Although *installing* linux from RedHat disks has improved over the years, I still find that upgrading an existing installation can really try your patience. After doing a number of clean installs using the RedHat 7.1 disks, I felt comfortable thinking I could upgrade without much problem.
Wrongo.
There are a number of things that changed. Some I had know about from the previous clean installs. Others came as a distressing surprize: for instance the sendmail upgrade changes default behavior radically in that it is compiled against the tcpwrappers library, so now you need to consider sendmail entries in your hosts.allow and hosts.deny. Actually, that's a great idea, but I sure wish I knew that before hand (rather than bouncing mail for 2 days until I discovered the problem.)
Anyway, I could go on detailing some of these fascinating experiences, but I'll get to the point: my xterm seems to be bizarre when running on the local xserver.
I usually don't run xdm (runlevel 5 default in RedHat) but just do a startx. When I do that everything seems pretty OK until I actually try to *do* something. I click on the Netscape icon in the panel on the bottom of the screen. Nothing. I launch an xterm to try to figure out what's happening (or not, in this case) and it just gets worse: the keys don't seem to be matched up to the correct characters. When I press the 'o' key, I get a 'p' on the screen. When I press 'i', I get 'o'. In general it seems like the whole keyboard is just slid over by 1 key -- but I can't seem to find a key that gives me an return or enter.
As you can imagine this is annoying. I use Hummingbird Xceed on a windoze machine and the Xterm there running from the linux machine seems to be problem free. (Actually, that's how I usually "use" my linux machine -- I very rarely sit down in front of it.) When I do sit in front of it and use a plain tty, it's fine that way too.
Any ideas what's going on here?
-Peter Gutowski
