I use screen on bsd and debian through putty. On the freebsd system (which is quite old), I can use the scroll bar in the window. On the debian system, screen itself seems to manage the lines off the top of the putty window, I can't use the scrollbar.
In other words, if I cat out a large file, there's not much nothing if I scroll up with the scrollbar in putty. Yet on the bsd system, if I do the same thing, the file is all there as if it was printed out on one long roll of paper (up to the limit of the number of lines I told putty to save).
Why is this different in linux and how can I change it?
This brings up another question which I've had for a while. When you switch screens, the scroll buffer in putty above contains leftover stuff from the other window. Might it be possible to somehow fill or use some alternate page in putty so that the scrollbar worked across screens to scroll back whatever screen you were in? One possible way to do this might be to just dump the entire screen and it's history lines to fill up the putty buffer each time you switch screens.
Michael Grant