Running Premvet on an old PC

You have probably been in the same situation, you would like to use another terminal to access Premvet but find it difficult to buy another PC,e specially when considering you might have one or two old machines laying around gathering dust. This was a case with an old Dell Inspiron laptop. It had Windows XP installed but you had to take a holiday before being able to do anything on it. Considering the laptop was useless and could be just as good if it only ran Premvet then it would be better to have a more lean fast operating system installed.

I looked around the Linux distros and found ArchLinux. The fact that it was very technical and not for noobs scared me. I have dabbed into Linux a little bit and have even installed Ubuntu on my personal laptop (and kept it) - I gave it a try.

The download was relatively quite small and once I burned the .iso image on a CD-ROM I had a viable install CD. The system will first ask you to install a Live CD. I thought this was wrong and that I perhaps downloaded the wrong iso image. Don't worry, this is just an instance that helps you do the actall install on your hard-drive. The installation went smoothly and recognized my network card so I could install the FTP way.

First thing I remember doing was to create a user with non-admin privileges - I was consistent with the Network Solutions system and created vet. I had some problems logging into this user so I found the best was is to use the verbose method by just entering the useradd command. Also make sure you have inetutils installed. Also it makes it easier if you automatically log in to the "vet" user. This can be found here.

If everything works fine and you can login to a user automatically then all you have to do is to automatically call the telnet command from the bash:

telnet [premvet-server-ip-address] [port-number]

Some information is available here: http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/fofc00/telnet.html

To automate this you should add this line in the /etc/rc.local file.
I also made an alias for the user to shut down the machine at the end of the day. I made an alias called end for the command sudo poweroff
Sudo is to tell Linux to execute unser root privileges as Linux wouldn't be Linux if verything wasn't very secure. A normal user cannot even power off the system without special privileges. There is probably another way of doing this but I gave the user "vet" some priviliges in /etc/sudoers - you can edit this in an editor like nano or you can call it up directly in vi with "visudo" (http://www.go2linux.org/sudoers-how-to).

To make it even easier for my colleagues I even found a way of automating the login once the Premvet server was contacted. This is by using Expect. It successfuly logged in and entered the username and rendered the extra carriage return needed to get to the Premvet user login screen. The only problem I could not solve and I presume is a bug in Expect is, that it messes-up the rendering of characters in Premvet. The characters used to format the boxes is all wrong. This shouldn't have happened and I found no workaround.

So now the user must still enter the unix username and hit enter twice.

don't forget to change the terminal settings for Premvet for that machine: http://www.premvet.co.uk/premvet/manual/pv5/ch29b.html#29b2

There has just been one other snag besides Expect not working - colours. Premvet doesn't load a clolour scheme for this type of terminal so everything is in black&white. you can change the colours manually in Premvet for that machine but there is probably a workaround for that.