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From: karish@forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: X w/EGA, 5378, terminal problem.
Message-ID: <6088@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 25 Oct 89 03:39:37 GMT
References: <15@blender.UUCP>
Sender: USENET News System <news@Portia.stanford.edu>
Reply-To: karish@forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish)
Organization: Mindcraft, Inc.
Lines: 51

In article <15@blender.UUCP> herb@blender.UUCP (Herb Peyerl) wrote:
>  My question: Does anyone know of or have any experience running
>X on an RT with an EGA Display?

Why bother?  The 6153 can only handle one full-sized text window under
X, unless you use a microscopic font and read it with a magnifier.
And it has three times as many pixels as an EGA.

Besides, if you only have 4 MB of memory, your system will be paging
like crazy to keep up with X.  I'd take the X stuff off the disk,
and use the 7 MB or so you get that way for something that's more
directly useful.  The multi-screen console system isn't as sexy as
X, but it's a lot faster on a 4 MB RT.

>		 I have a VT220 hooked up to the 4-port asynch
>which seems to work reasonably well.  Proper IBM Terminal cable
>with a 25 foot 1:1 extension.  Now, the terminal works well 
>until I happen to hit a key while the RT is displaying something
>on it.  The port then hangs for any input to the RT, yet the
>RT can generate output to the terminal just fine.  Pdisable/penabling
>the port generates the appropriate login banner yet will not accept
>keystrokes.

Sounds like a line discipline or flow control problem.  Your
port should be configured for dtr protocol and local connection.

>The only solution to the problem seems to be pdisabling,
>unplugging the cable off the RT, penabling, and reinstalling the
>cable in the port.

This might be OK on the four-port card, but don't do it on the
planar serial ports (on the system board).  IBM recommends that
you power down the machine to unplug anything from the system board.
They've replaced two system boards for us after they became flaky
for one reason or another, so I believe there's cause for concern.

Did you try to delete and replace the driver for that port, using
vrmconfig?  That sometimes un-gums a serial port.  `vrmconfig -d
tty2' followed by `vrmconfig -a tty2'.  No need to power down, or
even go to single user mode.

For a while, we ran an RT with an EGA card and an IBM monochrome
PC monitor, under AIX 2.1.1.  It worked fine, but then again we never
tried to run X on it.

I played with two monitors once on an RT running an early version
of the 4.3 port.  At that time, at least, the code for selecting
the console on a two-monitor system was incomplete.

	Chuck Karish		karish@mindcraft.com
	(415) 493-9000		karish@forel.stanford.edu