neic.dk - Add terminfo entries on Linux

Add terminfo entries on Linux

Posted on 08 Nov 2011

I did SSH into my server running Ubuntu 10.10 from my laptop running Arch Linux with a rxvt-unicode terminal and received the following error when I tried to run screen: Cannot find terminfo entry for 'rxvt-unicode-256color'. or when i tried to do a clear: 'rxvt-unicode-256color': unknown terminal type.

To add the terminfo entry you can take the the terminfo from rxvt-unicode and add it to a file:

   infocmp -L rxvt-unicode > rxvt-unicode-256color.terminfo

Change the following two lines in the rxvt-unicode-256color.terminfo file

    rxvt-unicode|rxvt-unicode terminal (X Window System),
    [...]
    lines_of_memory#0, max_colors#88, max_pairs#256,

to

    rxvt-unicode-256colors|rxvt-unicode terminal (X Window System),
    [...]
    lines_of_memory#0, max_colors#256, max_pairs#32767,

create a directory to hold your custom terminfo entries:

   mkdir ~/.terminfo

build the terminfo entry:

   tic -o ~/.terminfo/ rxvt-unicode-256color.terminfo

and finally cleanup:

   rm rxvt-unicode-256color.terminfo