herb@blender.UUCP (Herb Peyerl) (10/22/89)
Subject: X on IBM RT w/EGA display. Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt Imagine my delight at some guy wanting to trade HIS 6150-25 for my '286 clone. So now I have this machine and all seems to be coming along nicely. However, imagine my dismay when trying to bring up IBM's rendition of XWindows on the EGA display that the machine came with. I get "No adaptor match found.". I've installed all the appropriate GSL stuff, created PTY's, and done just about everything I can think of. RTFM'ing shows that X wants to run on a 6153, 6154 or an 8058. I can't afford any of these devices so that isn't a viable solution. My question: Does anyone know of or have any experience running X on an RT with an EGA Display? Other questions: This machine came with an IBM 5378 monitor, box and AT-bus card. Of course the RT won't recognize it. Insiders at IBM tell me it's meant to hook an AT up to a 370 and give it some sort of graphics capability. Does anyone have any experience with this item. I don't have/have never see/don't want to see a 370 but would be delighted if this rather large and colour capable monitor would run on the RT. I know this is slim but hell... while I'm here. I have a VT220 hooked up to the 4-port asynch which seems to work reasonably well. Proper IBM Terminal cable with a 25 foot 1:1 extension. Now, the terminal works well until I happen to hit a key while the RT is displaying something on it. The port then hangs for any input to the RT, yet the RT can generate output to the terminal just fine. Pdisable/penabling the port generates the appropriate login banner yet will not accept keystrokes. The only solution to the problem seems to be pdisabling, unplugging the cable off the RT, penabling, and reinstalling the cable in the port. Or just rebooting the machine. I've had this same terminal and cable hooked up to my old Xenix box and didn't experience this problem at all. However, I've worked with RT's and used IBM3151 terminals and haven't run across this problem either. Does anyone know anything about this? No, I haven't attacked the cable with a breakout box yet. I don't have one. Other relevant information: 6150-25, 2 R40 drives (give me more diskspace.. Someone.. Quick), 4mb RAM, 4-Port Asynch, Floating Point accelorator, IBM EGA Display-card, Tatung EGA monitor, AIX V2.2.1...
wine@maui.cs.ucla.edu (David Wine) (10/25/89)
I run AOS 4.3 with Xwindows using MEGAPEL and EGA adapters and monitors. Once X comes up the EGA monitor works fine (although the server crashes if I tax it too much.) As a console device, the EGA doesn't work. The characters are all jumbled up. But all in all it works out OK. It's really nice to slide the mouse cursor off the side of one screen out onto the other. The only problem I have is during reboot when the system prefers the EGA as a console. There are some messages I miss before I can hot-key over to the MEGAPEL. --David Wine
karish@forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish) (10/25/89)
In article <15@blender.UUCP> herb@blender.UUCP (Herb Peyerl) wrote: > My question: Does anyone know of or have any experience running >X on an RT with an EGA Display? Why bother? The 6153 can only handle one full-sized text window under X, unless you use a microscopic font and read it with a magnifier. And it has three times as many pixels as an EGA. Besides, if you only have 4 MB of memory, your system will be paging like crazy to keep up with X. I'd take the X stuff off the disk, and use the 7 MB or so you get that way for something that's more directly useful. The multi-screen console system isn't as sexy as X, but it's a lot faster on a 4 MB RT. > I have a VT220 hooked up to the 4-port asynch >which seems to work reasonably well. Proper IBM Terminal cable >with a 25 foot 1:1 extension. Now, the terminal works well >until I happen to hit a key while the RT is displaying something >on it. The port then hangs for any input to the RT, yet the >RT can generate output to the terminal just fine. Pdisable/penabling >the port generates the appropriate login banner yet will not accept >keystrokes. Sounds like a line discipline or flow control problem. Your port should be configured for dtr protocol and local connection. >The only solution to the problem seems to be pdisabling, >unplugging the cable off the RT, penabling, and reinstalling the >cable in the port. This might be OK on the four-port card, but don't do it on the planar serial ports (on the system board). IBM recommends that you power down the machine to unplug anything from the system board. They've replaced two system boards for us after they became flaky for one reason or another, so I believe there's cause for concern. Did you try to delete and replace the driver for that port, using vrmconfig? That sometimes un-gums a serial port. `vrmconfig -d tty2' followed by `vrmconfig -a tty2'. No need to power down, or even go to single user mode. For a while, we ran an RT with an EGA card and an IBM monochrome PC monitor, under AIX 2.1.1. It worked fine, but then again we never tried to run X on it. I played with two monitors once on an RT running an early version of the 4.3 port. At that time, at least, the code for selecting the console on a two-monitor system was incomplete. Chuck Karish karish@mindcraft.com (415) 493-9000 karish@forel.stanford.edu