Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!rutgers!ucsd!ucbvax!pasteur!cory.Berkeley.EDU!dheller From: dheller@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Dan Heller) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: X11 on RT with AIX? Message-ID: <5756@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 18 Sep 88 04:21:22 GMT References: <148@sunquest.UUCP> Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU Reply-To: dheller@cory.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Dan Heller) Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 66 In article <148@sunquest.UUCP> whm@sunquest.UUCP (Bill Mitchell) writes: >Does anybody know if X11R2 will work on an IBM RT running AIX 2.2? (Anybody >tried it?) > >I am aware of 4.3 BSD for the RT, but that's not an option for us at the >moment. I've had the extreme displeasure of using an IBM RT running AIX and X11R2. Ironically, the server is "fast" (in comparison to my sun3-110's color server), but that's about all I can say that's good about it. The screen (hardware) hurts my eyes so much that I had to rlogin to the workstation from another window to do most editing and stuff... That editorialzed comment, which had nothing to do with X11, can be ignored. Many things don't work -- clipping, for one. (details left out) The termcap entry for xterm is really bad -- you always have reverse video blocks hanging around and you can never see the where the cursor is because it's an underscore and doesn't blink (I like solid black cursors that don't blink). There is lots of screen dust from backspacing etc... Programs I've written (including some on expo: xwatch, qix, dclock) all compile fine, but "dclock" seems to hang X -- you have to kill the server and restart. I have no idea why it's hanging, but I've had reports that dclock works fine for IBM-RT's running non-AIX and non-IBM version of X -- note: I was told that IBM did this particular version of X11R2; I have no idea about the validity of that statement. Xwatch and qix both work (altho qix doesn't run in color correctly, but that's due to my inexperience in dealing with color and X). I've taken some other programs from the net and some work ok, but I haven't investigated why others don't -- I don't have the time to look into the ones that don't work. There doesn't appear to be any "default" toolkit, so you have to bring one over yourself. I compiled the athena widgets, but things had to change some things. I didn't find the changes to be bothersome, but someone who doesn't know much about unix or makefiles will have problems. The real reason I'm using this machine is to test out the toolkit that I'm writing for a particular client (who shall remain nameless). My particular toolkit is similar to the athena toolkit, but has different bells and whistles. Anyway, it compiles ok, but there seems to be a problem with accessing fonts correctly. That is to say, if I have a widget which uses a font and tries to do a simple command like XTextWidth() of a string in a particular font, I get a segfault in that function whereas the same code works on other machines. I use that function as an example, but I've had problems with other font-based functions. What confuses me is that the athena widgets (of which I've only tested a handful) which use text seem to work ok. I don't particularly like system-v systems and find their environment very difficult to use ("whaddya mean I can't move a directory to '..'!?") so if the original question was intended to determine whether or not to get the IBM-RT, I advise looking into the 4.3 stuff first -- if that's "not an option" for you, I strongly urge you to make it an option. If your requirement is to use system V, then I urge you to choose another hardware vendor. If anyone has comments or questions about anything I've said here, please contact me at island!argv@sun.com Dan Heller