Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!wuphys!rdd From: rdd@wuphys.wustl.edu (Rakhal D. Dave) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Experiences with the NeXT Station 105 and More Keywords: swapfile, tex, dsp, floppy, boot, space, modem, speed, kernel Message-ID: <1990Dec27.082848.10036@wuphys.wustl.edu> Date: 27 Dec 90 08:28:48 GMT Reply-To: rdd@wuphys.UUCP (Rakhal D. Dave) Organization: Physics Dept, Washington U. in St Louis Lines: 312 Here is some information I have collected over the past 10 days after receiving my Next Station (105 Meg). First there is a lot of information and then there are some questions. This is rather longish but I think it is useful. If anyone wants to sell this information please feel free but do send me a copy of your product. I can be contacted at rdd@dirac.wustl.edu and rdd@wuphy.wustl.edu . Please assume the usual disclaimers. I have spent a day preparing this and notes of thanks will maintain my enthusiasm for the net after this debut. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all. CONTENTS: TRUTHS ABOUT THE CURRENTLY SUPPLIED NeXT STATIONS OF 105 MB: Hardware Software INSTALLING C ON THE 105 MB NeXT MACHINE INSTALLING TeX ON THE 105 MB NeXT MACHINE INSTALLING DSP STUFF NOTES ON MAKING SPACE COMMENTS ON SPEED and DISAPPEARING MEMORY wrt SWAPFILE SIZE RECOVERING FROM LOST KERNEL USING FLOPPY CONNECTING TO A HOST COMPUTER VIA MODEM QUESTIONS TRUTHS ABOUT THE CURRENTLY SUPPLIED NeXT STATIONS OF 105 MB: Hardware 1. When our campus representative showed of the NeXT station in our Physics Dept. the system crashed once while trying to read a floppy disk. He blamed this on the fact that the 68040 Motorola Chip inside was of an earlier version and had tendency to heat up. He opened up the slab and showed us the chip and it had a heat sink over it. He said that the machines that would be actually supplied to consumers will not have such a chip. They will have a better version of the chip which will not need a heat sink. OK. I went home from the campus book store with my new slab. I opened it up (not simply out of the box but the magnesium lid too) and guess what I found. A chip with a heat sink and to make matters worse it very clearly states on top of the chip: 68040 SAMPLE - BF. "SAMPLE ?" I don;t like that very much. Two machines had been delivered to The Washingtin Univ. (in St. Louis) book store. I got one and the other one went to a colleague of mine in the Physics department. He was the first to open up the cube and find out about this chip. His machine is no longer working. He was in the middle of an "edit" session as I am now and the screen went white. He took it back to the campus book store and tested it with the "Mega-pixel display" there and still the same thing. The local NeXT engineer determined it to be a "logic problem". Euphemism for bad chip ? Anyway the guarantee is still there for 51 more weeks and so the mother board is back in California. My computer is still working. I am not sure which of us is the lucky one. 2. One other interesting hardware feature is that my slab is supposed to be an 8 MB RAM machine. However when I saw inside I found that all the RAM slots were filled. The workspace info panel shows 8 MB as it should be but why are all the slots full? Software 1. As supplied, the disk had 25 Meg available (without Mathematica, see below) 2. The upgraded version of Mathematica (2.0) is not ready and the Machine was supplied without it. The Campus book store gave me Mathematica 1.0 to tide over until 2.0 was ready (and supplied to me through the book store). 3. The machine could not run C or C++ programs as supplied. INSTALLING C ON THE 105 MB NeXT MACHINE In order to get C started, I picked up the following files from the campus demo NeXT computer which is a 340 Meg cube with optical drive. directory: /bin/ ar* cc* file* kgdb* nm++* segedit* as* cc++* g++filt* ld* otool* size* atom* ebadexec* gdb* nm* ranlib* strip* On adding these files I think that my /bin directory looked exactly like the /bin of the cube. Total of 77 files. I also added files cc1 and cc1++ to my /lib from the demo cubes /lib thinking that they may have something to do with compiling and assembling C. My final /lib directory looked like this: directory: /lib/ cc1* collect* crt0.o libsys_p.a cc1++* cpp* gcrt0.o libsys_s.a Total of 8 files. In this case I do not remember the original configuration of the /lib directory so I might have added more than just cc1 and cc1+, but in any case the final /lib looked as above. I then tried to compile the following C program: main() {printf("Hello World\n");} As far as I remember it complained about not finding stdio.h. It was bad weather here in St. Louis and I did not feel like another trip to the campus book store so I coonected via modem to the Physics Dept. VAX (which is also UNIX, ofcourse) and picked up stdio.h and math.h from its /usr/include directory. The new Next machine does not have a /usr/include directory so I made one and put these 2 files in there so that finally that directory looked like this: directory /usr/include/ math.h stdio.h Now I could at least compile and run the C program above. This program does not need math.h but I picked it up because any useful program would. I have not yet tested math.h in a program. Ideally these programs should be picked up from a NeXT since Mach and Unix might be slightly different. INSTALLING TeX ON THE 105 MB NeXT MACHINE Lot of people in research also want Tex. For those research types who need mathematica and Tex on a 105 Meg Next station, there is good news. you can have both and be still left over with about 10 Meg. (see below for pointers on how to make space). In order for Tex to run you will need the following files to be added to your directory /usr/bin/ Install_TeX* dvitype* gftopk* jot* pktogf* MakeTeXPK* etags* gftype* kl_ld* pktype* bibtex* filemem* inimf* mft* pltotf* dvips* gftodvi* initex* pageSymbols* tex* Total addition of 20 files. The original configuration of my NeXT station had 164 files in /usr/bin. I now had 184. You will also need TeXview to make full use of the NeXT wysiwyg capabilities. This you will find probably in /NextDeveloper/Demos of the cube and you can put it in the same place on your machine. This does not seem to be an appropriate place for it though. Then you need the huge file TeXdist.tar.Z or Texdist.tar.Z. This you should find in /usr/tex along with a file README which explains how to proceed. There may also be a file ntman.dvi which can be viewed by TeXview and which explains a few things about TeX. Your /usr/tex directory should look like this: directory /usr/tex/ README ntman.dvi texdist.tar.Z note: ntman.dvi is not crucial to installing TeX. The usr/bin files, Texview and the usr/tex files are definitely necessary for TeX to be installed and to run. But it is possible that texdist.tar.Z automatically generates the missing files in /usr/bin. Note on Installing TeX: After copying Mathematica 1.0 and the necessary TeXstuff above I had only about 17 Meg leftover. When you try to install TeX the installing program warns you that you need at least 25 Meg for the installation to work although this does not mean that you will have used up 25 Meg when it is done. It only needs this during the transient stage of installation. When I started my installation(read README) I began to quickly run out of memory. When only 1 meg was left over (keep updating workspace browser to see how much space is left) I went back to the shell and typed ^Z (control Z) and stopped the process. I then erased Texdist.tar.Z and this gave me about 6 more Meg to work with. I then typed fg to continue the stopped process. This worked fine. I have TeX now. Final structure of Installed TeX: NextLibrary/Fonts/TeXFonts 5.69 MB linked by usr/lib/tex/fonts and NextLibrary/Tex/tex/fonts NextLibrary/Tex/tex 3.97 MB linked by usr/lib/tex NextLibrary/Tex/mf 1.12 MB linked by usr/lib/mf Addition of 20 files to usr/bin 1.08 MB TOTAL 11.86 MB If you include usr/tex/ntman.dvi and usr/tex/README add 0.159 MB bringing up the total to about 12 MB. INSTALLING DSP STUFF I don't know much about dsp programming yet. I am including it here only for completeness.One thing definitely important for those seriously interested in using the dsp are the following 10 files which should be in /usr/bin : directory /usr/bin asm56000* dspbeep* dsploadwrap* dsptest* lib56000* dspabort* dspimg* dspmsg* dspwrap* lnk56000* These 10 files takes the final tally of files in usr/bin to 194. With the addition of these files my usr/bin looks exactly like the usr/bin of the cube. Also important is the directory NextDeveloper/DSP and all its subdirectories. NOTES ON MAKING SPACE 1. If you are not going to use an Optical drive you can safely get rid of /odmach. Remember if you ever need it that odmach and sdmach are the same binary files (do a diff to confirm that) and so you can make odmach from sdmach when required. 2. If you have installed TeX you shoul have the following 4 files in /usr/bin : latex slitex tex virtex Theses files are the same and are used by TeX for differebt applications. If you read chapter 2 of ntman.dvi, on the first page of chapter 2 it tells you that these files are meant to be linked. the TeX installation I did, did not however create them linked. Linking them will give you half a meg more. 3. Sometimes when you run some processes like compiling C programs or some other process which did not terminate in a regular way, a file is made in /private/tmp called private/etc/netinfo/core (there is a chance that I may have this directory wrong. It might be private/tmp/core). This file might be used for debugging but if you don't need it, it can be erased. This file can sometimes get very large. 4. This is perhaps the best pointer I have for people who are going to use the NeXT as a standalone system. When delivered, the NeXT 105 Mb station comes with a virtual memory swapfile /private/vm/swapfile of 16 MB. This is usually more than enough. Having it at 16 Mb has the advantage that when you see how much memory you have left on the disk it is almost definitely all available for use. What I have done however is to erase /private/vm/swapfile. When you erase it there is no immidiate effect. Yuo have to shut of power and reboot. When the system starts up it will regenerate the swapfile in /private/vm . You will see that while booting it may take a few seconds more and the rebooting animation stops momentarily while it creates swapfile I suppose. The regenerated file will take up typically 4 or 5 MB only and you will see an addition of about 10 MB to the available space. This memory is not all available for use however. As you begin to test the sytem by running many processes at the same time (multi-tasking) mamory will begin to be chopped of and delegated to the swapfile. If you keep multi-tasking within some reasonable bounds the swapfile may grow upto 9 MB. In severe multi tasking situations it has never grown beyond 12 MB in my case. Thus I feel that you can safely consider adding 4 Mb from outside in place of 4mb from the original 16 Mb swapfile. From here on add stuff, but keep in mind that this may be at the expense of speed during multi-tasking. COMMENTS ON SPEED and DISAPPEARING MEMORY wrt SWAPFILE SIZE I have seen some comments on the net from people who found that the NeXT was very slow. One of them was seeing a Demo machine and another had it at home and had slowed down for some reason (the rotating disk syndrome). Some others may have noticed disappearing memory space.I think that this happens when you carry out some very unreasonable process and the swapfile becomes very large. It happened to me when I tried to open the Webster Dictionary as a writenow document. The Swapfile grew to 20 MB. The computer eventually managed to show me the dictionary but even after I exited "writeNow" it remained slow. It was then that my detective work led me to the realization that there is no setup in the operating system to recover from large swapfile size. I erased the swapfile and rebooted and everything was fine again. I think that demo machines are usually abused by people who are not sure about what they are doing and the reason why people may come to the wrong conclusion about the speed of the NeXT is because they see a machine with a huge swapfile. RECOVERING FROM LOST KERNEL USING FLOPPY I had inadvertently removed sdmach too during this operation thinking that the mach file was the real kernel. This is not true. The file /mach is linked to $BOOTFILE whatever this might mean. When I did a diff between /mach and /sdmach it showed up to be the same. so I got rid of sdmach and odmach and linked them to /mach . But /mach being linked to some dummy $BOOTFILE contained no information and so I was left with nothing. The following are the sequence of events to boot the NeXT station from floppy. You have to assume that the rest of the directory structure, particularly all the files called by /etc/mach_init. 1. Copy /mach and /sdmach onto floppy (Perhaps /mach is not necessary. Remember /mach is really a dummy file linked to some $BOOTFILE I don't know about) from a working machine. 2. Insert floppy into drive. 3. Press Right Command with ~ key just after the "Loading from disk" message comes on frame. This gets you into the "ROM MONITOR". 4. Type bfd -a -s This causes the floppy to be read and the boot up to begin. 5. The rom monitor will ask for root device. When it does so type: sd0 (and then return) This tells the computer to look for the initialization files on the scsi disk. As this proceeds the screen will be replaced by the Next-Mach operating system monitor. You will be in a unix shell and can access all your files with unix commands. You will however not yet have the Next-Step interface and all the attendent graphics. The Next Steps are to get that: 6. Press the 2 command keys together with ~ to get you to the Next-Mach operating system again. Here type "mon" without the quotation marks and this will take you back to the ROM monitor. 7. At this point eject floppy with the command "ef" (No quotation marks). 8. After the floppy has ejected type "c" for continue( " ). The screen will turn gray from white and you will be back in the unix shell. There will be a # prompt. Type "exit" (No quotation marks) and the system will proceed to boot up for multi-user mode and launch the graphical user interface eventually ending with the login window. CONNECTING TO A HOST COMPUTER VIA MODEM 1. For those expecting delivery of the NeXT station please do not buy the usual cable used for a cube to modem connection. The connector has changed and you will most probably have to make one yourself. Read the release notes which are a bunch of papers stapled together and placed along with the manuals in the "starting point kit". 2. If you are using TIP to connect to a modem I found that everything works fine if I leave the /etc/tty file alone. This suggestion contradicts the Network and system Administration maual on page 183. However all I needed to connect to modem was to add the following line to /etc/remote dialer:dv=/dev/cub:br#2400: and then type: "tip dialer" in a shell to obtain connection with the modem. Ofcourse change the Baud rate to your Baud rate. If I attempted to do what the manual asked I almost always ended up with a device busy signal. (even though the directory /usr/spool/uucp/LCK was empty). QUESTIONS 1. Anomalous launching of finder on completion of the tetris game. It also happened once when I was in "WriteNow". It has never happened again with the WN but at the end of tetris when all the blocks are down and the last block comes in and you attempt to adjust its position with the keypad keys 4,5, and 6, the effect is that tetris closes down without even recording scores and the finder is launched. WHY. 2. Many of the tar.Z packages which are not binary files but asci files typically from pub/next/sources of some archive site require the use of the make command before they are correctly installed. The make command is to be given from the same directory in which the associated README file resides.In every case that I have tried this I get a message telling me that the file: /usr/lib/nib/Makefile.common could not be found. In every case there is already a Makefile in the directory I would currently be in. The computer however is looking for this other file. It is not in my NeXT station. Could someone who has it send it to me. If it is binary you can send it uuencoded by giveing the command: uuencode filename filename>filename.uu and then send me filename.uu .Either that or tell me what I am doing wrong with the make command. 3. Could someone post on the net what is contained in the /usr/include of a cube. This is useful information for those that have the 105 MB machine and need to know what additional stuff needs to be added for the C programming to work. I am also confused about where the C libraries reside and if I have them at all. 4. Has someone successfully connected a Laser Jet HPIIP personal Laser printer to a NeXT computer without problems. If so does one need it to have the PostScript package. I should think not, since the postscript calculations can be done on the NeXT and the printer can be bit-blasted with printing information just as is done with the NeXT Laser printer. Also as far as I know the NeXT laser printer has no cpu or memory of its own. Can the HP be connected without any additionall memory added to it or would there be some limitations. 5. Is there any public domain Fortran compiler for the NeXT? 6. If not I plan to use f2c which is in the public domain. I can use it to convert Fortran to C and then run the C programs. Has anyone done this with success. I saw a note earlier on the net that there were some bugs in the archive version at purdue for example. The suggestion was to get the files from research.att.com = 192.20.225.2 . This number does not seem to work from here at least so are there any sources of working f2c programs ? 7. I have probably not read the manual carefully but how useful are the NetManager, NetinfoManager and MailManager for a stand alone system. The only access I have to the outside world is through phone. This article, I am posting from the school computer connected to my NeXT via modem. Let me reframe this question to the following: If I am sure that I am never going to have an ethernet or any other link to my machine except phone what software can I safely throw away ? <<<<<<<<<< Rakhal Dave: "I think therefore I might not be" >>>>>>>>>>