-- $Id: INSTALL,v 1.27 1997/04/26 23:48:19 tom Exp $ --------------------------------------------------------------------- How to install Ncurses/Terminfo on your system --------------------------------------------------------------------- ************************************************************ * READ ALL OF THIS FILE BEFORE YOU TRY TO INSTALL NCURSES. * ************************************************************ You should be reading the file INSTALL in a directory called ncurses-d.d, where d.d is the current version number. There should be several subdirectories, including `c++', `form', `man', `menu', 'misc', `ncurses', `panel', `progs', and `test'. See the README file for a roadmap to the package. If you are a Linux or FreeBSD or NetBSD distribution integrator or packager, please read and act on the section titled IF YOU ARE A SYSTEM INTEGRATOR below. If you are converting from BSD curses and do not have root access, be sure to read the BSD CONVERSION NOTES section below. If you are using a version of XFree86 xterm older than 3.1.2F, see the section on RECENT XTERM VERSIONS below. If you are trying to build GNU Emacs using ncurses for terminal support, read the USING NCURSES WITH EMACS section below. If you are trying to build applications using gpm with ncurses, read the USING NCURSES WITH GPM section below. If you are trying to build Elvis using ncurses for terminal support, read the USING NCURSES WITH ELVIS section below. If you are running over the Andrew File System see the note below on USING NCURSES WITH AFS. If you want to build the Ada95 binding, go to the Ada95 directory and follow the instructions there. The Ada95 binding is not covered below. If you are using anything but (a) Linux, or (b) one of the 4.4BSD-based i386 Unixes, go read the Portability section in the TO-DO file before you do anything else. REQUIREMENTS: You will need the following in order to build and install ncurses under UNIX: * ANSI C compiler (gcc is recommended) * sh (bash will do) * awk (mawk or gawk will do) * sed * BSD or System V style install (a script is enclosed) INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: 1. First, decide whether you want ncurses to replace your existing library (in which case you'll need super-user privileges) or be installed in parallel with it. The --prefix option to configure changes the root directory for installing ncurses. The default is in subdirectories of /usr/local. Use --prefix=/usr to replace your default curses distribution. This is the default for Linux and BSD/OS users. The package gets installed beneath the --prefix directory as follows: In $(prefix)/bin: tic, infocmp, captoinfo, tset, reset, clear, tput, toe In $(prefix)/lib: libncurses*.* libcurses.a In $(prefix)/share/terminfo: compiled terminal descriptions In $(prefix)/include: C header files Under $(prefix)/man: the manual pages Note however that the configure script attempts to locate previous installation of ncurses, and will set the default prefix according to where it finds the ncurses headers. 2. Type `./configure' in the top-level directory of the distribution to configure ncurses for your operating system and create the Makefiles. Besides --prefix, various configuration options are available to customize the installation; use `./configure --help' to list the available options. If your operating system is not supported, read the PORTABILITY section in the file ncurses/README for information on how to create a configuration file for your system. The `configure' script generates makefile rules for one or more object models and their associated libraries: libncurses.a (normal) libcurses.a (normal, a link to libncurses.a) This gets left out if you configure with --disable-overwrite. libncurses.so (shared) libncurses_g.a (debug) libncurses_p.a (profile) If you do not specify any models, the normal and debug libraries will be configured. Typing `configure' with no arguments is equivalent to: ./configure --with-normal --with-debug --enable-overwrite Typing ./configure --with-shared makes the shared libraries the default, resulting in ./configure --with-shared --with-normal --with-debug --enable-overwrite If you want only shared libraries, type ./configure --with-shared --without-normal --without-debug Rules for generating shared libraries are highly dependent upon the choice of host system and compiler. We've been testing shared libraries on Linux and SunOS with gcc, but more work needs to be done to make shared libraries work on other systems. You can make curses and terminfo fall back to an existing file of termcap definitions by configuring with --enable-termcap. If you do this, the library will search /etc/termcap before the terminfo database, and will also interpret the contents of the TERM environment variable. See the section BSD CONVERSION NOTES below. 3. Type `make'. Ignore any warnings, no error messages should be produced. This should compile the ncurses library, the terminfo compiler tic(1), captoinfo(1), infocmp(1), toe(1), clear(1) tset(1), reset(1), and tput(1) programs (see the man pages for explanation of what they do), some test programs, and the panels, menus, and forms libraries. 4. Run ncurses and several other test programs in the test directory to verify that ncurses functions correctly before doing an install that may overwrite system files. Read the file test/README for details on the test programs. NOTE: You must have installed the terminfo database, or set the environment variable $TERMINFO to point to a SVr4-compatible terminfo database before running the test programs. Not all vendors' terminfo databases are SVr4-compatible, but most seem to be. Exceptions include DEC's Digital Unix (formerly known as OSF/1). The ncurses program is designed specifically to test the ncurses library. You can use it to verify that the screen highlights work correctly, that cursor addressing and window scrolling works OK, etc. 5. Once you've tested, you can type `make install' to install libraries, the programs, the terminfo database and the man pages. Alternately, you can type `make install' in each directory you want to install. In the top-level directory, you can do a partial install using these commands: 'make install.progs' installs tic, infocmp, etc... 'make install.includes' installs the headers. 'make install.libs' installs the libraries (and the headers). 'make install.data' installs the terminfo data. (Note: `tic' must be installed before the terminfo data can be compiled). 'make install.man' installs the man pages. ############################################################################ # CAVEAT EMPTOR: `install.data' run as root will NUKE any existing # # terminfo database. If you have any custom or unusual entries SAVE them # # before you install ncurses. I have a file called terminfo.custom for # # this purpose. Don't forget to run tic on the file once you're done. # ############################################################################ The terminfo(5) manual page wants to be preprocessed with tbl(1) before being formatted by nroff(1). Modern man(1) implementations tend to do this by default, but you may want to look at your version's man page to be sure. If the system already has a curses library that you need to keep using for some bizarre binary-compatibility reason, you'll need to distinguish between it and ncurses. If ncurses is installed outside the standard directories (/usr/include and /usr/lib) then all your users will need to use the -I option to compile programs and -L to link them. If you have BSD curses installed in your system and you accidentally compile using its curses.h you'll end up with a large number of undefined symbols at link time. _waddbytes is one of them. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE ROOT: Change directory to the `progs' subdirectory and run the `capconvert' script. This script will deduce various things about your environment and use them to build you a private terminfo tree, so you can use ncurses applications. If more than one user at your site does this, the space for the duplicate trees is wasted. Try to get your site administrators to install a system- wide terminfo tree instead. See the BSD CONVERSION NOTES section below for a few more details. 6. The c++ directory has C++ classes that are built on top of ncurses and panels. You need to have c++ (and its libraries) installed before you can compile and run the demo. 7. If you're running an older Linux, you must either (a) tell Linux that the console terminal type is `linux' or (b) make a link to or copy of the linux entry in the appropriate place under your terminfo directory, named `console'. All 1.3 and many 1.2 distributions (including Yggdrasil and Red Hat) already have the console type set to `linux'. The way to change the wired-in console type depends on the configuration of your system. This may involve editing /etc/inittab, /etc/ttytype, /etc/profile and other such files. Warning: this is not for the fainthearted, if you mess up your console getty entries you can make your system unusable! However, if you are a distribution maker, this is the right thing to do (see the note for integrators near the end of this file). The easier way is to link or copy l/linux to c/console under your terminfo directory. Note: this will go away next time you do `make install.data' and you'll have to redo it. There is no need to have entries for all possible screen sizes, ncurses will figure out the size automatically. IF YOU ARE A SYSTEM INTEGRATOR: Beginning with 1.9.9, the ncurses distribution includes both a tset utility and /usr/share/tabset directory. If you are installing ncurses, it is no longer either necessary or desirable to install tset-jv. Configuration and Installation: Configure with --prefix=/usr to make the install productions put libraries and headers in the correct locations (overwriting any previous curses libraries and headers). This will put the terminfo hierarchy under /usr/share/terminfo; you may want to override this with --datadir=/usr/share/misc; terminfo and tabset are installed under the data directory. Please configure the ncurses library in a pure-terminfo mode; that is, with the --disable-termcap option. This will make the ncurses library smaller and faster. The ncurses library includes a termcap emulation that queries the terminfo database, so even applications that use raw termcap to query terminal characteristics will win (providing you recompile and relink them!). If you must configure with termcap fallback enabled, you may also wish to use the --enable-getcap option. This option speeds up termcap-based startups, at the expense of not allowing personal termcap entries to reference the terminfo tree. See the code in ncurses/read_termcap.c for details. Keyboard Mapping: The terminfo file assumes that Shift-Tab generates \E[Z (the ECMA-48 reverse-tabulation sequence) rather than ^I. Here are the loadkeys -d mappings that will set this up: keycode 15 = Tab Tab alt keycode 15 = Meta_Tab shift keycode 15 = F26 string F26 ="\033[Z" Naming the Console Terminal In various Linuxes (and possibly elsewhere) there has been a practice of designating the system console driver type as `console'. Please do not do this any more! It complicates peoples' lives, because it can mean that several different terminfo entries from different operating systems all logically want to be called `console'. Please pick a name unique to your console driver and set that up in the /etc/inittab table or local equivalent. Send the entry to the terminfo maintainer (listed in the misc/terminfo file) to be included in the terminfo file, if it's not already there. See the term(7) manual page included with this distribution for more on conventions for choosing type names. Here are our recommended primary console names for the most important freeware UNIX distributions: linux -- Linux console driver freebsd -- FreeBSD netbsd -- NetBSD bsdos -- BSD/OS If you are responsible for integrating ncurses for one of these distribution, please either use the recommended name or get back to us explaining why you don't want to, so we can work out nomenclature that will make users' lives easier rather than harder. RECENT XTERM VERSIONS The terminfo database file included with this distribution assumes you are running an XFree86 xterm based on X11R6 (i.e., xterm-r6). The earlier X11R5 entry (xterm-r5) is provided as well. If you are running XFree86 version 3.2 (actually 3.1.2F and up), you should consider using the xterm-xf86-v32 entry, which adds ANSI color and the VT220 capabilities which have been added in XFree86. If you are running a mixed network, however, where this terminal description may be used on an older xterm, you may have problems, since applications that assume these capabilities will produce incorrect output on the older xterm (e.g., highlighting is not cleared). CONFIGURING FALLBACK ENTRIES In order to support operation of ncurses programs before the terminfo tree is accessible (that is, in single-user mode or at OS installation time) the ncurses library can be compiled to include an array of pre-fetched fallback entries. These entries are checked by setupterm() only when the conventional fetches from the terminfo tree and the termcap fallback (if configured) have been tried and failed. Thus, the presence of a fallback will not shadow modifications to the on-disk entry for the same type, when that entry is accessible. By default, there are no entries on the fallback list. After you have built the ncurses suite for the first time, you can change the list (the process needs infocmp(1)). To do so, use the script MKfallback.sh. If you wanted (say) to have linux, vt100, and xterm fallbacks, you would use the commands cd ncurses; MKfallback.sh linux vt100 xterm >fallback.c Then just rebuild and reinstall the library as you would normally. You can restore the default empty fallback list with MKfallback.sh >fallback.c The overhead for an empty fallback list is one trivial stub function. Any non-empty fallback list is const-ed and therefore lives in sharable text space. You can look at the comment trailing each initializer in the generated ncurses/fallback.c file to see the core cost of the fallbacks. A good rule of thumb for modern vt100-like entries is that each one will cost about 2.5K of text space. BSD CONVERSION NOTES: If you need to support really ancient BSD programs, you probably want to configure with the --enable-bsdpad option. What this does is enable code in tputs() that recognizes a numeric prefix on a capability as a request for that much trailing padding in milliseconds. There are old BSD programs that do things like tputs("50"). (If you are distributing ncurses as a support-library component of an application you probably want to put the remainder of this section in the package README file.) The following note applies only if you have configured ncurses with --enable-termcap. ------------------------------- CUT HERE -------------------------------- If you are installing this application privately (either because you have no root access or want to experiment with it before doing a root installation), there are a couple of details you need to be aware of. They have to do with the ncurses library, which uses terminfo rather than termcap for describing terminal characteristics. Though the ncurses library is terminfo-based, it will interpret your TERMCAP variable (if present), any local termcap files you reference through it, and the system termcap file. However, in order to avoid slowing down your application startup, it will only do this once per terminal type! The first time you load a given terminal type from your termcap database, the library initialization code will automatically write it in terminfo format to a subdirectory under $HOME/.terminfo. After that, the initialization code will find it there and do a (much faster) terminfo fetch. Usually, all this means is that your home directory will silently grow an invisible .terminfo subdirectory which will get filled in with terminfo descriptions of terminal types as you invoke them. If anyone ever installs a global terminfo tree on your system, this will quietly stop happening and your $HOME/.terminfo will become redundant. The objective of all this logic is to make converting from BSD termcap as painless as possible without slowing down your application (termcap compilation is expensive). If you don't have a TERMCAP variable or custom personal termcap file, you can skip the rest of this dissertation. If you *do* have a TERMCAP variable and/or a custom personal termcap file that defines a terminal type, that definition will stop being visible to this application after the first time you run it, because it will instead see the terminfo entry that it wrote to $HOME/terminfo the first time around. Subsequently, editing the TERMCAP variable or personal TERMCAP file will have no effect unless you explicitly remove the terminfo entry under $HOME/terminfo. If you do that, the entry will be recompiled from your termcap resources the next time it is invoked. To avoid these complications, use infocmp(1) and tic(1) to edit the terminfo directory directly. ------------------------------- CUT HERE -------------------------------- USING NCURSES WITH AFS: AFS treats each directory as a separate logical filesystem, you can't hard-link across them. The --enable-symlinks option copes with this by making tic use symbolic links. USING NCURSES WITH EMACS: GNU Emacs has its own termcap support. By default, it uses a mixture of those functions and code linked from the host system's libraries. You need to foil this and shut out the GNU termcap library entirely. In order to do this, hack the Linux config file (s/linux.h) to contain a #define TERMINFO and set the symbol LIBS_TERMCAP to "-lncurses". We have submitted such a change for the 19.30 release, so it may already be applied in your sources -- check for the #define TERMINFO. USING NCURSES WITH GPM: Ncurses 4.1 can be configured to use GPM (General Purpose Mouse) which is used on Linux console. Be aware that GPM is commonly installed as a shared library which contains a wrapper for the curses wgetch() function (libcurses.o). Some integrators have simplified linking applications by combining all of libcurses.so (the BSD curses) into the libgpm.so file, producing symbol conflicts with ncurses. You may be able to work around this problem by linking as follows: cc -o foo foo.o -lncurses -lgpm -lncurses but the linker may not cooperate, producing mysterious errors. A patched version of gpm is available: ftp.clark.net:/pub/dickey/ncurses/gpm-1.10-970125.tgz USING NCURSES WITH ELVIS: To use ncurses as the screen-painting library for Elvis, apply the following patch to the Elvis curses *** curses.c.orig Sun Jun 26 05:48:23 1994 --- curses.c Sun Feb 11 16:50:41 1996 *************** *** 986,992 **** { if (has_IM) do_IM(); ! do_IC(); qaddch(ch); if (has_EI) do_EI(); --- 986,995 ---- { if (has_IM) do_IM(); !#ifdef NCURSES_VERSION ! else /* ncurses does insertion in a slightly nonstandard way */ !#endif ! do_IC(); qaddch(ch); if (has_EI) do_EI(); This patch is for elvis-1.8pl4 but it can even be used for elvis-1.8pl3 with an offset of -11 lines. BUGS: Send any feedback to the ncurses mailing list at ncurses@bsdi.com. To subscribe send mail to ncurses-request@mailgate.bsdi.com with body that reads: subscribe ncurses The Hacker's Guide in the misc directory includes some guidelines on how to report bugs in ways that will get them fixed most quickly.