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A N I N T R O D U C T I O N T O X11R5 P A C K A G E S. No List Yet. AN INTRODUCTION TO X11R5. FROM ANSWER SOFTWARE & CONSULTING. CONTENTS: What is X11R5 What does it cost Will it run on my system What about updates What video cards does it run What about memory Public Domain Software Other Languages. MISC: Disclaimer: Trademarks: Where mentioned, remain the property of the owner. A N O V E R V I E W. ********************************************************************* Where to get it? The Premier X11R5 Developer's Package is now available from Answer Software & Consulting. Priced at $299 (+S&H), this package includes: * Complete documentation (O'Reilly X Series, Volumes 1-5) * 256-color X server capable of up to 1024 by 768 resolution * Black & white X server capable of up to 1024 by 768 resolution * Standard X applications including xclock, xcalc, xedit and xterm * Xlib, Xt, and Xaw programming libraries and tools * Sample X application source code ____________________________________________________________________________ The Premier X11R5 Package is also available without O'Reilly documentation ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS: The Premier X11R5 Developer's Package has the following software requirements: * COHERENT 4.0.1r72 or greater If you are running an earlier version of COHERENT, you must order a supplemental update package from Mark Williams Company. If you are running a later version of COHERENT, you must order an update package from ASC ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS: The Premier X11R5 Developer's Package has the following hardware requirements: * a 3.5" or 5.25" floppy drive (for installation) * at least 8Mb of RAM * approximately 20Mb of free disk space * a Logitech, Microsoft, or Mouse Systems compatible serial or bus mouse * Any VGA or SuperVGA card can be used with the black & white X server * Any SuperVGA card based on one of the following chipsets is required for the 256-color X server: - ATI 18800, Mach8, Mach32, 28800 - Trident TVGA 8800, 8900, and 9000 - Genoa GVGA - Tseng ET3000 and ET4000 - OAK OTI-67 and OTI-77 - Video 7/Headland Technologies - Paradise PVGA1A - Western Digital WD90Cxx ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information contact: Answer Software & Consulting 182 Aldrich Road Columbus, Ohio 43214 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT KIND OF WARRANTY PLAN DOES ANSWER SOFTWARE OFFER? If for any reason you are not completely satisfied with the Premier X11R5 Developer's Package within 30 days of receiving the product, you will get your money back upon the return of the software and the 5 O'Reilly volumes. DOES ANSWER SOFTWARE REQUIRE A FLOATING POINT PROCESSOR TO BE PRESENT? No. You can certainly use floating point in your X programs. It is not required or used by the X server or the X libraries. Use of floating point is supported but it is optional. IS THE 8 MB A SYSTEM TOTAL, OR DOES THAT MUCH NEED TO BE RESERVED FOR THE X SYSTEM? That's 8 MB total. With 8 MB, you can start six or seven DIFFERENT clients. Remember that running a second instance of the same client is much less costly. Don't even think about trying anything with only 4 MB. We've already tried it. HOW MUCH MEMORY DOES THE X SERVER OCCUPY? To know how much memory the X server is using at any one time, type the command "ps -axl" while in xterm and look for the X server process. A typical value us 2.5 MB. Certain applications, like GIF viewers, can cause the X server to grow. DOES ANSWER SOFTWARE DO A PROPRIETARY SWAPPING TECHNIQUE, OR WHEN THE RAM IS EXHAUSTED DOES X FAIL GRACEFULLY? We do not currently have any plans to implement any proprietary swapping technique since a future version of COHERENT will likely support virtual memory. This will help alleviate some of the problems. Here are two scenarios under which you can run out of RAM while using X11R5: 1. X application runs out of memory. This can happen if you try to start too many programs. It does not cause the system to crash. The application will simply not start. 2. X server runs out of memory. This can happen if you are running an X application that allocates large pixmaps or other X server resources. This currently will cause the X server to abort. We are continuing to make improvements in this area to insure that the application requesting the memory fails instead of the server. WHAT ABOUT SHARED LIBRARIES? As soon as shared libraries are made available for COHERENT by the Mark Williams Company, Answer Software will support them. Shared libraries will enhance performance and make use of RAM more efficient. SO WHAT'S A CLIENT? "Client" is an overused word in the computer world. When we refer to "client", we usually mean an X application. For example, "xclock" and "xcalendar" are clients. WHAT WINDOW MANAGER(S) DOES ANSWER SOFTWARE SUPPORT? The product comes with twm (Tab Window Manager). We will also be shipping the olwm that was contributed to the MIT ftp site. Please call or e-mail for a further explanation of what olwm is and is not. DOES ANSWER SOFTWARE PROVIDE THE LIBRARIES NECESSARY FOR CREATING NEW X APPLICATIONS AS PART OF THE PACKAGE, OR ARE THEY EXTRA? The Premier X11R5 Developer's Package includes everything you need to write, compile, and run your own X applications. We are providing Xlib, Xt, and Xaw programming libraries and tools. We will also be providing some ready-to-compile sample source code. Keep in mind, however, that there are a variety of additional proprietary toolkits and programming libraries, such as MOTIF and OLIT, that are NOT available from Answer Software & Consulting at this time. CAN I COMPILE AND RUN PUBLIC DOMAIN APPLICATIONS ON YOUR X SERVER AND MWC'S COMPILER? Yes. However, application changes necessary to address incompatibilities with COHERENT and the MWC compiler will vary depending on the application. These issues are no different than those that apply to porting straight Unix applications to COHERENT. The point here is that the type of porting problems that you will run into porting X applications will be no different than porting straight UNIX applications. The portability problems that typically show up have to do with the compiler or operating system services. You should not see any problems with the X libraries. In the case of the compiler, the MWC compiler is strictly K&R and lacks ANSI features. This will cause you great grief trying to port an application that uses ANSI features such as function prototypes. Gcc is ANSI compliant so you might have better luck with this compiler. In the case of the operating system services, COHERENT lacks a number of Berkeley, POSIX, and System V system calls that show up now and again in some applications. However, you can usually find alternatives for the missing system calls. WHICH COMPILER IS NECESSARY FOR THIS, THE MWC COMPILER OR THE GCC? The Mark Williams compiler works fine. However, if you want to develop or port ANSI C or C++ applications, GCC will also work. WAS X BUILT USING COHERENT'S NATIVE COMPILER? Yes. ARE THE HEADER FILES SUPPLIED WITH YOUR PACKAGE IN ANSI OR REGULAR COHERENT FORM? Both. WHAT KIND OF UPDATE/SUPPORT IS INCLUDED IN THE BASE PACKAGE? The package includes one free upgrade. You can "cash in" on this upgrade whenever you wish. Once you use your free upgrade, you will need to repurchase the product if you desire subsequent upgrades. You will also receive phone and e-mail support during the 30 day trial period. WILL THE PACKAGE RUN ON FUTURE VERSIONS OF COHERENT? We do not depend on any undocumented features of the COHERENT operating system, and we do not anticipate the Mark Williams Company removing support for X in any of their future releases. Therefore, X11R5 should remain upward compatible with future releases of COHERENT. However, it is possible that future releases of COHERENT may require you to upgrade your X Windows System. We will work with the Mark Williams Company as closely as possible to insure compatibility issues are resolved . We will certainly release new versions of X11R5 in order to exploit networking, shared libraries, and other new features anticipated in future releases of COHERENT. IS A GIF VIEWER PART OF THE PACKAGE? No. However, there are several public domain GIF viewers that can easily be ported using our product. CAN I USE YOUR SOFTWARE WITH A VGA MONOCHROME MONITOR ? Yes. MY VIDEO CARD IS COMPATIBLE WITH ONE OF YOUR SUPPORTED CHIPSETS, BUT ONLY HAS 512K OF MEMORY ON IT. WILL I BE ABLE TO HAVE COLOR AT 800x600 RESOLUTION? Assuming your monitor supports it, yes. (800 x 600 = 480,000 which is less than 512K) CAN ANSWER SOFTWARE'S X11R5 SUPPORT 64K COLORS? Not at this time. The maximum is 256 colors. WHICH COM PORT SHOULD I USE FOR MY SERIAL MOUSE? Just be sure that your com port is interrupt driven as opposed to polled. DOES IT MATTER WHICH DRIVE I INSTALL FROM? No. You can install from either the A or B drive. DOES ANSWER SOFTWARE'S X11R5 DEVELOPMENT PACKAGE SUPPORT 8514 GRAPHIC BOARDS? Yes. Answer Software has tested the 8514 board and guarantees that the board will work fine in both monochrome and 256-color. However, our port of X11R5 does not currently exploit the accelerator. ARE THERE ANY OTHER X WINDOW PACKAGES AVAILABLE FOR COHERENT AT THIS TIME? No. DOES ANSWER SOFTWARE SELL X11R5 FOR COHERENT WITHOUT THE O'REILLY BOOKS? Yes. You can save $162 by ordering our product without documentation. That brings the price down to $137!!! Remember that X comes with on-line documentation and it may be all you need. Also, you will get installation instructions. If you want some O'Reilly books, and not others, we suggest you try your local bookstore or contact O'Reilly & Associates at 1-800-338-6887. If you order through us, however, it's "all or nothing". WHY MUST I GET THE 72 KERNEL UPDATE TO RUN YOUR PRODUCT? There are several reasons, however, the primary reason has to do with the hooks into the Coherent kernel that allow video memory to be mapped into a process (i.e. the X server) and allow a process (i.e. the X server) to perform I/O to video ports. We actually helped MWC define these hooks and they were implemented in the DDK and are also included in the kernel 72 update. This is the main reason we require our customers to get the kernel 72 update. Answer Software & Consulting will support the following video cards for their port of X11R5 to the COHERENT operating system. We also expect any video cards that are not listed, but have one of the following chipsets will also work without any problems. ARE LANGUAGES-OTHER-THAN-ENGLISH INTERFACES AVAILABLE. Currently under development, and available for testing are two most interesting interfaces, or xterm clients, one for JAPANESE, and one for CHINESE. The Japanese xterm should be available from Answer Software or their Japanese distributor, and the Chinese xterm, still under development is being worked on by Bob Chalmers, robert@cstpl.com.au. European interfaces, ( localization ) should be available in the near future. Video Card ChipSet ------------------------------------------------ ARC V-16 PVGA1A AT&T VDC 600 PVGA1A AST VGA Plus PVGA1A ATI Prism Elite TVGA8800CS ATI Ultra Mach 8 ATI Ultra Plus Mach 32 ATI Ultra Pro Mach 32 ATI Vantage Mach 8 ATI Wonder ATI18800 ATI Wonder PLUS ATI28800 ATI Wonder XL ATI28800 Boca SuperVGA ET4000 Compuadd Hi-Rez card ET4000 Diamond SpeedStar ET4000 Diamond SpeedStar+ ET4000 Diamond SpeedStar 24X WD90C31 Eizo MD-B07 ET3000 Eizo MD-B10 ET3000 Eizo Extra/EM ET3000 Everex UltraGraphics II EV-236 TVGA8900 Everex EV-678 TVGA8900 Genoa 5300 SuperVGA ET3000 Genoa 5400 SuperVGA ET3000 Genoa 6100 SuperVGA GVGA Genoa 6200 SuperVGA GVGA Genoa 6300 SuperVGA GVGA Genoa 6400 SuperVGA GVGA Oak Technology OTI-067 OTI67 Oak Technology OTI-077 OTI77 Optima Mega/1024 ET4000 Orchid Designer VGA ET3000 Orchid Designer 800 ET3000 Orchid ProDesigner ET3000 Orchid ProDesigner Plus ET3000 Orchid ProDesigner /e ET3000 Orchid ProDesigner II/1024 ET4000 Orchid ProDesigner IIs ET4000 Paradise VGA Plus PVGA1A Paradise VGA Professional PVGA1A Paradise VGA 1024 WD90C00 Sigma Legend ET4000 STB EM-16 VGA ET3000 STB EM-16+ VGA ET3000 STB Extra-EM ET3000 STB PowerGraph ET4000 Swan SVGA with VCO chip ET4000 Tecmar VGA AD ET3000 TOPVGA EXPERT ET4000 TRICOM Mega/1024 ET4000 TRUETECH VGA TVGA8800CS Trident TVGA 9000 TVGA9000 Trident TVGA 8900 TVGA8900C Trident TVGA 8800 TVGA8800CS Tseng Labs VGA ET4000 Video7 VRAM VGA Video7 Video7 VRAM II VGA Video7 Video7 VGA 1024i Video7 Video7 VGA 16 Video7 Western Digital VGA 16 PVGA1A ============================ patches and fixes ======================== > > 1. The install process completly overwrites the /etc/ttys file, removing > the virtual console things aand replacing everything with X11's own > version. > Q. Is there a way to avoid this, other that back it up first? > > 2. The install process, building the kernel from the kCoh77 update > directory, doesn't build in the virtual terminals, nor anything > else that was previously compiled into the r77 kernel. > Q. Is there something undocumented in the install process, or should > the option to use /conf be accepted as the kernel build directory > be accepted, and not the /conf/kCoh77 diectory. Our X package requires special console functions that are not available in the stock COHERENT console driver. As such, we had to provide a replacement console driver with our package. Unfortunately it does not support virtual consoles. That is why the definitions are removed from the /etc/ttys file. We are planning to eliminate this restriction in the next release of our product. > 3. The rebuilt kernel appears to be ignoring the 4 serial ports that are > on the system, and compiling in only the com1 and com2 ports. > Q. Is this the same problem as 2. above? This stuff is controlled by the file /etc/default/async. If a serial mouse is selected, or a bus mouse that uses IRQ 3 or IRQ 4, the definitions in /etc/default/async are modified to remove any serial ports that have conflicting IRQ's. This is required because our X mouse driver that is linked into your kernel will not be able to install it's interrupt handler if the regular COHERENT async driver has already taken it. In the case of a serial mouse connected to COM1, both COM1 and COM3 will be eliminated. If you have a COM3 that you want to use, you could modify /etc/default/async and uncomment the definition for COM3. However, to avoid the IRQ conflict you must change the IRQ # from 4 to 3. Also, you will only be able to use COM3 in polled mode since IRQ 3 is not really driving COM3. After you make any changes to /etc/default/async, you will need to relink your X kernel and reboot for them to take effect. If you are actually using a bus mouse, we recommend that you change the IRQ of the bus mouse to something not already used such as IRQ 5. We are looking into making the install procedure a little more friendly in this area. Bill@x4coher.com ========================== Since System V is the direction COHERENT is taking, that is the flavor we tried to stick with. Also, to make sure we didn't break anything in X11R5, we tried to avoid making any changes to the X header files as much as possible. To compile correctly on COHERENT you must include the following definitions on your compile: -DSYSV -DUSL -DSYSV386 More on this topic can be found in Chapter 5 of our startup guide. ================================================================== 1.1.94 Bret A. Johnson (bret@bjohns.win.net) wrote: : : In article <2fun5j$c3v@nermal.cs.uoguelph.ca>, Harry C Pulley (hpulley@herman.cs.uoguelph.ca) writes: : >Eric V. Bruno (eribruno@netcom.com) wrote: : >: To those who have ASC's Premier X11R5 : > : >: I had a package come in the mail today (27-Dec-93). I was not : >: expecting it so was quite suprised. : > : >: The Premier X11R5 Development Pkage Version 1.2 : >: For Coherent 4.2 systems : > : >: A product of Answer Software & Consulting : >: Revision 1.2.0 December 6, 1993 : > : >: The postmark was 23-Dec-93. : > : >: It installed without problem. You lose the virtual consoles like : >: the prior release. : > : >: The enclosed letter stated: : >: " enclosed a complimentary copy of our newest release 1.2 of the Premier : >: X11R5 Development Package" .... "is now compatible with the newly released : >: COHERENT 4.2" ... "CONERENT versions older that COHERNET 4.2 will not work : >: correctly" : > : >: The address on the enclosed letter was : > : >: Answer Software & Consulting : >: 182 Aldrich Rd. : >: Columbus, OH 43214 : > : >: No phone number or e-mail address was listed. : > : >Excellent! I hope I can contact them soon! : > : >It seems like they have just moved. I am sorry for assuming them dead... : > : I guess this seems a proper place to ask this one.. : Can any one make a comparision between ASC and the MWC X : implimentionions? : I have the MWC (RTR) one. I almost got ASC a while back. : The only thing I know of now is that the MWC one is cheaper even : with the marketing ploy of the Club.. But, ASC offered to sell me : the X books. ASC's supports bus mouses, many more video cards, doesn't use the clocks lines so it is much easier to set up, uses a special mouse driver so the movement is much smoother than when you use serial mouses, uses a socket driver instead of pipe emulation of sockets, binaries are much (100-200K) smaller for some reason [which saves disk space, RAM and loading time], can use the video BIOS for non-standard cards, etc. Harry -- hpulley@uoguelph.ca |This message released|It takes all kinds, Harry C. Pulley, IV |to the PUBLIC DOMAIN.|and to each his own. ----------------------------------+---------------------|This thought in mind, Stay away from the DOS side, Luke!|Un*x don't play that.|I walk alone. =============================================================================