This is an implementation of the 5250 telnet protocol. It was originally an implementation for Linux, but it has been reportedly compiled on a number of other platforms. Contributed keyboard maps and termcap entries for FreeBSD are in this tarball as well (see freebsd/README for more information).

Skip to "Building and Installing" below if you got these sources from a .tar.gz release file.

Certain files, such as the libtool support files and some shell scripts which replace possibly missing commands on the target system are not in git because we don't maintain them. They can be installed with the following command:

./autogen.sh

This command requires current versions of the following packages, and the generated files may not work properly.

automake
autoconf
libtool

You may receive an error the first time you run this script. If so, run the script a second time to make sure you don't get an error (this is a bug with automake).

To build the emulator simply type the following:

./configure
make
make install

Additional (but decidedly generic) installation instructions are available in the INSTALL file included in this distribution tarfile. Installation instructions specific to your platform exist if you are using Linux or FreeBSD -- they are in the linux/ and freebsd/ directories, respectively. Please read these before telling us that the function keys don't work ;-)

The emulator uses the ncurses library for manipulating the console. Make sure you have the ncurses development libraries installed before trying to compile the source. There have been both reports of the standard BSD curses working and not working, so you may have to install ncurses under *BSD.

To use the emulator under X Windows, use the provided xt5250 shell script, which sets up a standard xterm (it will not work with an nxterm or an rxvt terminal).

There is one common problem which would cause xt5250 to flash once on the screen then disappear. If the termcap or terminfo entry for the "xterm-5250" terminal type does not exist, xterm will exit immediately.

To build on Windows, use CMake:

New-Item -Path build -Type Directory
$cmake = (Join-Path -Path (Get-ItemProperty `
        -Path HKLM://HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Kitware\CMake `
        -Name InstallDir).InstallDir `
        -ChildPath "bin/cmake.exe")
Start-Process -FilePath $cmake -Wait -NoNewWindow -ArgumentList "-S . -B .\build\"
Start-Process -FilePath $cmake -Wait -NoNewWindow -ArgumentList "--build build"

Other information is available on the web.

• tn5250 Homepage
• Issue tracker
• Former home at SourceForge

Enjoy!