"screen" causes problems for non-screen tty's

[Walter Dnes]

  I'll avoid a long story, but I've got a bunch of stuff I want to do in
different text console tty's.  I log on as a regular user for email,
news, websurfing, etc.  I log on as a second special-purpose user for
other stuff like programming, etc.  When I open up a separate tty for
each of my tasks, 6 tty's is not enough.  I had to edit /etc/inittab
like so to get enough consoles...

# TERMINALS
c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty1 linux
c2:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty2 linux
c3:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty3 linux
c4:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty4 linux
c5:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty5 linux
c6:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty6 linux
c7:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty7 linux
c8:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty8 linux
c9:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty9 linux
c10:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty10 linux

  The X-session is in tty11, and I can run a second one in tty12 if I
get ambitious.

  Why am I not using screen, you ask?  Well, I tried, and everything
worked OK *UNDER SCREEN*, e.g. vim and mc (Midnight Commander).  But...
I started having problems in tty's that were *NOT* running under screen.
Vim and mc started spewing out A's and B's rather than moving the cursor
when I pressed the up and down arrows.  Apparently screen kicks *ALL*
text consoles into vt100 mode *PERMANENTLY*, even different tty's
running different users.  I have not been able to turn this off, other
than by re-booting (bleagh).

  I tried "export TERM=vt100", and it "worked".  The keys did what
they were "supposed to do".  The 4 grey arrow keys moved the cursor
around properly, and all the keys on the numeric keypad generate weird
escape sequences as per the vt100 spec... oops.  Losing the numeric
keypad is *NOT* acceptable, so I gave up.  Anybody have any ideas on how
to get screen to play nice?

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
An infinite number of monkeys pounding away on keyboards will
eventually produce a report showing that Windows is more secure,
and has a lower TCO, than linux.
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