tn5250

This is the homepage for the free “Linux tn5250” emulator. That’s a bit of a misnomer though, since it works on FreeBSD and any other modern Unix, and starting with the 0.16.4 release, it also runs on 32-bit versions of Windows.

tn5250 is a telnet client for the IBM iSeries and AS/400 that emulates 5250 terminals and printers. This function is the same as that provided by the 5250 emulator in IBM iSeries Access. Have a look at a screenshot for an example.

Please report any bugs in tn5250, preferably to the mailing list, or to the tn5250 SourceForge bug tracker.

The tn5250 project is kindly hosted by SourceForge. Visit the tn5250 SourceForge project page to see all the other tools they give us to work with.

James Rich has written a useful HOWTO for tn5250. Read it on his web site (133kB PDF).

Getting tn5250

To get the latest stable release of tn5250, visit the tn5250 project files list.

If you don’t want to have to compile the program yourself, there are a few other options:

• Red Hat users can look for RPMs on Rpmfind.Net, use the RPMs built by James Allman (see his email to the mailing list), or use the older RPMS provided by Henri Gomez.
• Debian users can install tn5250 by typing apt-get install tn5250 as root. Debian 3.0 users can also download a Debian package of tn5250 0.16.5 from our files area.
• FreeBSD users can install it by typing cd /usr/ports/net/tn5250 && make install as root.
• Microsoft Windows users can download the Win32 Installer from our files area.
• Linspire users can “Click-N-Run” tn5250 from www.linspire.com/xt5250 or download and install the Debian package.

Finally, you can get the latest tn5250 sources from anonymous CVS, or just browse them online.

To check out the main branch of tn5250 via anonymous CVS, enter the following commands. When asked for a password for ‘anonymous’, just press Enter.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@tn5250.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tn5250 login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@tn5250.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tn5250 co -P tn5250

To build the Unix version of tn5250 from CVS, you’ll need automake, autoconf, libtool and ncurses. Run ./autogen.sh, ./configure then make && make install from the checked out directory.

To build the Windows version of tn5250 from CVS, you’ll need a CVS client (maybe WinCVS or TortoiseCVS). Once you’ve downloaded the sources, detailed build instructions can be found in the README.txt file in the win32 subdirectory.

Mailing list

tn5250 development and discussion all happens on the mailing list, provided by MIDRANGE dot COM. You must subscribe to the mailing before you will be able to send email to it, but it’s very low traffic.

• Subscribe to the linux5250 mailing list.
• Read the archives of the tn5250 mailing list.
• Read the GMANE archives of the tn5250 mailing list.

Development

There’s a page of links to related documentation on this site.

Related Free Software

tn5250j is a 5250 emulator written in Java.

x3270 implements the tn3270 protocol, which is very similar to tn5250.

Last modified: Sun May 21 11:04:36 UTC 2006