[ANSWERED] Any good Linux telnet client to go on BBS?

Life Technology
1

Hi,

I use Nally on Mac to access BBS. The default telnet client on Debian based distribution displays characters incorrectly on my terminal. What telnet client do you use ?

Thx

2

[quote=“symbion”]Hi,

I use Nally on Mac to access BBS. The default telnet client on Debian based distribution displays characters incorrectly on my terminal. What telnet client do you use ?

Thx[/quote]

Wow, it’s been maybe a decade since I’ve even looked at telnet. But I vaguely recalled that there was something or other that had to be done to make it work with Chinese. Googled it, and found this:

telnet

telnet is not 8-bit clean by default. In order to be able to send Unicode keystrokes to the remote host, you need to set telnet into “outbinary” mode. To do this:

$ telnet
telnet> set outbinary
telnet> open

You turn off binary with “unset outbinary” command.

Other than this, I have no other ideas. But I’d appreciate it if you let us know if this works or not.

cheers,
DB

3

[quote]$ telnet
telnet> set outbinary
telnet> open
[/quote]

Same result as the original post (Chinese character not displayed).

4

I recommend to just use the browser plugins.

I’m a firefox user (chrome is harsh on system resources, i only use it when I want to use chromecast), so I only know firefox addions, but I am sure chrome also has similar plugins.

Here are the ones I use:
BBSFOX
addons.mozilla.org/zh-tw/firefox/addon/bbsfox/

PCMAN for Firefox
forum.moztw.org/download/file.php?id=12239

both are pretty good.

To correctly see CJK characters on BBS, try running:

 luit -encoding big5 telnet ptt.cc

Most BBS in Taiwan for some reason refuse to switch over to utf8, since most systems use utf8 encoding by default, that’s why the texts are messed up.

5

I just learned there’s an even easier way…

on your gnome-terminal’s menu (assuming you are using gnome with your debian), Terminal -> Set Character Encoding -> Add or Remove -> Add big5,

in the future select big5…

6

I prefer command line tool and that did the job very well. Plus, I learnt about “luit”. Thx.

7

[quote=“symbion”][quote=“hansioux”]
To correctly see CJK characters on BBS, try running:

 luit -encoding big5 telnet ptt.cc

[/quote]

I prefer command line tool and that did the job very well. Plus, I learnt about “luit”. Thx.[/quote]

echo "luit -encoding big5 telnet ptt.cc" > ~/bin/ptt;chmod 755 ~/bin/ptt

and in the future just run ptt in the terminal, is a pretty sweet way to go.

8

Sorry for bumping this old thread. I was looking at a non-telent solution to access bbs on an English Ubuntu install (and you should too, as telnet is inherently insecure because it transmits your login credentials in plain text!). So I’ll just post this for the others who google this problem.

You could connect to PTT using SSH. So doing this:

luit -encoding big5 ssh bbs@ptt.cc

would connect you onto ptt (ditto for ptt2, ptt3 as well).

However, it turns out that ptt has an unicode server! (see this: ptt.cc/bbs/Windows/M.1398910983.A.E3F.html). So you can just do:

ssh bbsu@ptt.cc

would let you get on PTT using the Linux terminal.

To add an alias (shortcut) command to Ubuntu Linux (or any other Linux that uses Bash), you simply create a file called ~/.bash_aliases . You may already have a file there, but most likely if you haven’t done any aliasing before, you won’t. Simply create a text file at .bash_aliases (need the dot in the file name) under your home directory (~/) and add the line of:

alias ptt='ssh bbsu@ptt.cc'

And on the next logon you could just type ptt at the terminal and be connected.