Can I change terminal type used to login through SSH?

Question

When I login on some particular server through SSH (which I do not have admin access to), I get the following error: urxvt-unicode: Unknown terminal type (I also don't want to change my terminal type permanently). It is important because depending on the terminal type I get different colors when logged in.

Is it possible to change the terminal type just when logging through SSH?

Solution 1

If you have root access to the remote box, install the package ncurses-term. This will provide the rxvt-256color terminfo entry.

As a non-root user, you can also copy over the rxvt terminfo entries to $HOME/.terminfo/r/ on the remote machine, and export TERMINFO=$HOME/.terminfo.

ssh <host> 'mkdir -p .terminfo/r'
scp /usr/share/terminfo/r/rxvt-unicode-256color <host>:~/.terminfo/r/

Solution 2

after login you can execute something like:

export TERM=vt100

Solution 3

Usually TERM is passed from your local environment, unchanged, to the remote environment. If you set TERM on the local side when invoking ssh, that will do what is needed.

For instance, if the remote end has the terminal description for rxvt (but not rxvt-unicode), that would work well enough for function keys, etc.

Assuming bash or some shell which is POSIX-compliant, you can do this by

TERM=rxvt ssh remotehost

Doing it that way only affects the ssh command, not your local environment. I use this feature for handling typical machines which do not have the description for screen.xterm-new. Depending on the remote machine, there may or may not be a suitable package which can be installed for the full terminal database. Some (such as Solaris and FreeBSD) require the workaround.

Further reading:

• The terminfo database is big—do I need all of that?

Solution 4

You can also add following lines to your .ssh/config:

host *
   SetEnv TERM=xterm

Or whatever terminal you prefer.

You can set that also per host

host foo.bar
   SetEnv TERM=vt100

Solution 5

sshd process (from sshd(8) ) will read ...

6.   Reads the file ~/.ssh/environment, if it exists, and users are
allowed to change their environment.  See the PermitUserEnvironment 
option in sshd_config(5).

and

8.   If ~/.ssh/rc exists, runs it; else if /etc/ssh/sshrc exists, 
runs it; otherwise runs xauth.  The “rc” files are given the X11 
authentication protocol and cookie in standard input.  See SSHRC, below.

you might whish to edit ~/.ssh/rc to setup TERM's value, as this file is read before shell's profile.

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Comments

[Ondra Žižka]

I don't have anything in /usr/share/terminfo/.