gfr@cobra.mitre.org (Glenn Roberts) (01/13/89)
> <on the Sun 386i> .. "Can DOS windows be opened via telnet, or > even over serial lines? I know that DOS can handle a standard > ANSI display mode, so this doesn't sound too far fetched. You can have multiple DOS sessions on the 386i (I just telnetted into my machine and ran dos -w to test this .. works fine). The problem is that the guy who telnets in can't do much that's useful. The telnet session can't handle memory mapped screen I/O so forget about using any kind of spreadsheet or word processor and most database packages. I haven't tried loading the ANSI driver, but I'm guessing that it wouldn't work over the telnet session, besides I don't know of too many DOS packages that make use of it. If all you want to do is compilations or some other line oriented work (edlin?) that should work fine. Note that DOS is a CPU hog on the 386i - simply entering text into a file via edlin pegs the CPU meter at 100% on my machine so performance with two active DOS sessions would probably be lousy. - Glenn Roberts, The MITRE Corp., McLean VA (703) 883-6820 gfr@cobra.mitre.org
ted@braggvax.arpa (01/13/89)
>Can DOS windows be opened via telnet, or even over serial lines?...
Yes.
Unfortunately it is not very useful. You can start a DOS session in
telnet or however you are logged in outside of Sunview by typing
dos -w
The catch is that you only get output that goes through the standard DOS
I/O calls, which most applications, and many utilities tend to bypass for
direct screen memory access. So, you can run something like the MIX
Powerc compiler with no problem, but something like the Turbo C integrated
environment produces a blank screen (probably the command line version
would work, but I haven't tried it). If you start up an application like
this, and it has an abort sequence that can be sent from an ascii
keyboard, you can exit it, otherwise you are hosed. (And of course, you
are generally hosed on things like ALT keys even for "well behaved"
programs).
It seems to me that SUN could provide a curses like emulator for remote
DOS programs (which would help with ones that do flashy text menus and
windows, but no graphics per se), but for now, if it's other than plain
vanilla, forget it.
Ted Nolan
ted@braggvax.arpa