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