FacetWin scoansi terminal emulator on linux.

[Brian K. White]

Just discovered something pretty neat.

Sometimes it would be real handy to have a terminal emulator that runs on 
linux and provides good scoansi emulation rather than the techinically more 
correct way of installing linux termcap & terminfo on the sco box, or 
modifying the xterm entries so they work with xfree's xterm instead of sco 
older xterm.

So just for giggles, on a suse 10.1 box I installed wine from yast,
downloaded the facetwin terminal installer,
ran the installer, ran fwt.exe, and it all "just worked"
I didn't have to configure a thing.

This part is SuSE-specific:
Install wine just by going into yast, software manager, search, "wine", 
select, accept, done.

Now, be in the graphical desktop if not already.

Download & install facetwin client:
    wget ftp://ftp.facetwin.com/evals/facetwin/fwt/setup.exe
    wine setup.exe
(accept all the defaults during install)

Now to use it:
    wine 'c:/program files/facetcorp/facetwin/fwt.exe'
or
    wget http://nj5.aljex.com/demo/Aljex_Demo.fwt
    wine 'c:/program files/facetcorp/facetwin/fwt.exe' Aljex_Demo.fwt

Thats it.
There are a couple of cosmetic annoyances I'm sure can be cleared up.

1) The installer installs a systray agent thats useless for 99% of users.
Wine actually impliments it. It makes a little tiny window the size of a 
small icon.
You can right-click on the little window with the F icon and select exit 
just like as if it were on windows.

2) When fwt.exe starts up, it produces a messagebox about not being able to 
find the wins2000 server.
It seems harmles. You hit OK and the program works as normal.

Wine sure is a lot slicker and more automagical than the last time I used 
it.

There is already a native linux port of putty, but I don't know if it's any 
better than the windows version as far as the saved onnections being 
inconveniently stored in the registry instead of config files (like facetwin 
.fwt, vncviewer .vnc, remote desktop .rdp, anzio .def) because I couldn't 
build it and there was no premade package.
I'm sure I'd get it to build eventually, but the commands above just worked 
out of the box without even rtfm.
They were the first things I tried too, not the final result of a bunch or 
trial & error.

Yast does show a clone called gputty I haven't investigated yet.

I just thought it was pretty handy since up until recently we were a just 
about 100% facetwin shop for many years and I still support a lot of sco 
boxes and this allows me to use any of the linux boxes to connect to the 
remote sco boxes (they almost all have facetwin) instead of needing to use a 
windows station just so I can pull up a scoansi terminal emulator like anzio 
or facetwin, or else spend the first little while configuring the sco box to 
understand linux and rxvt before even looking at the problem I'm really 
supposed to be there for.

Gonna try anzio next. If that works thats even more useful since it connects 
to telnet and ssh and serial servers, doesn't require facetwin on the 
server, doesn't eat a facetwin licence on the server or fail to connect for 
lack of an available licence on the server :)

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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