So, my problem is simply that I can't get screen
started on my user account. When I invoke it as superuser it works, under any circumstance, like a charm, but until now (that is, in the about last THREE and more hours of troubleshooting) there wasn't a single instance in which it would spawn a new session.
To give some context, this morning I installed Debian 9.0 (stretch) on a 64-bit processor. In the previous installation (Debian ~8.0) screen worked without flaws.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of my attempts at solving this issue:
- I unmounted the partition mounted at my home directory, and logged in with my user account in a new environment where there wasn't trace of my old custom config files;
- I tinkered with the
$TERM
-like variables, and also tried usingtset
; - I tried installing an older version of screen (
4.2.1-3+deb8u1
); - I made an attempt at running
apt-get purge screen
and then installing again the distribution-provided package.
None of these attempts (and even others) had an impact on how screen behaves. All of the times I did screen; echo $?
($?
being a status-code variable, IIRC) I got 0
printed on my console.
I am resorting to this Q&A as a last and desperate solution :'-).
$TERM
is always equal toxterm-256color
.screen
on console, with my normal account:none@vacuum:~$ screen\n none@vacuum:~$ echo $?\n 0\n
. (Edit: comments don't allow newlines; added "\n"s to give an idea.)