1-- $Id: INSTALL,v 1.33 1999/09/18 23:04:36 tom Exp $ 2--------------------------------------------------------------------- 3 How to install Ncurses/Terminfo on your system 4--------------------------------------------------------------------- 5 ************************************************************ 6 * READ ALL OF THIS FILE BEFORE YOU TRY TO INSTALL NCURSES. * 7 ************************************************************ 8 9You should be reading the file INSTALL in a directory called ncurses-d.d, where 10d.d is the current version number. There should be several subdirectories, 11including `c++', `form', `man', `menu', 'misc', `ncurses', `panel', `progs', 12and `test'. See the README file for a roadmap to the package. 13 14If you are a Linux or FreeBSD or NetBSD distribution integrator or packager, 15please read and act on the section titled IF YOU ARE A SYSTEM INTEGRATOR 16below. 17 18If you are converting from BSD curses and do not have root access, be sure 19to read the BSD CONVERSION NOTES section below. 20 21If you are using a version of XFree86 xterm older than 3.1.2F, see the section 22on RECENT XTERM VERSIONS below. 23 24If you are trying to build GNU Emacs using ncurses for terminal support, 25read the USING NCURSES WITH EMACS section below. 26 27If you are trying to build applications using gpm with ncurses, 28read the USING NCURSES WITH GPM section below. 29 30If you are trying to build Elvis using ncurses for terminal support, 31read the USING NCURSES WITH ELVIS section below. 32 33If you are running over the Andrew File System see the note below on 34USING NCURSES WITH AFS. 35 36If you want to build the Ada95 binding, go to the Ada95 directory and 37follow the instructions there. The Ada95 binding is not covered below. 38 39If you are using anything but (a) Linux, or (b) one of the 4.4BSD-based 40i386 Unixes, go read the Portability section in the TO-DO file before you 41do anything else. 42 43REQUIREMENTS: 44 45You will need the following in order to build and install ncurses under UNIX: 46 47 * ANSI C compiler (gcc is recommended) 48 * sh (bash will do) 49 * awk (mawk or gawk will do) 50 * sed 51 * BSD or System V style install (a script is enclosed) 52 53Ncurses has been also built in the OS/2 EMX environment. 54 55INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: 56 571. First, decide whether you want ncurses to replace your existing library (in 58 which case you'll need super-user privileges) or be installed in parallel 59 with it. 60 61 The --prefix option to configure changes the root directory for installing 62 ncurses. The default is in subdirectories of /usr/local. Use 63 --prefix=/usr to replace your default curses distribution. This is the 64 default for Linux and BSD/OS users. 65 66 The package gets installed beneath the --prefix directory as follows: 67 68 In $(prefix)/bin: tic, infocmp, captoinfo, tset, 69 reset, clear, tput, toe 70 In $(prefix)/lib: libncurses*.* libcurses.a 71 In $(prefix)/share/terminfo: compiled terminal descriptions 72 In $(prefix)/include: C header files 73 Under $(prefix)/man: the manual pages 74 75 Note however that the configure script attempts to locate previous 76 installation of ncurses, and will set the default prefix according to where 77 it finds the ncurses headers. 78 792. Type `./configure' in the top-level directory of the distribution to 80 configure ncurses for your operating system and create the Makefiles. 81 Besides --prefix, various configuration options are available to customize 82 the installation; use `./configure --help' to list the available options. 83 84 If your operating system is not supported, read the PORTABILITY section in 85 the file ncurses/README for information on how to create a configuration 86 file for your system. 87 88 The `configure' script generates makefile rules for one or more object 89 models and their associated libraries: 90 91 libncurses.a (normal) 92 93 libcurses.a (normal, a link to libncurses.a) 94 This gets left out if you configure with --disable-overwrite. 95 96 libncurses.so (shared) 97 98 libncurses_g.a (debug) 99 100 libncurses_p.a (profile) 101 102 If you do not specify any models, the normal and debug libraries will be 103 configured. Typing `configure' with no arguments is equivalent to: 104 105 ./configure --with-normal --with-debug --enable-overwrite 106 107 Typing 108 109 ./configure --with-shared 110 111 makes the shared libraries the default, resulting in 112 113 ./configure --with-shared --with-normal --with-debug --enable-overwrite 114 115 If you want only shared libraries, type 116 117 ./configure --with-shared --without-normal --without-debug 118 119 Rules for generating shared libraries are highly dependent upon the choice 120 of host system and compiler. We've been testing shared libraries on Linux 121 and SunOS with gcc, but more work needs to be done to make shared libraries 122 work on other systems. 123 124 You can make curses and terminfo fall back to an existing file of termcap 125 definitions by configuring with --enable-termcap. If you do this, the 126 library will search /etc/termcap before the terminfo database, and will 127 also interpret the contents of the TERM environment variable. See the 128 section BSD CONVERSION NOTES below. 129 1303. Type `make'. Ignore any warnings, no error messages should be produced. 131 This should compile the ncurses library, the terminfo compiler tic(1), 132 captoinfo(1), infocmp(1), toe(1), clear(1) tset(1), reset(1), and tput(1) 133 programs (see the man pages for explanation of what they do), some test 134 programs, and the panels, menus, and forms libraries. 135 1364. Run ncurses and several other test programs in the test directory to 137 verify that ncurses functions correctly before doing an install that 138 may overwrite system files. Read the file test/README for details on 139 the test programs. 140 141 NOTE: You must have installed the terminfo database, or set the 142 environment variable $TERMINFO to point to a SVr4-compatible terminfo 143 database before running the test programs. Not all vendors' terminfo 144 databases are SVr4-compatible, but most seem to be. Exceptions include 145 DEC's Digital Unix (formerly known as OSF/1). 146 147 The ncurses program is designed specifically to test the ncurses library. 148 You can use it to verify that the screen highlights work correctly, that 149 cursor addressing and window scrolling works OK, etc. 150 1515. Once you've tested, you can type `make install' to install libraries, 152 the programs, the terminfo database and the man pages. Alternately, you 153 can type `make install' in each directory you want to install. In the 154 top-level directory, you can do a partial install using these commands: 155 156 'make install.progs' installs tic, infocmp, etc... 157 'make install.includes' installs the headers. 158 'make install.libs' installs the libraries (and the headers). 159 'make install.data' installs the terminfo data. (Note: `tic' must 160 be installed before the terminfo data can be 161 compiled). 162 'make install.man' installs the man pages. 163 164 ############################################################################ 165 # CAVEAT EMPTOR: `install.data' run as root will NUKE any existing # 166 # terminfo database. If you have any custom or unusual entries SAVE them # 167 # before you install ncurses. I have a file called terminfo.custom for # 168 # this purpose. Don't forget to run tic on the file once you're done. # 169 ############################################################################ 170 171 The terminfo(5) manual page wants to be preprocessed with tbl(1) before 172 being formatted by nroff(1). Modern man(1) implementations tend to do 173 this by default, but you may want to look at your version's man page 174 to be sure. 175 176 If the system already has a curses library that you need to keep using 177 for some bizarre binary-compatibility reason, you'll need to distinguish 178 between it and ncurses. If ncurses is installed outside the standard 179 directories (/usr/include and /usr/lib) then all your users will need 180 to use the -I option to compile programs and -L to link them. 181 182 If you have BSD curses installed in your system and you accidentally 183 compile using its curses.h you'll end up with a large number of 184 undefined symbols at link time. _waddbytes is one of them. 185 186 IF YOU DO NOT HAVE ROOT: Change directory to the `progs' subdirectory 187 and run the `capconvert' script. This script will deduce various things 188 about your environment and use them to build you a private terminfo tree, 189 so you can use ncurses applications. 190 191 If more than one user at your site does this, the space for the duplicate 192 trees is wasted. Try to get your site administrators to install a system- 193 wide terminfo tree instead. 194 195 See the BSD CONVERSION NOTES section below for a few more details. 196 1976. The c++ directory has C++ classes that are built on top of ncurses and 198 panels. You must have c++ (and its libraries) installed before you can 199 compile and run the demo. 200 201 Use --without-cxx-binding to tell configure to not build the C++ bindings 202 and demo. 203 204 If you do not have C++, you must use the --without-cxx option to tell 205 the configure script to not attempt to determine the type of 'bool' 206 which may be supported by C++. IF YOU USE THIS OPTION, BE ADVISED THAT 207 YOU MAY NOT BE ABLE TO COMPILE (OR RUN) NCURSES APPLICATIONS WITH C++. 208 2097. If you're running an older Linux, you must either (a) tell Linux that the 210 console terminal type is `linux' or (b) make a link to or copy of the 211 linux entry in the appropriate place under your terminfo directory, named 212 `console'. All 1.3 and many 1.2 distributions (including Yggdrasil and 213 Red Hat) already have the console type set to `linux'. 214 215 The way to change the wired-in console type depends on the configuration 216 of your system. This may involve editing /etc/inittab, /etc/ttytype, 217 /etc/profile and other such files. 218 219 Warning: this is not for the fainthearted, if you mess up your console 220 getty entries you can make your system unusable! However, if you are 221 a distribution maker, this is the right thing to do (see the note for 222 integrators near the end of this file). 223 224 The easier way is to link or copy l/linux to c/console under your terminfo 225 directory. Note: this will go away next time you do `make install.data' 226 and you'll have to redo it. There is no need to have entries for all 227 possible screen sizes, ncurses will figure out the size automatically. 228 229IF YOU ARE A SYSTEM INTEGRATOR: 230 231 Beginning with 1.9.9, the ncurses distribution includes both a tset 232 utility and /usr/share/tabset directory. If you are installing ncurses, 233 it is no longer either necessary or desirable to install tset-jv. 234 235 Configuration and Installation: 236 237 Configure with --prefix=/usr to make the install productions put 238 libraries and headers in the correct locations (overwriting any 239 previous curses libraries and headers). This will put the terminfo 240 hierarchy under /usr/share/terminfo; you may want to override this with 241 --datadir=/usr/share/misc; terminfo and tabset are installed under the 242 data directory. 243 244 Please configure the ncurses library in a pure-terminfo mode; that 245 is, with the --disable-termcap option. This will make the ncurses 246 library smaller and faster. The ncurses library includes a termcap 247 emulation that queries the terminfo database, so even applications 248 that use raw termcap to query terminal characteristics will win 249 (providing you recompile and relink them!). 250 251 If you must configure with termcap fallback enabled, you may also 252 wish to use the --enable-getcap option. This option speeds up 253 termcap-based startups, at the expense of not allowing personal 254 termcap entries to reference the terminfo tree. See the code in 255 ncurses/tinfo/read_termcap.c for details. 256 257 Note that if you have $TERMCAP set, ncurses will use that value 258 to locate termcap data. In particular, running from xterm will 259 set $TERMCAP to the contents of the xterm's termcap entry. 260 If ncurses sees that, it will not examine /etc/termcap. 261 262 Keyboard Mapping: 263 264 The terminfo file assumes that Shift-Tab generates \E[Z (the ECMA-48 265 reverse-tabulation sequence) rather than ^I. Here are the loadkeys -d 266 mappings that will set this up: 267 268 keycode 15 = Tab Tab 269 alt keycode 15 = Meta_Tab 270 shift keycode 15 = F26 271 string F26 ="\033[Z" 272 273 Naming the Console Terminal 274 275 In various Linuxes (and possibly elsewhere) there has been a practice 276 of designating the system console driver type as `console'. Please 277 do not do this any more! It complicates peoples' lives, because it 278 can mean that several different terminfo entries from different 279 operating systems all logically want to be called `console'. 280 281 Please pick a name unique to your console driver and set that up 282 in the /etc/inittab table or local equivalent. Send the entry to the 283 terminfo maintainer (listed in the misc/terminfo file) to be included 284 in the terminfo file, if it's not already there. See the 285 term(7) manual page included with this distribution for more on 286 conventions for choosing type names. 287 288 Here are some recommended primary console names: 289 290 linux -- Linux console driver 291 freebsd -- FreeBSD 292 netbsd -- NetBSD 293 bsdos -- BSD/OS 294 295 If you are responsible for integrating ncurses for one of these 296 distribution, please either use the recommended name or get back 297 to us explaining why you don't want to, so we can work out nomenclature 298 that will make users' lives easier rather than harder. 299 300RECENT XTERM VERSIONS 301 The terminfo database file included with this distribution assumes you 302 are running an XFree86 xterm based on X11R6 (i.e., xterm-r6). The 303 earlier X11R5 entry (xterm-r5) is provided as well. 304 305 If you are running XFree86 version 3.2 (actually 3.1.2F and up), you 306 should consider using the xterm-xf86-v32 (or later, the most recent 307 version is always named "xterm-xfree86") entry, which adds ANSI color 308 and the VT220 capabilities which have been added in XFree86. If you 309 are running a mixed network, however, where this terminal description 310 may be used on an older xterm, you may have problems, since 311 applications that assume these capabilities will produce incorrect 312 output on the older xterm (e.g., highlighting is not cleared). 313 314CONFIGURING FALLBACK ENTRIES 315 In order to support operation of ncurses programs before the terminfo 316 tree is accessible (that is, in single-user mode or at OS installation 317 time) the ncurses library can be compiled to include an array of 318 pre-fetched fallback entries. 319 320 These entries are checked by setupterm() only when the conventional 321 fetches from the terminfo tree and the termcap fallback (if configured) 322 have been tried and failed. Thus, the presence of a fallback will not 323 shadow modifications to the on-disk entry for the same type, when that 324 entry is accessible. 325 326 By default, there are no entries on the fallback list. After you 327 have built the ncurses suite for the first time, you can change 328 the list (the process needs infocmp(1)). To do so, use the script 329 MKfallback.sh. A configure script option --with-fallbacks does this 330 (it accepts a comma-separated list of the names you wish, and does 331 not require a rebuild). 332 333 If you wanted (say) to have linux, vt100, and xterm fallbacks, you 334 would use the commands 335 336 cd ncurses; 337 MKfallback.sh linux vt100 xterm >fallback.c 338 339 Then just rebuild and reinstall the library as you would normally. 340 You can restore the default empty fallback list with 341 342 MKfallback.sh >fallback.c 343 344 The overhead for an empty fallback list is one trivial stub function. 345 Any non-empty fallback list is const-ed and therefore lives in sharable 346 text space. You can look at the comment trailing each initializer in 347 the generated ncurses/fallback.c file to see the core cost of the 348 fallbacks. A good rule of thumb for modern vt100-like entries is that 349 each one will cost about 2.5K of text space. 350 351BSD CONVERSION NOTES: 352 If you need to support really ancient BSD programs, you probably 353 want to configure with the --enable-bsdpad option. What this does 354 is enable code in tputs() that recognizes a numeric prefix on a 355 capability as a request for that much trailing padding in milliseconds. 356 There are old BSD programs that do things like tputs("50"). 357 358 (If you are distributing ncurses as a support-library component of 359 an application you probably want to put the remainder of this section 360 in the package README file.) 361 362 The following note applies only if you have configured ncurses with 363 --enable-termcap. 364 365------------------------------- CUT HERE -------------------------------- 366 367If you are installing this application privately (either because you 368have no root access or want to experiment with it before doing a root 369installation), there are a couple of details you need to be aware of. 370They have to do with the ncurses library, which uses terminfo rather 371than termcap for describing terminal characteristics. 372 373Though the ncurses library is terminfo-based, it will interpret your 374TERMCAP variable (if present), any local termcap files you reference 375through it, and the system termcap file. However, in order to avoid 376slowing down your application startup, it will only do this once per 377terminal type! 378 379The first time you load a given terminal type from your termcap 380database, the library initialization code will automatically write it 381in terminfo format to a subdirectory under $HOME/.terminfo. After 382that, the initialization code will find it there and do a (much 383faster) terminfo fetch. 384 385Usually, all this means is that your home directory will silently grow 386an invisible .terminfo subdirectory which will get filled in with 387terminfo descriptions of terminal types as you invoke them. If anyone 388ever installs a global terminfo tree on your system, this will quietly 389stop happening and your $HOME/.terminfo will become redundant. 390 391The objective of all this logic is to make converting from BSD termcap 392as painless as possible without slowing down your application (termcap 393compilation is expensive). 394 395If you don't have a TERMCAP variable or custom personal termcap file, 396you can skip the rest of this dissertation. 397 398If you *do* have a TERMCAP variable and/or a custom personal termcap file 399that defines a terminal type, that definition will stop being visible 400to this application after the first time you run it, because it will 401instead see the terminfo entry that it wrote to $HOME/terminfo the 402first time around. 403 404Subsequently, editing the TERMCAP variable or personal TERMCAP file 405will have no effect unless you explicitly remove the terminfo entry 406under $HOME/terminfo. If you do that, the entry will be recompiled 407from your termcap resources the next time it is invoked. 408 409To avoid these complications, use infocmp(1) and tic(1) to edit the 410terminfo directory directly. 411 412------------------------------- CUT HERE -------------------------------- 413 414USING NCURSES WITH AFS: 415 AFS treats each directory as a separate logical filesystem, you 416 can't hard-link across them. The --enable-symlinks option copes 417 with this by making tic use symbolic links. 418 419USING NCURSES WITH EMACS: 420 GNU Emacs has its own termcap support. By default, it uses a mixture 421 of those functions and code linked from the host system's libraries. 422 You need to foil this and shut out the GNU termcap library entirely. 423 424 In order to do this, hack the Linux config file (s/linux.h) to contain 425 a #define TERMINFO and set the symbol LIBS_TERMCAP to "-lncurses". 426 427 We have submitted such a change for the 19.30 release, so it may 428 already be applied in your sources -- check for the #define TERMINFO. 429 430USING NCURSES WITH GPM: 431 Ncurses 4.1 and up can be configured to use GPM (General Purpose Mouse) 432 which is used on Linux console. Be aware that GPM is commonly 433 installed as a shared library which contains a wrapper for the curses 434 wgetch() function (libcurses.o). Some integrators have simplified 435 linking applications by combining all of libcurses.so (the BSD curses) 436 into the libgpm.so file, producing symbol conflicts with ncurses. You 437 may be able to work around this problem by linking as follows: 438 439 cc -o foo foo.o -lncurses -lgpm -lncurses 440 441 but the linker may not cooperate, producing mysterious errors. 442 A patched version of gpm is available: 443 444 ftp.clark.net:/pub/dickey/ncurses/gpm-1.10-970125.tgz 445 446 This patch is incorporated in gpm 1.12; however some integrators 447 are slow to update this library. 448 449USING NCURSES WITH ELVIS: 450 To use ncurses as the screen-painting library for Elvis, apply the 451 following patch to the Elvis curses 452 453*** curses.c.orig Sun Jun 26 05:48:23 1994 454--- curses.c Sun Feb 11 16:50:41 1996 455*************** 456*** 986,992 **** 457 { 458 if (has_IM) 459 do_IM(); 460! do_IC(); 461 qaddch(ch); 462 if (has_EI) 463 do_EI(); 464--- 986,995 ---- 465 { 466 if (has_IM) 467 do_IM(); 468!#ifdef NCURSES_VERSION 469! else /* ncurses does insertion in a slightly nonstandard way */ 470!#endif 471! do_IC(); 472 qaddch(ch); 473 if (has_EI) 474 do_EI(); 475 476This patch is for elvis-1.8pl4 but it can even be used for elvis-1.8pl3 with 477an offset of -11 lines. 478 479BUGS: 480 Send any feedback to the ncurses mailing list at 481 bug-ncurses@gnu.org. To subscribe send mail to 482 bug-ncurses-request@gnu.org with body that reads: 483 subscribe ncurses <your-email-address-here> 484 485 The Hacker's Guide in the misc directory includes some guidelines 486 on how to report bugs in ways that will get them fixed most quickly. 487