TTY special files of the form ``ttye?'' are interfaces to the Amiga ITE for bit-mapped displays. An
ite is the main system console on most Amiga workstations and is the mechanism through which a user communicates with the machine. If more than one of the supported displays exists on a system, any or all can be used as
ites with the limitation that only one will have a keyboard (since only one keyboard is supported) and only one of each type can be used.
ite devices use the HP-UX ‘
300h'
termcap(5) entry. However, as currently implemented, the
ite does not support the full range of HP-UX capabilities for this device. Missing are multiple colors, blinking, softkeys, programmable tabs, scrolling memory and keyboard arrow keys. The keyboard will use the left and right
Amiga keys as meta keys, in that it will set the eighth bit of the character code.
ite devices also do a good job at emulating the ‘
vt100'
termcap(5) entry.
Upon booting, the kernel will first look for an
ite device to use as the system console (
/dev/console). If a display exists at any hardware address, it will be the console. The kernel looks for them in decreasing order (that is, choosing the highest-numbered one).
On most systems, a display is used both as an
ite (
/dev/ttye? aka
/dev/console) and as a graphics device (/dev/grf?). In this environment, there is some interaction between the two uses that should be noted. For example, opening
/dev/grf0 will deactivate the
ite that is, write over whatever may be on the
ite display. When the graphics application is finished and
/dev/grf0 closed, the
ite will be reinitialized with the frame buffer cleared and the old colormap installed.