In order to connect your Macintosh as an X terminal to another machine,
you will need to take a few preliminary steps.
1) Lanuch MI/X
2) Select File / Preferences... from the menubar.
3) Select Hosts and select "Allow All" or "Allow Listed" accordingly.
If you want to restrict access to your Machine, and still use it as an X terminal,
select "Allow Listed" and add your host's name to the list by clicking the "Add"
button.
These steps will allow the connection of X traffic to your Macintosh. Now, in order
to launch X programs, you will need to use a telnet session. By telneting to your host,
you may tell your host where to send its output by executing the UNIX command
setenv DISPLAY your.Mac's.IP.number:0.0
Of course you will need to replace the text "your.Mac's.IP.number" with the actual
IP number of your Mac. Your machine's name may also work:
for instance if your machine's name is "mars" and its IP number is 109.122.122.1 you could type:
setenv DISPLAY mars:0.0
or failing that
setenv DISPLAY 109.122.122.1:0.0
In the event that your host gives you an error saying "can't open host xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx"
and you have tried both of the setenv commands above, make sure that you have set up
MI/X to allow remote clients as outlined at the top of this document. If you are allowing connections from remote servers, you may also use the UNIX command line to tell a particular X program where to send its output, instead of using the setenv command as above. This is done by passing the -d option. For instance you may execute xclock in the background on your remote host and have the output sent to your Mac by typing:
xclock -d 109.122.122.1:0.0 &
If none of the above methods work, check with your system administrator and make sure that your remote host is allowing X traffic over the network.
Configuring your session
You may choose to use the same twm configurations when using MI/X on your Mac that you use on your UNIX host. By default, MI/X will run its own twm, which will read its configuaration from a system.twmrc which is the same syntax as a .twmrc file on UNIX.
In the system.twmrc, you can execute a command on a remote system using f.exec and rsh. Since Macintoshs don't have an rsh command, it's built into twm. For example:
Button3 = : root : f.menu "RightButtonMenu"
menu "RightButtonMenu"
{
"Remote xterms" f.title
"host1" !("rsh -l username host1 xterm")
"host2" !("rsh -l username host2 xterm")
"host3" !("rsh -l username host3 xterm")
}
Where "username" is the name of the account on the remote machine to run the xterm as. A -display parameter will be appended to the command to redirect the xterm to the MI/X server.
You can also tell MI/X to use a window manager such as mwm on the remote host. This is done by selecting File / Preferences... and selecting the "Preferences" icon on the left. Deselect the checkbox saying "Use local window manager (twm)." You then will need to use telnet to execute your window manager on your remote host.
Mouse Buttons
Since most Macintosh mice only have one button, MI/X defaults to using Option-Click as the middle button and Command-Click as the right button. If you have a 3 button mouse, be sure you have the control panel for the mouse installed. You can then use the mouse's control panel to tell the mouse to output what MI/X expects or use the MI/X preferences dialog to tell MI/X what the mouse will output.
Preferences
Starting MI/X while holding down the command key will bring up the preferences dialog instead of launching the X server.
XDM
MI/X has partial support for XDM (X Display Manager) but it's not done yet.
