fwp1@CC.MsState.Edu (Frank Peters) (08/16/90)
Hello,
We have had the X11R4 from expo installed on our Sun systems and have been
keeping them current with all of the patches.
We have recently received Open Windows 2.0 from Sun. It includes a number
of very nice tools.
Now I am faced with the problem of integrating MIT X and Open Windows and
I'm wondering what others are doing about this.
Here are some of the questions I have. Any and all suggestions would be
most gratefully accepted.
1. Is it reasonable to copy (or link) the libraries in /usr/lib to the
lib directory in OPENWINHOME? Presumably the versions I have with
the latest MIT patches are newer and better than the ones that came
with OW 2.0. And presumably as new fixes come out of MIT they will
continue to improve. I've tried these links (in a personal copy of
OW 2.0 on my workstation) and this seems to work . In fact, it prevents
many of our existing X applications from complaining about library
versions (I can keep LD_LIBRARY_PATH defined without any conflicts).
Are there any hidden gotchas?
2. Assuming that there is no desire to run sunview or news applications
would it be reasonable/better/faster to run the X server in /usr/bin/X11
instead of xnews? The xnews program is more than twice the size of the
Xsun executable and presumably does a lot of work to allow for NeWS and
sunview. Again, I have made this change personally and it seems to
work fine. I have not been able to make any real performance evaluations
though. Note that I'm not talking in this case about replacing xnews
(since some of our users presumably want sunview and or NeWS apps).
Rather, I have made a link to /usr/bin/X11/Xsun and run that with the
-server flag.
3. Are the libraries and such shipped with OW 2.0 identical to those which
will presumably reappear on expo? Assuming that I compile the expo
sources (without deleting my root directory :-) would it be reasonable
to replace the libraries in the Sun release with the newer (and better?)
ones?
4. Are there any other suggestions for improving the integration of MIT X
and OW 2.0?
Thanks in advance.
--Frank
--
Frank W. Peters Systems Programmer Computing Center & Services
fwp1@CC.MsState.Edu Peters@MsState.Bitnet (601)325-2942
"I can't give you brains, but I can give you a diploma." -- The Wizard of OZ
--
Frank W. Peters Systems Programmer Computing Center & Services
fwp1@CC.MsState.Edu Peters@MsState.Bitnet (601)325-2942
"I can't give you brains, but I can give you a diploma." -- The Wizard of OZfgreco@govt.shearson.COM (Frank Greco) (08/16/90)
> >1. Is it reasonable to copy (or link) the libraries in /usr/lib to the > lib directory in OPENWINHOME? Presumably the versions I have with > the latest MIT patches are newer and better than the ones that came > with OW 2.0. And presumably as new fixes come out of MIT they will > continue to improve. I've tried these links (in a personal copy of > OW 2.0 on my workstation) and this seems to work . In fact, it prevents > many of our existing X applications from complaining about library > versions (I can keep LD_LIBRARY_PATH defined without any conflicts). > Are there any hidden gotchas? > We do the same thing. Everything, so far, works fine. >2. Assuming that there is no desire to run sunview or news applications > would it be reasonable/better/faster to run the X server in /usr/bin/X11 > instead of xnews? The xnews program is more than twice the size of the > Xsun executable and presumably does a lot of work to allow for NeWS and > sunview. Again, I have made this change personally and it seems to > work fine. I have not been able to make any real performance evaluations > though. Note that I'm not talking in this case about replacing xnews > (since some of our users presumably want sunview and or NeWS apps). > Rather, I have made a link to /usr/bin/X11/Xsun and run that with the > -server flag. You could bring up xnews with the env variable X11ONLY set. That will, essentially, bring xnews up as a garden variety X server and not load any NeWS-ish things into the server. OW 2.0 server is very fast. Basically the speed we all saw going from vanilla X11R3 to R4 is more than obtained from OW 1.X to 2.0 (...or perhaps OW 1.X was sooooo slow....;-) On our network, we mix X11R4 and OpenWindows with very minor problems. We use primarily X software...but the NeWS stuff is so cool. > >4. Are there any other suggestions for improving the integration of MIT X > and OW 2.0? > There are some weird-ities running OW binaries on a R4 server. Like OW's (2.0 that is) shelltool barfs quite frequently (we don't really care since we prefer xterm), some other binaries (mostly game-ish things) lock the server (or olwm)... but all in all, every thing meshes pretty well for us. Frank G. +-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+ |Frank D. Greco - Consultant | | | | | |On Assignment at: |Office: | | Shearson Lehman Brothers | Crossroads Technologies, Inc. | | World Financial Center, 11th Floor| PO Box 530 | | New York City, NY 10007 | Fanwood, NJ 07023 | | | | | email: fgreco@shearson.com | email: frank5@mars.njit.edu | | voice: (212) 528-6122 | voice: (201)-754-7820 | +-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+ My comments reflect my own opinions, not my clients.
salzman%gaucho@RAND.ORG (Isaac) (08/17/90)
>bu.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ra!tzu!fwp1@bloom >-beacon.mit.edu (Frank Peters) writes: > >Here are some of the questions I have. Any and all suggestions would be >most gratefully accepted. Hiya. We've been running a mixed OpenWindows (1.0, 1.0.1, 2.0beta, 2.0) and X11R4 environment for quite some time. I've written some shell scripts and csh aliases to that are used here at RAND to deal with the mixed environment as well as provide a friendlier front end to xinit for people that have never used X before (we have a lot of SunView users that are just starting into X). You can anonymous ftp them from expo.lcs.mit.edu as contrib/sun-xaliases.shar.Z (they've been there since June, and I just updated it today). Here's how I deal with some of the problems you've mentioned: >1. Is it reasonable to copy (or link) the libraries in /usr/lib to the >lib directory in OPENWINHOME? Presumably the versions I have with >the latest MIT patches are newer and better than the ones that came >with OW 2.0. And presumably as new fixes come out of MIT they will >continue to improve. I've tried these links (in a personal copy of >OW 2.0 on my workstation) and this seems to work . In fact, it prevents >many of our existing X applications from complaining about library >versions (I can keep LD_LIBRARY_PATH defined without any conflicts). >Are there any hidden gotchas? You can link things in there if you like, it shouldn't be a problem. I set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to search the X11R4 lib directory first, then $OPENWINHOME/lib. The OW2 shared libX11 has a higher version number than the X11R4 version. To deal with that I just made a sym-link in the X11R4 lib directory: libX11.so.4.3 -> libX11.so.4.2, and that'll keep ld.so from complaining. I prefer that to trying to keep everything in one spot. The fewer sym-links I make, the better! :-) >2. Assuming that there is no desire to run sunview or news applications >would it be reasonable/better/faster to run the X server in /usr/bin/X11 >instead of xnews? I run the xnews server all the time. Give pageview, the NeWS PostScript previewer, a try sometime. They've done quite a nice job on it! Sometimes running SunView programs can be very useful. It's especially cool if you're debugging X applications with dbx or gdb and setting break points durring pointer grabs. You can start up a SunView cmdtool and run dbx in there. Since SunView app's are completely independant, the pointer grab won't effect the SunView window (whereas if you tried this in an xterm you would lock up the server and have to kill the process from another machine). I set up our scripts/aliases so people can run which ever they choose. On a Sun 3 with limited memory (< 8meg), you probably want to run the R4 server. On a SPARCstation, xnews and the R4 server run at about the same speed (if you have a GX, xnews is probably faster). >3. Are the libraries and such shipped with OW 2.0 identical to those which >will presumably reappear on expo? Assuming that I compile the expo >sources (without deleting my root directory :-) would it be reasonable >to replace the libraries in the Sun release with the newer (and better?) >ones? The XView source distribution presumably has some bug fixes that aren't in the OW2 binary distribution. You can replace the OW2 lib's with the ones you build from source if you like.... >4. Are there any other suggestions for improving the integration of MIT X >and OW 2.0? Fonts can be a hassle. If you've got Andrew or xtex installed you'll need to convert the Andrew and xtex fonts to xnews format. It would be nice if xnews could use .snf fonts. Converting the bdf fonts is pretty simple though. You run convertfont on the bdf files and then bldfamily on the directory that contains the output from convertfont. Then you use xset to add that stuff to your font path as you normally would. Check the man pages for details. Pick up sun-xaliases.shar.Z and check the README file for more MIT X and OW2 integration issues. :-) Ciao! -- * Isaac J. Salzman ---- * The RAND Corporation - Information Sciences Dept. /o o/ / * 1700 Main St., PO Box 2138, Santa Monica, CA 90406-2138 | v | | * AT&T : +1 213-393-0411 x6421 or x7923 (ISL lab) _| |_/ * Internet : salzman@rand.org / | | * UUCP : !uunet!rand.org!salzman | | |
janssen@parc.xerox.com (Bill Janssen) (08/17/90)
In article <9008161814.AA19815@gaucho.rand.org> salzman%gaucho@RAND.ORG (Isaac) writes:
Fonts can be a hassle [with OpenWindows]. If you've got Andrew [...]
installed you'll need to convert the Andrew [...] fonts to xnews format.
You can ftp the Andrew fonts, compiled for xnews, from expo.lcs.mit.edu,
contrib/andrew/AndrewFontsForOW.tar.Z, 226061 bytes. I've tried them with
OW 1.0 and 2.0.
Bill
--
Bill Janssen janssen@parc.xerox.com (415) 494-4763
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, California 94304wolf@cbnewsh.att.com (thomas.wolf) (08/17/90)
From article <9008161357.AA19858@islanders.>, by fgreco@govt.shearson.COM (Frank Greco): > You could bring up xnews with the env variable X11ONLY set. That > will, essentially, bring xnews up as a garden variety X server > and not load any NeWS-ish things into the server. OW 2.0 server I've been told (and checked it by running with and without) that for OW2.0, the X11ONLY variable is no longer needed or even looked at (and has no effect on server size). /dev/tom -- +-------------------------------------+ "Stupid" questions are better than | Thomas Wolf | (201) 949-8063 | no questions at all. No answer is | Bell Labs, NJ | wolf@spanky.att.com | better than a stupid one. +-------------------------------------+