Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
From: pnakada@oracle.com (Paul Nakada)
Subject: Wow! X is great!
Nntp-Posting-Host: pnakada.us.oracle.com
Organization: Oracle Corporation, Redwood Shores, CA
Distribution: comp
Date: Thu, 7 May 1992 16:38:54 GMT
X-Disclaimer: This message was written by an unauthenticated user
at Oracle Corporation. The opinions expressed are those
of the user and not necessarily those of Oracle.
Many thanks to Thomas Roell and OBZ for their tremendous effort in
getting X11R5 up on the 386, and espeialliy Linux. This is a serious
credibility builder for linux.
a serious bug. If I pull down the xterm middle menu (control +
middlebutton (both buttons)) my screen gets shifted ~30% with the
right side wrapping to the left side. wierd.
is libobz.a going to be part of the 0.96 release? it's missing from
the pre 96 + X patches release, making building any X apps impossible.
Following up on my note from yesterday oncerning "lame" SVGA cards, I
must comment. Yesterday, I evaluated two video cards, the orchid
prodesigner IIs, and the Diamond Speedstar+, both running about $170 +
tax. Performance was *much* better then my trident 8900 chipset card.
Scrolling under windows 3.1 is actually accepable, and performance
under X is great.
I really think it's worth upgrading to a better card, just for the
performance benefits. my $0.02.
-Paul
--
Paul Nakada | Oracle Corporation | pnakada@oracle.com
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
Subject: Re: Wow! X is great!
Date: 7 May 92 17:40:38 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: University of Helsinki
In article < PNAKADA.92May7083854@pnakada.oracle.com> pnakada@oracle.com
(Paul Nakada) writes:
>
>a serious bug. If I pull down the xterm middle menu (control +
>middlebutton (both buttons)) my screen gets shifted ~30% with the
>right side wrapping to the left side. wierd.
Yes, this is one of the bugs that is still in the pre-0.96 release with
the X patches: it's due to the fact that error messages get printed to
the console, and the pre-0.96 kernel didn't notice that things were in
graphics mode, so it prints out the message and changes various VGA
regs, thinking it writes to a normal text-screen. This obviously doesn't
work too well when in garphics mode.
Other bugs relate to the pty's: when scrolling in an xterm it sometimes
stops, and you have to hit a key to get it to wake up. I've also found
it's possible to freeze the machine with ^C under some circumstances
when writing heavily to pty's. Don't try it without syncing first, and
avoid testing it at all if possible :)
All the above bugs should be fixed in next weeks release, so I'm not
making patches available right now. Additionally, 0.96 has the TIOCCONS
ioctl that allows a pty to get the output intended for the console (so
that you see whan processes write directly to /dev/tty0 etc), as well as
a syslog() system call (syscall nr 103) that reads the messages printed
with printk(). The syslog syscall means you can get the kernel warning
messages to a window under X. Of course, the really bad messages
(notably kernel panics) don't get printed, but hopefully those aren't
that usual.
TIOCCONS was easy to add due to the better vfs routines. Similarly, 0.96
now supports dropping DTR when a serial line is finally closed. Thank
abc for goading me into adding the trivial fix.
In an earlier post I mentioned that 0.96 might have a new floppy-driver:
I just patched it in today, and it seems to work, so that's official.
The new floppy-driver finally allows formatting, and also has
auto-detect floppies (much nicer than under minix: they are quite as
fast as the non-auto versions from my limited testing) as well as
user-defined floppy-types (ie you can define 20-sector formats on the
fly etc..). The patches were courtesy of Werner Almesberger, so send
him a kind thought.
>is libobz.a going to be part of the 0.96 release? it's missing from
>the pre 96 + X patches release, making building any X apps impossible.
Hlu has already added them to the library: the newest version should
have them and some other syscalls ([f]truncate etc). I also think it now
supports multiple shared libraries: practical for X and math. I haven't
had time to try it out myself yet.
Linus
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
From: obz@sisd.kodak.com (Orest Zborowski COMP)
Subject: Re: Wow! X is great!
Organization: Printer Products Eastman Kodak
Distribution: comp
Date: Fri, 8 May 92 12:50:46 GMT
>>is libobz.a going to be part of the 0.96 release? it's missing from
>>the pre 96 + X patches release, making building any X apps impossible.
>
>Hlu has already added them to the library: the newest version should
>have them and some other syscalls ([f]truncate etc). I also think it now
>supports multiple shared libraries: practical for X and math. I haven't
>had time to try it out myself yet.
>
> Linus
libobz.a is in the pre0.96-obz.cdif.Z package, but in source form only.
you need to compile it (depending on if you have hlu's latest compiler)
and make a symlink from /usr/lib/libobz.a to it.
zorst
--
zorst (orest zborowski)
[reply to obz@sisd.kodak.com]