What is the issue?
After a reboot of the system chiad (which runs fedora) I noticed a problem when I started a screen session. It gave a beep/bell and displayed the following:
;stefan@chiad:~[stefan@chiad ~]$
[stefan@chiad ~]$
The second line is there because I gave an enter and it shows what has been added to the first line. And when I logged out of the screen session it should show
;screen
I also noticed this only happend when I logged in via ssh from my console system. When logging in via ssh from a xterm didn’t give any problems. Also logging into a system running CentOS (kari) I didn’t have these issues.
What to search for?
The biggest disadvantage of using screen as a terminal multiplexer is that it is hard to search for on the internet, because a lot of things are screens, but not the GNU screen program. Because searching for a beep or bell doesn’t really make sense I tried searching for "linux screen ncurses background color not filling" because I also noticed that mutt and wyrd did not fill the background color when it supposed to. This search led me to some interesting URL’s.
Kevin Goodsell
The Kevin Goodsells terminal.txt gave me insight to the infocmp command and mentioned the TERM environment variable. So I saved the output of infocmp and set from both the chiad and kari systems to a file to compare.
ArchWiki
Based on the information regarding to hardstatus and termcapinfo on the ArchWiki I tried to change the values or make a comment of those items in the screen configuration, but that didn’t solve the issue.
What is the difference?
The first difference I noticed was the screen version between kari (CentOS) and chiad (Fedora). Chiad had a newer version, but the ChangeLog didn’t mention anything that would cause this issue. When I restored the original /etc/screenrc on chiad, it didn’t change the issue. It just kept on beeping, also with every change of window.
When comparing the set output of both chiad and kari, I looked at the output both outside and inside GNU screen. And I noticed that chiad used
TERM=xtermTERM=screen.linuxOn chiad there were 2 lines
term xterm
in the /etc/screenrc and when I made a comment of those lines, the beeping stopped and the background color was working correctly again.