lets talk about talk ... ?

[Rick Stevens]

Steve Larsen wrote:
> Hello Install List,
> 
> I have talkd installed and it seems to run .. but not in a split screen 
> mode.
> When I type " talk user " and the user replies, we seem to be typing over
> each others words and no "split screen" shows up. This is not the behavior
> I remember from using this years ago. Some information on the system is
> included below.
> 
>     rpm -qa talk* 
>     talk-0.17-12 
>     talk-server-0.17-12 
>     =========
> 
>     netstat -l 
>     Active Internet connections (only servers) 
>     Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address        
>     State      
>     udp        0      0 *:talk                 
>     *:*                                 
>     udp        0      0 *:ntalk                
>     *:*                                 
>     ========= 
>     Red Hat Linux release 7.3 (Valhalla) 
>     Kernel 2.4.18-3 on an i686 
>     ========= 
>     service talk 
>     { 
>             disable                 = no 
>             socket_type             = dgram 
>             wait                    = yes 
>             user                    = nobody 
>             group                   = tty 
>             server                  = /usr/sbin/in.talkd 
>     } 
> 
> My initial thoughts are that this version of talk is too old? Does 
> anyone have
> any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks in advance.

I answered this last week, I think.

It depends on several things: do you have ncurses installed and what
your "$TERM" environment variable looks like.

ncurses allows the funky screen drawing stuff and your TERM says what
terminal type you have.  If it isn't set to a terminal type that
supports direct cursor addressing and the like, it can't do split
screen.

Under a GUI (e.g. Gnome or KDE) with "echo $TERM" returning "xterm",
it works fine.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-              Where there's a will, I want to be in it.             -
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