[12907] in Athena Bugs
decmips 7.7G: talk and otalk on athena SPARCs running Solaris
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (gptesler@MIT.EDU)
Thu Nov 17 22:34:01 1994
From: gptesler@MIT.EDU
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 1994 22:33:51 EST
What's wrong:
Various combinations of talk and otalk with athena SPARCs display
return as ^M, rather than beginning a new line. These excerpts from
olc explain it all in detail.
Log Initiated for user Glenn P Tesler (gptesler@W20-575-117.MIT.EDU [0]).
[Thu 17-Nov-94 8:19am]
Topic: unix
Question:
On the athena SPARCs under Solaris, there's something strange with
talk, otalk, and the return key displaying as ^M. I actually first
encountered this when someone at another school on a machine running
Solaris tried to "talk" to me, so it's more likely to be Solaris than
athena.
scenario 1: on the athena SPARCs under Solaris, bring up two xterms,
and run talk in each to talk to yourself.
Each time you press return, it displays as ^M, rather than starting a
new line. Next do the same but with otalk, and it works fine.
scenario 2: I tried to talk between an athena SPARC under Solaris,
and a non-athena computer taylor.mit.edu, which hostinfo says runs SUNOS.
taylor has talk and ntalk, rather than talk and otalk. The combination
of programs I must use is otalk on athena and talk on taylor. Now,
when I type on taylor, the returns display properly in both windows.
When I type on athena, the returns start new lines on athena,
but display as ^M on taylor.
In short:
athena otalk <-> athena otalk: return works fine in both
athena talk <-> athena talk: return displays as ^M in both.
This is particulary troubling,
as it can't be incompatible machines;
it's all on one machine!
athena otalk <-> taylor talk: pressing return on taylor is fine
pressing return on athena shows ^M
on taylor
So how do I get the returns to display properly?
I looked at stty and tried the various options concerning NL/CR
(inlcr,igncr,icrnl,onlcr,ocrnl,onocr,onlret, and -each of these), with
no effect.
___________________________________________________________
*** Mail from consultant jroth@NAVIGATOR.MIT.EDU [0].
[Thu 17-Nov-94 9:57am]
Sorry we couldn't answer your question while you were logged on. You asked:
...
Thanks for the detailed description of the problem - someone might
actually use that to finally fix the broken talk on Solaris. In the
meantime, try ytalk from the sipb locker. It's supposedly better and
capable of emulating all of the [on ]talk stuff:
add sipb
ytalk foo@host
Please get back to us once you try it. Please use the "send" command at
the olc> prompt (and not private mail).
Jakub Roth
Athena Consultant
*** Reply from user gptesler@M4-167-7.MIT.EDU [0].
[Thu 17-Nov-94 4:34pm]
Hi,
ytalk doesn't seem to be in the sipb locker on the suns.
It can't find it when I try to run it; which doesn't list it; and
then we have
athena% cd /mit/sipb; ls */ytalk
decmipsbin/ytalk rs_aix32/ytalk rt_aos4/ytalk vax_bsd43/ytalk
pmax_ul4/ytalk rsaixbin/ytalk rtbin/ytalk vaxbin/ytalk
which shows it's not in any of the sun binary directories at all.
So I can't try it out.
Glenn
*** Reply from consultant yba@MARINARA.MIT.EDU [0].
[Thu 17-Nov-94 6:49pm]
Sounds like the talk program is in raw mode. The stty command to
reverse it is just
stty -raw
on most systems, under solaris I would check for the reasons noted
earlier :-). I suggest you use sendbug....
*** Reply from user gptesler@W20-575-114.MIT.EDU [0].
[Thu 17-Nov-94 7:06pm]
I tried "stty -raw" with athena talk <-> athena talk, in one window,
and in both windows, and there was no change. It still displays as ^M.
*** Reply from consultant wchuang@TAILGUNNER.MIT.EDU [3].
[Thu 17-Nov-94 10:24pm]
Hello, Glenn...
This is actually a bug with the version of talk running on the Athena
SparcStation Classics...
I would suggest sending in a bug report about this (i.e., what you've
entered as a question seems to do very nicely as a detailed bug report)
