Announcing minicom 1.78

A short summary of what minicom is:

Minicom is a communications program that resembles the MSDOS Telix

somewhat. It has a dialing directory, color, full ANSI and VT100

emulation, an (external) scripting language and more.

Tested platforms:

Linux 2.0.30

Supported but untested (maybe needs a little tweaking):

DGUX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Coherent, HP/UX, SysVR4, Apollo Domain/OS, SunOS, SCO.

New in minicom 1.78:

- A logfile is kept of connects, disconnects and file transfers.

When you dial a number from the phone directory and the other end answers,

the connect string from the modem is written to the logfile with the entry

name and phone number. When the carrier drops, the text "Offline" is written.

The command line of file transfers are also written. The file names and sizes

are taken from the external protocol driver output lines beginning with 

"Sending", "Receiving" and "Bytes". I tested this with rz and sz.

All output lines in the logfile are preceded with the system date and time.

If you want to disable logging, you may comment out the LOGFILE macro in 

config.h and recompile the program. If you don't want to compile it, and

you don't care about the logfile, you may create an empty file "minicom.log" 

in your home directory with no write permissions.

- The date and time of the latest call, and a call counter is stored for 

each phone directory entry. They are shown in the phone dir instead of

some things I found less interesting, like the terminal emulation setting

and serial port parameters.

- The DTR drop time with the hangup command is now adjustable. Some modems

need DTR to be down more than just one second before they hang up.

- Character conversion tables for calling systems that use a character set

different from your computer. You may define a conversion table for each 

phone directory entry, and the defined table will be loaded when you call 

that entry, before running the login script. If no table is defined in the

phone dir, the table is not changed. Tables .mciso, .mcpc8 and .mcsf7 are

included to be used when calling systems that use iso-8859-1, pc character

set and the Finnish sf7 coding, respectively. The .mciso actually doesn't

convert anything. Copy the tables to your home directory. There is no

actual restriction of the filenames for the conversion tables (except that

it shouldn't be longer than 16 characters), I just began them all with .mc

to keep them together in the ls listings.

- Added environment variable TERMLIN for runscript. It is the number of

lines on the terminal screen. (That is, LINES - 1 if you use the statusline,

same as LINES if you don't.)

- Fixed a bug that caused runscript to always run the login script of the

first number dialed when several entries were tagged for dialing, regardless

which one of them answered.

- Changed the DTE speed from int to long. Now it should also work on modems 

faster than 32768 bps.

Jukka Lahtinen, walker@clinet.fi