5. Bugs and FAQ

Before sending bug reports, please check the problem with another X terminal to find out whether it is `konsole' specific or not.

5.1 Installation Related Problems

Konsole requieres some specific fonts that come along with it's distribution but are not installed due to the authors preference not claim root privileges during the installation process. You'll have to do this manually. See README.linux.console for details.

5.2 Application Related Problems

Some programs have flaws when run under a X console.

MC (midnight commander 4.1.21)

• only when the emulation is called 'xterm' mc reacts on resize events (before any key is pressed) and on (xterm) mouse events. Note that xterm mouse events aren't specific at all, e.g. the Linux console produces them also.
• After ^O (showing the secondary screen) mc does not propagate resize events at all to it's sub shell. Try this with xterm, or whatever else terminal emulation.
• Apparently it does more strange things with the sub shell. When resizing the window with the mc panels shown, the secondary screen gets somehow affected (by real or faked prompts). This gets even worse when an application program is running while doing so.
• sends out at least newlines but often more stuff when resizing while the panels are shown.
• Under high traffic, some parts of the text is known to get lost. Try `ripple' in the test directory until you notice a drop. Since i've been able to reproduce this bug with kvt, rxvt and xterm, and i validated also that the data is already lost at read(3), i may well have stumbled into something different here. Because i was also only able to produce this effect while running mc, i feel pretty certain that mc's sub shell handling causes this effect.
• Resizing does not work well when running under linux console emulation. Especially, mc does not forward the resize information to the subshell. It is not mouse aware then any longer, too.

Vim 4.6

• emits a newline at exit, thereby producing a strange image on the secondary screen when run together with mc as default editor.

dselect (Debian package manager front end):

• assumes black background. So turn to white-on-black color scheme when using it. When run under the linux console emulation, it does not cope well with resize events (segfault).

5.3 Broken Termcap and Terminfo Databases

Please be aware of the fact that most applications (those using ncurses) base their knowledge on how to talk to a terminal emulation on the information within a database. This might well be wrong. Again, you should experience likely problems then with other emulations.

So, for example:

• debian 1.3.1 (Bo) omits the kdch1 entry, thus the DELETE key does appear not to work properly. Other keys might be missing as well.
• the mc 4.1.21 distribution contains a xterm.ti with faulty hpa, vpa entries (with [ omitted after ESC). Even stranger, xterm runs happily with them, because of a feature, that allows to accept errorness sequences under some circumstances (ESC Pn C is treated like ESC [ Pn C, where C is a non-digit.).
• I've included a xterm.ti for this reason. (Compile using tic.)

5.4 Problems with BACKSPACE, DELETE and Likely Keyboard Issues.

Once upon a time there was a terminal without a delete key. This problem has been perpetuated in Linux and is still a never ending nightmare. It has been worked around separately in all programs that have to deal with these keys and they have now ended up to be configurable and therefore are likely to come in configured wrong. And so is konsole.

Konsole emits DEL (0x7f) for the BS key and ESC[3  for the DEL key if the `BS sends DEL' option is activated, and then behaves like a typically configured Linux console. Ctrl-H (0x08) is then left for the use of the application programs, e.g. typically configured emacs help.

When this options is not set, the BS key sends BS (0x08) and the DEL key sends DEL (0x7f), as regular VT100s and IBM PCs do.

[ Since every program can be configured BS=BS, DEL=DEL, and the poor terminal without delete key mentioned above exists today only in legends, the author wonders why this BS hack is still around. ]

ctrl-^ == ctrl-  == ctrl-` == RS == 0x1e cannot be typed with an european keyboard map loaded, since all three base characters are prefixes (i.e. are eventually to be continued with a second character). X11 is known to have these dead keys.

5.5 Color Scheme

Because of a storm of complaints about the color scheme, konsole offers configurable color schemes in it's latest versions. A proper document on them is still missing.

5.6 Fonts

(Slightly outdated, check README.linux.console)

• the VGA font uses a different encoding then the other ones, and will therefore not display graphic and national characters when run with TERM=xterm. It is best suited to dos(1) and also work somewhat with TERM=linux. Note that the inclusion of this font is experimental.
• other fonts but the ones included appear not to be usable for terminal applications. This is not that much due to their variable pitch (which i'd implemented experimentally), but because they miss the graphical subset. Try xfd(1x) to check this.
• In general a proper font family for terminals seems to be missing at all. If you know about a scalable terminal font family, please drop me a line.

5.7 Security

Konsole is not intented to be installed root-suid. Don't do it. Konsole drops privileges immediately after being started.

Secure keyboard (X11) is not implemented which means that other X11 applications can get the keyevents from konsole, if they want. Beware of trojan horses.

konsole uses the separate konsole_grantpty to chown the slave tty to prevent eavesdroping your sessions in a multiuser environment. Make sure to have this program installed root-suid.

5.8 Known Bugs

• keys on the keypad does not cause any effect when numlock is not set. This truly reflects, what i receive from Qt. All the keys come in as #ffff. Think this comes from the eventFilter i had to install to get the key-presses.
• check TODO for "bugs" due to missing features, also.

5.9 Features That Will Not Be Implemented.

• utmp entries.

  The utmp is a database that reports who is currently logged on. This is used by programs like who, finger, wall, talk, etc. to list the users of a system and to contact them.

  It does not make sense when used with an X terminal, since there is nothing like _the_ terminal then, to which one can send notices.

  The proper solution would be, to stamp the utmp with the xdm/kdm session manager. Further, a proper notification/chat program should be run automatically when the X session starts (ktalk?), so that a communication channel is available to the one at the console.