[comp.unix.i386] VPix and X11 problem

tml@hemuli.atk.vtt.fi (Tor Lillqvist) (11/11/89)

In article <1842@lamont.ldgo.columbia.edu> fritzz@lamont.ldgo.columbia.edu (fritz zaucker) writes:
>Hi,
>I have a problem with Interactives VP/IX running under X11:

> [Press Enter to Continue]

>what I don't want because I want to run the DOS program within
>make for a lot of targets.

Running vpix noninteractively is really a pain.  We wanted to do the same
as you, run DOS programs from make.  And as if that wasn't difficult
enough, we want to run make on another machine (where we edit the files on
the 386/ix host via NFS), and start vpix via rsh...  After many trials, we
now finally have it working almost like we want.  Vpix doesn't like being
run via rsh, I guess it isn't expecting to see a socket (actually some
STREAMS device file, I guess) as stdin.  One way around this is to say

	rsh host 'echo | vpix -c foobar.bat -n 2>&1'

where foobar.bat is a file into which you put the DOS commands you want to
execute.  (Remember to run it through lef.)  I don't know why the 2>&1 is
necessary.

Still more hair is needed: The programs we want to run (Intel's C and PL/M
compilers, assemblers, linkers, etc) seem to use the root directory of the
DOS default drive for temporary storage.  If vpix runs with Z: (by default
the whole UNIX file system) as the default drive, these programs simply
hang without any error message (as the UNIX root directory is write
protected, of course).  So, you must add some dosmount and drive changing
commands in your autoexec.bat, or in the foobar.bat file you execute with
vpix -c.  Killing vpix by interrupting the rsh doesn't seem to work, you
must manually kill the vpix process.

I guess that the authors of vpix didn't guess that anybody would want to
run noninteractive programs in DOS from UNIX.  Probably they thought that
people only want to run spreadsheets, word processing and other very
interactive tasks.
-- 
Tor Lillqvist, VTT/ATK