KW20HYI0@TWNITRI1.BITNET (09/19/90)
Hello!
We are a team from Computer and Communication Laboratory (CCL), a
branch of Industry Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Taiwan, trying to push
AMS in our local environment. We are in the infancy of the 1-year project and
have some questions crucial to our success.
We get the Andrew system in X11 r4 distribution tape and have not
installed it yet. Our members have taken some time in looking over the
directories and files. It turns out that the on-tape documentation is not
complete. For instance, we lack the list of methods provided by the ATK.
Moreover, most of the documents can't be printed before the system is setup.
We are going to add a Chinese-text object to the ATK. Is the AMS good
enough to automatically take advantage of the new object?
Since 386 machines are much cheaper than SUNs, we believe 386/Unix based
AMS is more affordable to our users. Is there a 386 version already available?
Or we should do the porting ourselves. Which part(s) of the Andrew system
is/are relevant to the porting?
Any responses to the questions or comments to our project will be greatly
appreciated. Even more appreciated is the hints to any traps or problems we
can't foresee now.
Yi, Huang
KW20HYI0@TWNITRI1Craig_Everhart@TRANSARC.COM (09/19/90)
I believe that ATK has some new international-language features that may be more appropriate to doing Chinese text than a new ATK inset, though both paths are available. The Messages program is good enough to take advantage of any Chinese-language texts or insets that you wish to provide, at least in the body portion of messages. If you try to view these message bodies with lower-function interfaces like CUI or VUI, you won't see what they have to say. None of AMS can deal with internationalized-text or insets in message headers (like To:, From:, and so forth); you'd need to use Romanized addresses there, same as you currently do with Bitnet mailers. I hope that others can help you with the rest of your questions. Craig
nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein) (09/19/90)
If you write a Chinese text object as an inset, and you install it in the right directory, it will be automatically usable by AMS, with exactly the same interface it is usable anywhere else. As for ATK documentation, I believe that CMU is currently trying to get rid of some paper copies of the ATK its documentation -- see the message posted only yesterday by Tom Neuendorffer for more information. You can also get copies of my book about ATK from Prentice Hall. I believe that the curernt version of the Andrew distribution (patch level 6) includes support for 386 machines running Mach. Other variants of UNIX on the 386 might require some porting effort. For the most part, the parts of Andrew that need to be ported are quite localized, and the only thing that is at all challenging to port is the dynamic loader. Hope that helps! -- Nathaniel