MAE 2.0
Tech Note #2

Last updated on 07/21/95

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE MAE DESKTOP AND THE FINDER

Icon Placement When Resizing Windows

Whenever the display window for the MAE desktop is resized, all icons are aligned on the right side of the window. The Trash will be moved to the lower right corner and the startup drive (which always appears as "/" in MAE) will appear on top. Any other icons, including the user's home directory, are placed below and to the left of the startup drive. To avoid the loss of any custom icon placement you can iconify MAE if more workstation desktop space is desired.

Flashing Menu Bar After Exporting to X

If text is selected from an open application such as "Note Pad" and exported to X (using the "Export to X" key from the MAE toolbar), the Finder menu bar may flash or disappear when returning focus to MAE. If this happens, clicking on the Macintosh Desktop within MAE will restore the menu bar.

Rebuilding the Desktop

If MAE is started with the -rebuild option, MAE will search for files in the System Folder and appledir. If you have applications and documents that are not in these directories, they will revert to generic icons until they are used again by the Finder. This is different from native Macintosh behavior and was implemented to prevent MAE from potentially trying to resolve icons for multiple remotely-mounted file systems, which could take a great deal of time. However, you can put symbolic links into a directory of your choosing and have those file systems searched during a Desktop rebuild. To do this, start MAE with the -applepath [dir] option, where [dir] is the full pathname of the directory. For example, if your symbolic links are located in a directory whose path is /usr/joe/rebuild, you can start MAE with

mae -rebuild -applepath /usr/joe/rebuild

Files that are contained within folders that have been assigned a label from the Finder (e.g., "Hot") will revert to an unlabeled state when the Desktop is rebuilt. This behavior does not occur with files that are located on the Desktop itself.

FILE SYSTEM

There are no new updates for this version of the Tech Notes.

NETWORKING

Remote (Network) File System Performance and Timeouts

When a user's System Folder or Apple directory (appledir) resides on a network file system (e.g., NFS), performance will be affected by the configuration and by the loads on the file servers involved. In some cases, this affects MAE behavior. For example, to avoid "hanging" forever because of communication failure with an NFS host (a problem in MAE 1.0), MAE v2.0 periodically reviews ongoing file operations and will abort any file system operation that loses communication for a specified threshhold time (called the "File System Timeout"). This timeout is ten seconds by default. This means that if MAE waits for a response from an NFS-mounted file system for more than the timeout, MAE gives up on the access and returns failure. If the operation is non-critical (e.g., a directory listing), MAE treats that file system as inaccessible. If the access is critical to MAE's operation (such as the Finder) then MAE will hang.

In configurations with heavy network traffic (resulting in slow network response), MAE's default timeout setting may be too short. If so, you may see an error such as "... because the disk `/' cannot be found." Using the -fstimeout option at startup will increase the amount of time that MAE will wait before giving up on a remotely-mounted filesystem and help to prevent MAE from hanging. For example, you can start MAE with the command `mae -fstimeout 30' which sets the timeout to 30 seconds. This value should be sufficiently high for networks where response time is variable due to heavy loads. If -fstimeout is set to 0, the heartbeat function is disabled and MAE will wait indefinitely for a remote file system (this is identical to MAE v1.0).

If network response time is still affecting the performance of MAE after you increase the value of -fstimeout, consider putting the System Folder or Apple directory (appledir) on a local volume.

FLOPPY DISKS AND CD-ROMS

MAE and Microsoft Office

Microsoft has instituted a new diskette format (known as DMF -- Distributed Media Format) that permits distribution of software on a smaller number of diskettes. This is accomplished by using a format of 1.6M which cannot be used by current PC-compatible (360K/720K/1.4M) or Apple (400K/800K/1.4M) floppy drives unless read by the installer program. The special installer modifies the hardware floppy driver to support the new format. MAE does not use standard Macintosh drivers to support floppy drives. As a result, the installer cannot be run from disks that support DMF.

To properly install MS Office for use with MAE, you can do one of the following: (1) install from a CD; (2) install from a diskette set that does not use DMF; (3) install using a DMF diskette set onto a native Macintosh and use AppleShare to transfer the files to MAE.

When running the install, select a new folder when asked to specify the directory for installation. The directory created will then be the installation folder, and the install will proceed normally. Lastly, when asked to update Excel graphs, select `No.'

PRINTING

There are no new updates for this version of the Tech Notes.

KEYBOARD AND DISPLAY

Colormap Sharing Between MAE and X Applications

If "Map X Windows to MAE palette" is enabled from within the "MAE General" Control Panel, MAE will try and share as many colors as possible with other X applications. If an X application modifies an entry in the colormap that is being shared with MAE, you may see a temporary change in how that color displays within MAE. To prevent this from happening, change the selection in the "MAE General" Control Panel to "Allow colormap flash" and reboot. This will cause a color "flash" when changing focus between MAE and other X windows but preserves the colormaps for each environment.

Modifier Map Sharing Between MAE and X Applications

Every keystroke that occurs in an X environment is inspected by X so that it can catch the keystrokes that invoke X operations. To accomplish this, the X enivonment uses a "modifier map" -- a keyboard translation table.

While the X window containing MAE is the active window, MAE modifies this keyboard map, so that keystrokes meaningful to MAE are passed to MAE by the X environment for processing, even if they would normally have meaning to the X environment itself. This means that while MAE is active, keystrokes are processed as specified in the 'MAE Keyboard' Control Panel. For example, if the [META] key is mapped to the MAE [Command] key, the X environment will pass on to MAE those [META] keystrokes that occur MAE has focus. Typing Meta-Q in the MAE environment will therefore quit a Macintosh application even though Meta-Q would normally be interpreted by the X environment as a CLIENT_KILL (which would terminate MAE).

As soon as MAE is no longer the active window, the original modifier map is restored and all keystrokes function as defined for the X environment. This restoration, however, is not reliable under all circumstances. For example, pushing an MAE session over the network to a server running X11R6 can result in unpredictable results.

One solution to this problem is to disable MAE's ability to change the modifier keys. This can be done either by setting an environment variable

set TBNOMODMAP=1

or by starting MAE with the -nomodmap option.

IMPORTANT: Be careful if you choose to disable the modifier mapping; keystrokes intended for MAE may be trapped by the X Window Manager with unexpected results.

OTHER

(HP only) HP-UX 9.0.1 and STREAMS/UX

On HP-UX, MAE requires that STREAMS/UX be installed if you are planning to run AppleTalk. The v2.0 CD contains packages for both 9.0.3 and 9.0.5 of HP-UX. If you are running 9.0.1, you can use the STREAMS/UX package for 9.0.3. Please note that MAE does not support sound if used with 9.0.1.

Applications and Processor Performance

MacOS applications, whether they are running on MAE or on a Macintosh, normally dispatch each `event' as it occurs from a main program loop. Examples of events are mouse movement, screen update, etc. To await the next event, Macintosh programs normally use WaitNextEvent, which waits for an event or the expiration of a timeout while yielding processing time to other Macintosh programs. While WaitNextEvent is waiting and provided no events need attention, MAE will sleep, imposing a negligible load on the processor.

Some applications (SimpleText is among the popular examples) increase responsiveness, at the cost of higher processor load, by using very short timeouts while waiting for events. Running under MAE, such programs use the processor heavily. Programs with longer timeout values, such as MacWrite II, operate nicely in the MAE environment.

MAE and Meeting Maker XP

If you install Meeting Maker XP for use with MAE, you should remove the extension titled `Meeting Maker XP Extension' from the Extensions folder. It is not compatible with MAE and will be disabled when MAE is started. The extension is used to alert a user of a message when Meeting Maker XP is not active. To receive such messages, leave Meeting Maker XP running.

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