sam@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu (11/02/88)
I've been asked to port some software that I wrote for the Sun 3 to the Unix PC. They gave me a Unix PC running 3.5, a 40mb harddrive, 1meg of memory and an ethernet card. I've run into a number of problems trying to get all of this to work. The most painful problem is this : I installed the ethernet card and software and plugged it into our network ( class B 128.174.180.xxx ). Easy, huh? Everything seems to work. BUT. The machine is guarenteed to crash with a "kernal parity error" within the hour if I leave it plugged into the network. Also if I try and ftp a "large" file of 50K the machine crashes. Waiting the 5 to 10 minutes for it to come back up cuts down on development time a little. What am I doing wrong? The other problems come with porting the software. The program is a terminal emulator to talk to the Plato computer system ( big educational computer with a custom communcations protocol based loosely on the tektronix 4014 protocol.) I need as much resolution as possible in the Y direction because Plato expects 512 lines vertical ( up to the emulator to scale as appropriate.) /usr/include/sys/iohw.h says that the width is 720 ( great ) and that the height is 348. 348 scales out ok on other computers. But I can't use the whole screen. Does anybody have a set of graphics routines that will draw dots, lines, blocks and copy bitmaps that take advantage of the whole screen? I wrote some really gross routines using the wrastop function and wrastop is the one who tells me that I have a bounds error if I try to write to the bottom of the screen. The other problem is handling the keyboard. I need a simple routine that is non-blocking ( have to handle graphics and such coming over the serial port) and can give me a raw code for the keyboard? Lots of probs, huh? Well -- writing it on the Sun under SunView was a piece of cake, as was writing it on the ibm-pc. I've heard that I should avoid UA if I can -- is that right? Any advice? Anyone want a copy when it is done? Final questions : Can you get direct (not wrastop) access to screen memory? Has anybody ever ported X to this machine? Kurt Mahan mahan@uinova.cerl.uiuc.edu mahan/s/cerl ( on plato )