ggm@brolga.cc.uq.oz (George Michaelson) (01/23/89)
I used mgr (possibly in an earlier version) at ucl.cs and I would
say it is the best candidate yet for porting to minix. It is delightfully
simply coded, and considerably smaller both in terms of it's runtime
requirements and sourcecode than X.
The problem is that the version I saw, used underlying SUNos primitives to do
much of the work. That is, the ioctls for mouse control, and the bitblt
support were not totally "standalone" in my opinion. [I only looked at
code to try and add embedded cut & paste, and not in much detail]
Furthermore I can't see why a port from SUNos on 68000 to SUNos on 386i
should be expected to take more than a few days given the closely coupled
nature of the two "systems" as a whole. -The MAC port is a better indication
of workload, but again the message implied it was under native MACos which
would also offer much embedded support for mouse and screen interaction.
For minix much of this would have to be done from scratch.
I would suggest asking the people in York University who ported BLIT to
the arari-ST under GEMdos to comment on the work. -They also appear to be
very MINIX literate [hello guys!]
Given the variety of different IBM/PC graphics standards to be supported you
are looking at a LOT of different underlying models to assure it would work
under all available systems [ega/cga/hercules/brain-damaged-amstrad etc etc]
for all graphics and all meese.
If somebody *did* succeed in doing this, and perhaps extended the client-
server model to use amoeba as well as TCP, or some serial line comms to
mainframes a la blit on 19.2k then this would be a very very attractive
system.
-george
--
ACSnet: ggm@brolga.cc.uq.oz Phone: +61 7 377 4079
Postal: George Michaelson, Prentice Computer Centre
Queensland University, St Lucia, QLD 4067 hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) (01/25/89)
In article <265@brolga.cc.uq.oz> ggm@brolga.cc.uq.oz (George Michaelson) writes:
%The problem is that the version I saw, used underlying SUNos primitives to do
%much of the work. That is, the ioctls for mouse control, and the bitblt
%support were not totally "standalone" in my opinion. [I only looked at
%code to try and add embedded cut & paste, and not in much detail]
%
%Furthermore I can't see why a port from SUNos on 68000 to SUNos on 386i
%should be expected to take more than a few days given the closely coupled
%nature of the two "systems" as a whole. -The MAC port is a better indication
%of workload, but again the message implied it was under native MACos which
%would also offer much embedded support for mouse and screen interaction.
%
%For minix much of this would have to be done from scratch.
Well... For those systems, the code is there, so why not use it, eh?
I'd expect to be able to use the Atari ST's blit primitives for an ST
Minix port as well.
%
%I would suggest asking the people in York University who ported BLIT to
%the arari-ST under GEMdos to comment on the work. -They also appear to be
%very MINIX literate [hello guys!]
I'd heard rumors of this - anyone know where I can get hold of it? It'd
be great to use with our Vaxen at work. And I'd certainly like to hear
their comments on the actual work...
%
%Given the variety of different IBM/PC graphics standards to be supported you
%are looking at a LOT of different underlying models to assure it would work
%under all available systems [ega/cga/hercules/brain-damaged-amstrad etc etc]
%for all graphics and all meese.
Would probably be a good idea to copy the Sun implementation's handling of
this. That requires /dev entries for the "graphic device" as well as
/dev/mouse. (And under X you need to create /dev/bell or else it won't be
able to beep at you. [A blessing? ]) Of course, how would you decide what
suite of functions to provide for each device driver?
%
%If somebody *did* succeed in doing this, and perhaps extended the client-
%server model to use amoeba as well as TCP, or some serial line comms to
%mainframes a la blit on 19.2k then this would be a very very attractive
%system.
The nice thing about mgr is that it doesn't care about the underlying
network. You simply use whatever commands are available to you to initiate
a session, somewhere.
%
% -george
%
%--
%ACSnet: ggm@brolga.cc.uq.oz Phone: +61 7 377 4079
%Postal: George Michaelson, Prentice Computer Centre
% Queensland University, St Lucia, QLD 4067
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