Latest news

In the last 7 years I didn't have resources to test the patches to vt100 sent to me by several kind souls. I doubt I'll have time to integrate them any time soon, but I'll list them here as they came in. (Unfortunately, so far I only found one.)

Emails of the patch submitters inside, so if you have any questions, contact the authors directly.

But maybe one day I'll get back and integrate things anyway. Stay tuned...

VT100 Terminal for Pilot

Contents

  1. About
  2. Using Pilot VT100
  3. Work progress
  4. Pilot VT100 graphics snapshots

1. About

Pilot VT100 is a simple terminal emulator for the 3Com / USR Pilot PDA. It uses a very small fixed-sized font (3x5 character cells) and provides a 40x25 character screen. Buttons for escape (ESC) and control (CTL) allow the use of escape (ascii 27) and control a-z (ascii 1-27). To use control characters, tap the CTL button and write a lower-case letter. Applications that successfully run on Pilot VT100 include

Copying policies

The software is released without any charge for the use. However, you must read and understand the exact terms of the use! Share and Enjoy.

Why Freeware?

The Pilot software development community seems to have a leaning towards ShareWare as a distribution/licensing model. We personally do not plan on ever distributing a ShareWare pilot appliction.

Pilot VT100 was developed using a UNIX based development environment and many excellent free development tools.

We write pilot software because we enjoy doing so, and because it allows us to give something back to the community of developers who have spent so much time on the many excellent free tools and pilot applications. Perhaps we're spoiled by being a part of a larger UNIX community where many small and large applications are available freely.

Credit

Developers

  1. Brian J. Swetland (the original application author, worked on the application until Alpha 7, including)
  2. Vassilii Khachaturov (joined since Alpha 6, current mantainer)

2. Using Pilot VT100

Download vt100.prc (size 9870 bytes)

Note: Check out the copying terms before you proceed.

You may also get the sources bundle from the releases repository. A CVSWeb frontend will be established soon.

If you do changes to the sources, you are encouraged (but not obliged) to submit them back to Vassilii Khachaturov, for merging in the main codebase. Please consult the To Do List if you wish to contribute.

Installation

Install the PRC in the usual way. If you have any previous version of Pilot VT100 installed on your PDA, it will be automatically overwritten.

Using Pilot VT100 as a Linux terminal

An excerpt from my /etc/inittab:
s0:B:once:/sbin/agetty 19200 pilot vt100-nam

(On my system /dev/pilot is a link to /dev/cua0, where the pilot cradle is actually attached. Hence the s0 in the begining.) So whenever I want to login from the pilot, I run Pilot VT100 on it, select the baudrate 19200 via the menu (Options/Comm.), push the line button, and then I do telinit B as root on the Linux box.

Then I get the login prompt on the pilot screen.

The first command I issue upon login is stty cols 40 rows 25; a termcap/terminfo entry derived from vt100-nam could be used as well.


3. Work progress

Pilot VT100 releases

To Do List

You can read the list of features that we consider worth implementing somewhen in the future. Please consult it before submitting a feature request.

Changes Log

In case you care, here's the log of the changes made to the application, these Web pages and the development environment (since we started to bother to log these changes).

4. Pilot VT100 Graphics Snapshots

The 3x5 Font:


enlarged (4x)

and


actual size.

Screen Snapshots

These are screen grabs from xcopilot-0.4, blown up 2 times the size of an actual pilot screen.

Contact the developers:
swetland@frotz.net, vassilii@tarunz.org.