mouse@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu (der Mouse) (12/15/90)
(I thought I posted this before, but it now appears that that copy never got outside McGill. So here goes again.) This is to announce the general availability of my X11R4 server for the old NeXT cubes. (It may do something useful on new two-bit NeXTen, but I haven't tried it on such yet.) It has several problems, some serious. Some of the problems are due to a lack of documentation; the rest are due to a lack of time. There are many things I want to do to it, but I find I simply do not have the time to work everything out for myself, and NeXT has been, ah, less than tremendously helpful. (A couple of netters have been very helpful, though. You know who you are, and I thank you.) Since it's now about a month past the time I really wanted to take it out of beta and I *still* haven't dealt with the stuff reported by the beta people, I'm doing a general release of it in spite of all the work it needs. Don't get the wrong idea; it basically works. The problems are just things that need fixing before it can be considered solid. (For example, it can cause the gravity movie in the scene demo program to hang your workspace - not catastrophic, but serious.) The system it works on is the old cube with the two-bit grayscale display, running 1.0. It will need re-porting to work on other display types, and it is known to have problems getting events under 2.0. It is available for anonymous ftp from 132.206.1.1; cd to X/XNeXT/ and fetch one of the files with names containing `distribution'. The stuff that's there is still the stuff intended for beta sites; I haven't gotten around to fixing the READMEs and rebuilding the distribution for the general release yet, though I hope to Real Soon Now. I do not have time to respond to requests to mail it; sorry. Perhaps someone with a mail archive server already set up can make it available that way. While I do not now have the time to hack on it, I hope to Real Soon Now. I do intend to collect fixes and suggestions and hints and whatnot in the meantime. So, comments, questions, and especially fixes are welcomed (just send mail to me - see my signature for my address). I may not reply for a while (where "a while" is anything from a day to a week, depending on how busy I am), but I do read the letters and I want to know what needs doing for when I do have the time to hack on it, which I hope I will sometime before the next ice age. der Mouse old: mcgill-vision!mouse new: mouse@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu