 6.2.  These accounts include the use of Lynx 2.5.  These accounts =
>were recently upgraded to this software in December.  Since then, we =
>have been unable to use lynx.
>
>when we type lynx and it attempts to open the start menu, it crashes.  A =
>series of numbers scrolls by and then the message "a fatal error has =
>occurred in lynx, please contact your system administrator with a =
>description of what you were doing when this occurred".
>
>well, we have contacted our administrator via email and phone and they =
>have yet to fix the problem.  They gave us this address and told us to =
>ask here for help and/or support.
>
>any help you have for us would be appreciated.

We had some problems when we upgraded our systems to OpenVMS 6.2 though I don't
remember Lynx being affected (we're using version 2.5FM). The problem was
caused by the change in behaviour of the SET TERMINAL/INQUIRE command. Prior to
6.2, OpenVMS forced a page length of 24 lines; from 6.2 the page length is
taken from the information returned by the terminal or terminal emulator. For
our VT terminals and most of the terminal emulators that we use, there was no
change but for one terminal emulator, Emu-Tek for Windows, the page length
increased to 247 lines even though only 24 were actually visible at one time
(Emu-Tek seems to return the scroll buffer length). Some packages were upset by
this.

To see if this is potentially the problem, try typing the command

     set terminal/page=24

before starting Lynx.  If this doesn't work, try the command

     set terminal/inquire=old

If either fixes the problem, you may need to add the command concerned to the
appropriate LOGIN.COM files. The change to SET TERMINAL/INQUIRE is described on
page DCLII-224 of the manual 'OpenVMS DCL Dictionary: N-Z'.

David

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| David Hardy                             | E-mail: address@hidden    |
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