Okay, this may delve into excessive arcana, but I was curious...
I was trying to follow the step-by-steps posted recently by rqitzel under the title
Steps to a functional packagemanager in 3.5.1, From an OZ non-guru with a 5500 <https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=7901>, and I got to the line:
3. Boot up, and press a key at the appropriate time to keep Opie from starting
rqitzel goes on from there to delete reams of stuff and rewrite /etc/ipkg.conf. (H|Sh)e does the latter with a series of printf statements to file.
"Urgg," thinks I, so instead I fire up my Editor of Last Resort (yes, that would be vi) to modify the ipkg configuration. It transpires that you can edit as well as ever with vi in that bare command-line mode outside of opie until you want to use one of the large silver buttons to, e.g., move the cursor or escape from an insert/append mode back to the vi command line. Pressing one of the Large Silver Buttons floods the screen with lines of mysterious diagnostics from an irq handler. The buttons may or may not work -- at somepoint, for example, escape does indeed escape -- but who can tell in the gibberish.
What's going on and is there a way to make it stop??
Windrose
SL5600
OZ 3.5.1