After login: set your terminal type

The first thing to do after logging in is tell the remote Unix system what kind of terminal you are using. These machines predate today's terminal emulators and do not always recognize their default terminal names.

For the most reliable experience, resize your terminal window to 80x24 and use the widely supported vt100 terminal type. Then follow the instructions for the machine you logged in to.

4.3BSD-Reno and Ultrix 4.5

These systems use the C shell (csh). At the shell prompt, enter:

% set term=vt100

SunOS 5.6

SunOS uses the Bourne shell (sh). Enter these two commands:

% TERM=vt100
% export TERM

NetBSD 1.0

NetBSD may notice during login that it does not recognize your terminal type. If you see a message like this:

tset: terminal type xterm-256color is unknown
Terminal type?

Type vt100 and press Enter:

tset: terminal type xterm-256color is unknown
Terminal type? vt100

Your terminal is now ready for exploring the system. You can also try the exhibition's internal mail and user-discovery services.

What now?

Start looking around with ls and cd. To see which processes are running, use ps. On the BSD-derived systems, use:

% ps aux

On the System V-derived system, use:

% ps -ef

Two things to remember: these older Unix systems are picky about where you put command-line options. On Linux, you can call ls like this:

% ls /usr -l

That does not work here. You've got to put the options before the directory:

% ls -l /usr

None of these systems have less installed. To view the contents of a file, use more or cat.

However, all of the systems have vi and man pages installed.