vi almost unusable in recovery console

[Tommy Trussell]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 12:36 PM, Brian McKee <brian.mckee at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 7:37 PM, NoOp <glgxg at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>> On 07/30/2008 03:40 PM, Brian McKee wrote:
>>> Hi All
>>>
>>> I'm trying to edit an fstab with vi using the ubuntu alternate cd's
>>> 'recover a broken system' option.
>
>>> The problem is the console it drops you into has a term type of
>>> 'bterm'
>
>>> 1 - is there any way to get a better terminal?  or a different TERM I
>>> can tell vi it is for better results?
>
>>> 2 - what the heck package would I report a bug against?  or am I
>>> wishing for the impossible?
>
>>> Note that nano doesn't work right either - and emacs isn't available.
>
>> Try editing using nano:
>> sudo nano /etc/fstab
>
> Nano doesn't work.  Vi with the combinations I tried of vt100, linux,
> ansi and using vi -T dumb - none of them work right.
> You make a couple of changes and parts of the screen don't change so
> what you see isn't what's actually there.
>
> It makes the rescue console useless in my opinion.
> I'll have to try System Rescue CD or something else that grok's LVM for now.
>
> I'm off to file a bug - wish I knew what the right package to complain
> about was.
> I'm kinda shocked nobody's noticed this before.  Maybe I'm missing
> something obvious - or maybe everybody just uses the live cd for this
> stuff normally.

Just a "WAG" but it sounds to me like the console might not be
compatible with your video hardware for some reason. Obviously from
the Alternate CD there's no GUI involved, so you're talking pretty
low-level linux stuff when you're talking about the console. I haven't
looked at the Alternate CD in awhile, but you might check for some
additional tricks that can be added to the command line when you boot.
If you have ever looked at the help screens for a Knoppix disk you'll
see some of the kinds of things I'm talking about.

In fact, you might find the task easier with a Knoppix CD -- in the
past I've found Knoppix to boot successfully on a wider range of
hardware than just about any other distro.