unknown terminal "screen.linux"

[Mark Himsley]

Hello,

I have been using the excellent Screen window manager for many years and 
have been exceedingly happy with it.

Up until 6 months ago I had been using a RedHat 9 as the main server I ssh 
into. On it I tried to keep a `screen` running with some windows sshed into 
other servers, to give me a central perpetual connection to these other 
servers. This worked very well and I had no problems - it was using:

$ screen --version
Screen version 3.09.13 (FAU) 5-Sep-02

Six months ago I bought a faster machine and installed Fedora Core 3. I 
tried to setup the same arrangement but I am getting some problems with the 
terminal environment - the FC3 machine is using:

$ screen --version
Screen version 4.00.02 (FAU) 5-Dec-03

Which I *think* is the latest version.


If I am using a screen window on the FC3 machine and I ssh to, for 
instance, a Redhat 9 server I get the following error:

$ ssh address@hidden
unknown terminal "screen.linux"
unknown terminal "screen.linux"

and the terminal does not behave correctly.

If instead I enter the command:

$ TERM=screen ssh address@hidden

then everything works well.


> From the man page I was under the impression that:

"When screen tries to figure out a terminal name for itself, it first looks 
for an entry named "screen.<term>", where  <term> is the contents of your 
$TERM variable. If no such entry exists, screen tries "screen" (or 
"screen-w" if the terminal is wide (132 cols or more)). If even this entry 
cannot be found, "vt100" is used as a substitute."

When I ssh into the FC3 machine my $TERM variable is 'linux'. When I invoke 
Screen it is turning that into 'screen.linux'. When I ssh to another 
machine I though that Screen would try 'screen.linux', 'screen' and 'vt100' 
to try to get a valid terminal type.

It appears to me that Screen 4.00.02 is not trying either the 'screen' or 
the 'vt100' substitutes.

It it me - is there some configuration that I have failed to set in my 
~/.screenrc that would get over this problem?

My current solution is to add this to /etc/profile

if [ "$TERM" = "screen.linux" ]; then
       TERM="screen"
       export TERM
fi

This gets over the problem but it feels like there aught to be a more 
elegant solution. Alternatively I've got completely the wrong end of the 
stick.

Thanks for your time.

--
Mark Himsley