pda@stiatl.UUCP (Paul Anderson) (03/03/89)
This is a collection of information that I have been pulling together based on my own experiences and responses from the net. I hope you will find it useful. I will repost monthly at this point. I will mail this list to any requestors that miss it and will try to keep it updated. Anyone with additional information that would like to share it, I would greatly appreciate you sending it along and I will incorporate it within. Thanks, Paul Anderson --------------------------------------------------------------------- X11 for 386 Unix ---------------- >From: Dimitri Rotow >Bell Technologies. >Date: ~1/15/89 The Bell Tech Blit series of boards all run X. That we ship X10 as our present commercial implementation doesn't detract from the numerous 11 efforts on the Blit. We'll be shipping 11 in the weeks ahead based on AT&T's own X11 port. AT&T's stuff, by the way, is hands down the very best X11 port on Intel processors running System V. Their XWIN product is available off the shelf today and is absolutely rock solid. Even if you don't have one of our Blit boards, get the AT&T product and run it on your EGA (ugh!). The current line of Blits support 1662 x 1200 resolution in monochrome, and 640 x 480, 1024 x 768, 1024 x 1024 and 1280 x 1024 in color. The new "Instant Workstation" unit combines 1662 x 1200 in mono, plus 640 x 480 in color, plus thick and thin Ethernet, plus a mouse port on the same card. As well as X it runs TCP/IP, NFS and/or RFS for netstuff. These things plug into any '386 clone. Packages similar to Microsoft Windows for X =========================================== >From: Doug Toppin >uunet!melpar!toppin >Date: ~1/15/89 I use something at work called 'Viewnix' from the Five Paces Software company in Atlanta, Georgia. I run IBM Xenix V on an AT. It is configured into the kernel and provides multiple, simultaneously displayed windows on the console. Each window can be the size of the screen or smaller. The windows can remain in the background undisplayed or be floated to the foreground. Each window is in the device directory and is thus treated just like a terminal. Processes can be running in each window and each process believes it controls an entire terminal. I am extremely impressed with its performance and features. I believe the cost is ~$250.00 a pop but it is worth it. IBM-PC X-Windows Implementations ================================ >From: gatech!stiatl!pda (Paul Anderson) >Sales Technologies, Inc. >Date: 3/2/89 Graphic Software Systems has a PC XWindows Display Server that runs on 8088/86/286/386 class PC's running MSDOS. It requires the use of Excelan's 'Intelligent ethernet board' Model 205T. Current support is for EGA/VGA/VGIS graphics display cards. (VGIS is a very high res mono (I believe) display.) Software package is "PC XView", part no: 1260 priced at $295.00. Contact Russ Sprunger or Jim Thomason at Graphic Software Systems, Inc. (503) 641-2200. For the 205T ethernet board, contact David Hart at Excelan (800) 392-3526 or (408) 434-2300. You will also need their "Lan Workplace for PCDOS host share package", which is bundled with the board. The bundled price is $1150. -- >From: William S. Cole, University of Southern California >ARPA: cole@dworkin.USC.EDU >Date: ~1/15/89 For those interested in using X Windows Version 11 on an IBM-AT or compatible, Integrated Inference Machines has developed an X11 server which runs under MS-DOS using Microsoft Windows. The server converts an IBM-AT into an X Windows terminal. It requires a system with at least 2Meg of extended memory and currently requires an Excelan ethernet board (others are planned). Because the server runs under Microsoft Windows, a large variety of monochrome and color displays are supported. For more information, contact: Tricia Nuskin or Charles Ross Integrated Inference Machines 1468 E. Katella Avenue Anahiem, California 92805 Phone (714)978-6776 FAX (714)939-0746 -- >From: mbroadbe@gldsyd.OZ (Mark Broadbent) >Organization: Gould Electronics, CSD, Sydney, Australia >Date: 20 Feb 89 04:15:35 GMT >I am looking for the x window on IBM PC/AT compatibles with EGA >or VGA (maybe others?) graphics display. We have pcXsight running on a Commodore PClone and a NEC Powermate IV, connected to a Gould PowerNode Unix Super-minicomputer. This software runs on 8088, 8086, 80286, 80386 IBM PC compatibles, under DOS 3.1 or later, with an EGA, VGA, Hercules, or AT&T 6300 graphics adaptor. A chap called Peter Brown is distributing the software here in Australia. You can contact him on (02) 957-2522. XWindows Terminals Sources ========================== >From: Paul Anderson >Sales Technologies, Inc. >Date: ~1/15/89 Visual Technologies "Visual 640" X Display Station X11R2, TCP/IP, has support to use NFS for font downloads, TELNET terminal mode. 700 KB ROM with X Server and Ethernet Software. Monochrome display, 14" diagonal crt, 1024x800. Thick and thin wire Ethernet interfaces, as will as SLIP at 38.4 kbd. Optical mouse, DEC VT220 compatible keyboard. 68000 Cpu clocked at 10 Mhz, 1MB ram standard. Ed Heinze, Visual Technologies 1703 Middlesex St. Lowell, MA 01851 (508) 459-4903 1 (800) VISUAL-C -------- >From: Paul Anderson >Sales Technologies, Inc. >Date: ~1/15/89 Acer Counterpoint, Inc. "Acer Xebra 100" X11R2, TCP/IP, FTP for font downloads, TELNET & RS232 terminal mode. 512 KB ROM with X Server and Ethernet Software. Monochrome display, 14" diagonal crt, 640x480. Thick and thin wire Ethernet interfaces, as will as SLIP at 38.4 kbd. 8086 Cpu clocked at 10Mhz, 640KB ram standard. 3 button (or optional 2 button) optical mouse, DEC VT100 compatible keyboard. Centronics parallel port. Summary: The 640k of ram in the workstation was too little for our application so we were unable to evaluate the unit. Contact: Anil Singh, Acer Counterpoint 2127 Ringwood Ave. San Jose, CA 95131 (408) 434-0190 Fax: (408) 434-0273 Telex: 856884 ------- >From: Ken Lee klee@daisy.uucp >Daisy Systems Corp., Interactive Graphics Tools Dept. Tektronix (Beaverton, OR), model 4211 Graphics Netstation, 386SX cpu, TI 34010 graphics processor, 1024x768 color, 15" screen, $6495 ------- >From: Richard A. Johnson raj@ics.uci.edu (Internet) >UCI ICS Assistant Support Manager ucbvax!ucivax!raj (UUCP) >Date ~2/10/89 NCD-16 X Window Terminal We recently picked up one of the NCD-16 X Windowing terminals (the one which was at the Usenix in San Diego in case you know the one to which I'm referring) for a 1 week evaluation. (We would have liked to keep it longer but these things are really in demand and NCD doesn't have too many of them as yet. (We got serial number 50 or so! Something like that.) I thought I'd give everyone our impressions of it. General description: -------------------- 16 inch black and white square non-interlaced monitor. Resolution of 1024 x 1024. IBM-PC style keyboard layout. .5 - 4.5 Mb of memory (using SIMs) There are 4 SIM slots in the base. The unit has .5 Mb with nothing installed in these slots. You can put in 256K SIMs or 1Mb SIMs. (Are other size SIMs available? I don't use Macs so I don't know too much about SIMs really.) (Our unit had 1.5 Mb using 256K SIMs. We wish we had some 1Mb SIMs to try it with, but I couldn't find any at the time.) Software is at rev. 3 of X11. (Visual is currently in Beta testing of Rev. 3.) Supports thick and thin ethernet plus SLIP. Good points: ------------ The 16 inch screen is a LOT better than the small 14 inch Visual one. Also the non-interlaced monitor doesn't flicker like the Visual screen does. (This "flicker" is really evident if you use "twm". The header bars when you're focused on a window are really bothersome on the Visual, but are nice and clean on the NCD-16.) The pixels are closer together on the NCD and thus pictures appear sharper. The keyboard feels rather nice. I liked it a lot better than the Visual keyboard. (And MOST keyboards are better than a Sun, so that was no competition! :-) ) Setup and use was very straight forward. If you know enough about networking to set something like this up, then you can figure out how to do it easily. (By the way, we didn't have a manual, but we set it up with no problems.) The NCD system has a special graphic processor. This was really evident to me when I ran "texx" and panned around the zoomed image. On a Sun this flickers so badly that it's a really pain in the !@#$%, but on the NCD it was really smooth and fast. A few orders of magnitude improvement! Honest! The hardware has a little network activity light. It was nice when wondering why something (like getting a font) was taking so long. Bad points: ----------- It doesn't have NFS access for font files. It uses TFTP. This seems slower than the Visual using NFS. They said they will shortly have NFS (another month or so). Apparently you can't have more than around 20 or so TCP connections at once. This was a problem for us (the support staff), but probably wouldn't be one for general users. They said they could increase the limit and asked what was a good number. I told them 50 or so at least, but closer to 100 would be even better. It doesn't support compressed fonts. I haven't told them about this yet. I'll report back on their response when I do. We found 1 minor bug and 1 major one: 1) Minor: "xset fp" seems to do one of two things; both wrong. Sometimes it will set the font path to "(none)". This results in all font manipulations failing making the terminal unusable. Sometimes it simply "bombs" the system in such a way that it tells you push a letter to affect a system reboot. Both of these are bad, but you can avoid them by simply explicitly resetting the same font path. I haven't told them about this one either. I'll let you know. 2) Major: Sometimes the whole system just "locks up". When this happens the little network monitoring light stays on constantly and no mouse buttons or keyboard input works. The system still tracks the mouse but that's all. Killing X programs doing output on the system doesn't have any effect. They said they haven't seen this but they'll take note of it and see what can be done. Summary: -------- If I could get one in my office right now, I'd gladly give up my Sun 3/50! The increase in speed of the unit more than makes up for the lack of real estate in my opinion. Others in our support group feel the same way. We'll probably order a few of them, however we'll have an agreement with them first that we continue getting free software updates until they support NFS, have fixed all of the bugs we found, and maybe until they support compressed fonts. They're worth checking into. Definitely. By the way, I was told they plan a larger (19 inch) unit later this year (but who doesn't? 8^) ). Phone contacts: Main number for NCD: (415) 694-0650 I talked to Judy Estrin, who refered me to Janak Pathak, the sales manager. -- >From: SMITHKLINE.COM!WOOD ("Bill Wood, Upper Merion IS X5163 L331") >Organization: The Internet >Date: 22 Feb 89 04:56:00 GMT I use X at 9600 baud all the time, and the response is fabulous! My secret is the new Graphon X terminal. This terminal uses a Graphon protocol to communicate with the host computer, so it avoids the 3 layers of protocol inherent in X over SLIP (you have the X protocol, the SLIP protocol, and the TCPIP protocol). The Graphon communicates directly with an X server running on a Unix machine. Right now I am connected to a 9600 baud Microcom modem, which is dialed in to work; there it connects to another modem, thence to a Dec terminal server running LAT protocol. From there, I am connected to another terminal server which is offering the serial port on a Sun 3 as a service. The Sun, in turn, is running Graphon's X server. I have an xterm session, and from it I did an rlogin to our Vax system, and sent this message. You have to try this terminal to believe it. ICO runs like a bat out of hell! And there are virtually no memory restrictions, since the server is on the Sun. GraphOn is: GraphOn Corporation 67 S. Bedford St. Suite 400 W. Burlington, MA 01803 (617) 229-5829 Tony Parisi BBN Software Products -- >From: klee@daisy.UUCP (Ken Lee) >Organization: Daisy Systems Corp., Mountain View, Ca. >Date: 27 Feb 89 17:58:54 GMT There's an article discussing the GraphOn and several other X terminals in the Feb., 1989 issue of *Mini-Micro Systems*. GraphOn Corp. is located in San Jose, California. The GraphOn OptimaX 200 terminal will reportedly be formally introduced at Uniforum this week. X FOR IBM RT's ============== >From: Scott Schwartz <schwartz@shire.cs.psu.edu> >Date: ~2/20/89 In article <1709@ssc.UUCP>, fyl@ssc (Phil Hughes) writes: >Mike Kupfer writes: >> Is anyone running X on VGA displays? Is anyone working on it? >I haven't seen it run but Everex claims their X (X11 R3 which comes with >ENIX, their 5.3.2 port for the 386) works with both EGA and VGA. IBM ships X11 and drivers for the VGA with AOS (a.k.a. 4.3BSD) for their 6152 workstations (little RT's). Works fine. X Servers For the MAC II ======================== >From: alan@metasoft.UUCP (Alan Epstein) >Organization: Meta Software Corporation, Cambridge MA >Date: 2 Mar 89 15:54:27 GMT > we'd like to run the new eXodus X server on the mac II. as i > understand it, we can use TCP/IP with ethernet cards running > in the Mac II, or we can use the Appletalk Data Stream Protocol > with our Kinetics box. The second option requires ADSP to be > running on the host (a Sun 3 in this case). > [where may the necessary items be obtained?] Contact Jon Simmonds at IPT (Information Presentation Technologies). Their number is (818)347-7791. I'm not sure if they have ADSP running on the Sun 3 yet, but they were getting close back in November. They definitely do have some software for the Sun 3. I saw it running when I worked with them, and I saw an announcement for product shipment back in early January. I used the software on a MIPS M/120 last year, and it was great. I ran a MacII diskless (well, I had to boot from floppy, but after that it asked me for a Unix login, kicked out the disk, and warm-booted from the network). Also, it gives Unix/Mac access to printers on both networks, so you can access a LaserWriter from Unix and a Unix printer from the Mac. There's also a Unix mail interface and a few other neat items. My point is that it can be useful for many needs, not just ADSP. -- Paul Anderson gatech!stiatl!pda (404) 841-4000 X isn't just an adventure, X is a way of life...
klee@daisy.UUCP (Ken Lee) (03/04/89)
The Feb. 27 issue of InfoWorld mentions the MIPS RS1210 X terminal. 70Hz, non-interlaced, 16" monochrome, 1024x1024 pixels, up to 4.5MB RAM, Ethernet, TCP/IP. Basic model with 1MB is $3200, available in late March. I saw one of these at UniForum. The MIPS salesman admitted that it was really a NCD X terminal. Some other news from UniForum: IBM was displaying X servers for OS/2 and PC-DOS. Sorry, I didn't get any details. Apple has X running on the Macintosh under A/UX. Apollo has ported Open Dialog to X, but it doesn't use the X Toolkit (yet). Open Dialog support for the X Toolkit is planned to support Motif. NCR, NCD, Visual, Acer, and GraphOn X terminals were all on display. The first 3 look and perform suprisingly similarly. Salesmen from Tektronix and Wyse admitted that their rumored X terminals were vaporware at best. Toshiba and NEC were displaying "portable" 80386-based UNIX computers that run the X Window System. By portable, they mean they fold into 15 pound breifcases and can be carried to somewhere else with AC power. They're kind of cute, though. Ken Lee -- klee@daisy.uucp Daisy Systems Corp., Interactive Graphics Tools Dept.