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Couple of new FAQ questions: `what's the point of the Unix port' and

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`why does scrollback no longer work when I run screen'.

[originally from svn r3868]
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Simon Tatham 2004-02-16 14:38:42 +00:00
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@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
\versionid $Id: faq.but,v 1.59 2004/02/13 12:19:26 jacob Exp $
\versionid $Id: faq.but,v 1.60 2004/02/16 14:38:42 simon Exp $
\A{faq} PuTTY FAQ
@ -232,6 +232,28 @@ Note that Unix PuTTY has mostly only been tested on Linux so far;
portability problems such as BSD-style ptys or different header file
requirements are expected.
\S{faq-unix-why}{Question} What's the point of the Unix port? Unix
has OpenSSH.
All sorts of little things. \c{pterm} is directly useful to anyone
who prefers PuTTY's terminal emulation to \c{xterm}'s, which at
least some people do. Unix Plink has apparently found a niche among
people who find the complexity of OpenSSL makes OpenSSH hard to
install (and who don't mind Plink not having as many features). Some
users want to generate a large number of SSH keys on Unix and then
copy them all into PuTTY, and the Unix PuTTYgen should allow them to
automate that conversion process.
There were development advantages as well; porting PuTTY to Unix was
a valuable path-finding effort for other future ports, and also
allowed us to use the excellent Linux tool
\W{http://valgrind.kde.org/}{Valgrind} to help with debugging, which
has already improved PuTTY's stability on \e{all} platforms.
However, if you're a Unix user and you can see no reason to switch
from OpenSSH to PuTTY/Plink, then you're probably right. We don't
expect our Unix port to be the right thing for everybody.
\S{faq-wince}{Question} Will there be a port to Windows CE or PocketPC?
It's currently being worked on, but it's only in its early stages yet,
@ -819,6 +841,30 @@ If you really want to change the character set used by the server, the
right place is \c{/etc/sysconfig/i18n}, but this shouldn't be
necessary.
\S{faq-screen}{Question} Since I upgraded to PuTTY 0.54, the
scrollback has stopped working when I run \c{screen}.
PuTTY's terminal emulator has always had the policy that when the
\q{alternate screen} is in use, nothing is added to the scrollback.
This is because the usual sorts of programs which use the alternate
screen are things like text editors, which tend to scroll back and
forth in the same document a lot; so (a) they would fill up the
scrollback with a large amount of unhelpfully disordered text, and
(b) they contain their \e{own} method for the user to scroll back to
the bit they were interested in. We have generally found this policy
to do the Right Thing in almost all situations.
Unfortunately, \c{screen} is one exception: it uses the alternate
screen, but it's still usually helpful to have PuTTY's scrollback
continue working. The simplest solution is to go to the Features
control panel and tick \q{Disable switching to alternate terminal
screen}. (See \k{config-features-altscreen} for more details.)
The reason why this only started to be a problem in 0.54 is because
\c{screen} typically uses an unusual control sequence to switch to
the alternate screen, and previous versions of PuTTY did not support
this sequence.
\H{faq-secure} Security questions
\S{faq-publicpc}{Question} Is it safe for me to download PuTTY and