Terminal Emulator and Thin Client Software: Century Software

On a widescreen monitor, if TinyTERM is maximized to fill the screen, the letters will probably be spaced far enough apart to be distracting and hard to read. Widescreen monitors use a 16:9 or similar aspect ratio intended to be like a movie screen. The dedicated terminals TinyTERM emulates all used a 4:3 aspect ratio, similar to a standard television. That makes a widescreen monitor about 1/3 wider than an equivalent terminal, so the letters are spaced that much farther apart. There are two ways to compensate for this in TinyTERM.

The preferred method is to run TinyTERM in a window, rather than full screen. You can resize the window to use the full height of the screen, widening it until it looks correct to the user.

The alternate method is to change the number of columns TinyTERM displays. To do that, open the Session Properties. In the lower right of the Session tab, check the “Use custom emulation size” box. Change the number of columns to 132. Leave the number of lines as-is. This will cause TinyTERM to display the maximum number of letters it can support in each line. However, it will cause display oddities for text longer than the terminal standard of 80 characters.

Once you have either resized TinyTERM to match your preference or increased the number of columns, go to the File menu and select Save Session to save your settings. This will ensure that the spacing does not automatically reset.

Multifunction printers generally install two printer drivers: one for the printer itself, and one for the fax capability. Often these two names are identical, except the word “Fax” is appended to one. For example, these two printers might appear in your Windows printer list:

Lexmark X5070
Lexmark X5070 Fax

The near-identical names can cause problems selecting the correct printer. The solution is to make the names less identical. Renaming the fax driver by moving the word “Fax” to the beginning of the name will take care of the problem. In the above example, you would then have these two printers:

Lexmark X5070
Fax Lexmark X5070

Please note also that any multifunction printer is likely to be a USB printer. More information on using USB printers with TinyTERM is in this knowledge base entry.

(Century Software, Inc., does not endorse particular printer brands or models, nor do we manufacture or sell printers. The use of Lexmark above is intended as an example only. No trademark infringement is intended.)

Century Software, Inc., now has screencasts on our website, video recordings that demonstrate different TinyTERM features and capabilities. The topics covered are:

When connecting via SSH with an RSA key, you might see this message:

Connection failed (969) - Private key decryption failed

There are a couple of possible causes for this:

You entered the wrong username or pass phrase. The RSA key is unique to the user on the host system, and requires a specific pass phrase. If either of these does not match the RSA key, the key will not decrypt properly.
You have the wrong RSA key loaded in TinyTERM for the server. Each host requires its own RSA key, even if the username is the same for multiple systems.

To fix the error, verify the username and pass phrase you are using. Make sure there are no typos in either. If that does not help, you’ll need to double-check the RSA key you have loaded, and may need to regenerate it.

You can now view a screencast on this topic.

When using CenTE.ocx in a custom application, pressing F1 in the control will normally bring up the help file. The file name auto-generated by the OCX is TECTRL.HLP, which does not exist. Documentation for the TE control is actually in the TinyTERM Programmers Reference Manual.

CR 857

Install TinyTERM on Windows Vista, then connect to a SCO OpenServer 5 system. If you hit the Delete key at a shell prompt, it gives a new prompt on the next line. Do this enough times and TinyTERM will disconnect. This does not happen on other versions of Windows.

CR 856

Configure TinyTERM’s transparent printing option to spool the print job. Whether set to Print on Key Press or Print on Timeout, a printout that takes a long time to generate will put extra form feeds into the print job. This happens regardless of the timeout value as well.

CR 855