pr@cl.cam.ac.uk (Peter Robinson) (07/19/90)
We have a server for X10.4 that runs under XDE. This is written entirely in Mesa, using none of the X code distributed from MIT, and uses the standard XDE TCP/IP support. This has been in use for a three or four years now and is stable and reliable, if slightly incomplete. We routinely use it to access microVAXes in our distributed computing system from Daybreaks. The performance is quite acceptable (better than a monochrome VAXstation) but has occasional hiccups which we attribute to quirks in the underlying TCP/IP code. The server is rather complicated because it places all the X windows inside XDE windows. This means that all the usual XDE tools continue running and using the input system in their ordinary way while the X clients elsewhere believe that they are talking to an ordinary X server. This is allied with a simple XDE tool and a Unix daemon that allow an XDE user to cause a named Unix machine to run an xterm connected on one side to a login shell and on the other to an X connection back to the XDE machine. Thus an XDE user can log on to an arbitrary Unix machine with little effort. We never quite got round to upgrading it to X11. All our other workstations are now running X11.4, but we have retained an X10 version of xterm, so at least we can run terminal sessions from Daybreaks. I do not beleive that there are any great intellectual difficulties in upgrading the server, just a certain amount of tedium. We also wanted to install XDE 6.0 before doing any further work, but that has been rather slow arriving. We have not given much thought to making the server available under ViewPoint but, given the TCP/IP code, I imagine that there would be no great difficulties. If you are interested in integrating Xerox workstations into a Unix environment, you should also be aware of some other pieces of software that we have written. We have an XNS-SMTP mail gateway running under XDE using the Foreign Gateway Assistant, although this is about to be superseded by running Alpine on a nearby Sun. We also have tools for XDE and InterLisp that allow network news to be read from Unix servers using the remote read news protocol, and a number of utility tools to handle rwho transmissions and so on. Finally (but nothing to do with Unix), we have a mail-fax link running through a Xerox 7021 fax machine; sending faxes as electronic mail is extremely popular, receiving them is a bit slow. Back on the original question, you might care to check on Cal Poly's X11 server project which Jeff Weinstein was working on. This involved rebuilding an XDE bootfile with X windowing instead of XDE windowing. He had two main problems: it was slow and not very stable. Jeff has now left Cal Poly University, but I think the source code might be available from the Xerox UGP office (if it still exists). - Peter Robinson. University of Cambridge Telephone: +44 223 334637 Computer Laboratory Facsimile: +44 223 334678 New Museums Site Telex: 81240 (CAMSPL-G) Pembroke Street Cambridge E-mail: pr@cl.cam.ac.uk England CB2 3QG pr:ComputerLab:CambridgeUniv