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From: [email protected] (Jim Winstead Jr.)

Subject: Re: Problems with cdd
Keywords: cdd linux
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 5 May 92 21:57:56 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <1992May05.203935
[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (The News System)
Organization: Harvey Mudd College, WIBSTR
Lines: 28

In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Rajat D
atta) writes:
>The concept of executing a program is *very* different under Unix than
>under DOS. Under DOS there is only one environment which loads and
>runs programs as necessary and when the program is done, the shell
>(COMMAND.COM) is reloaded and waits for the next command. So, if you
>chdir in a program, you are affecting your one and only environment.

This is true in the case of the current directory, but is misleading -
programs each inherit their own 'environment' space under DOS, where
all the SET FOO=BAR stuff is stored, so it is not entirely correct to
say their is only one environment.

>To write a new 'cd' you have to modify the shell itself. Under Linux,
>that will mean changes to bash or ash. If bash, you might be able to
>do this with a shell function. Exactly what does your cdd do?
>Perhaps we can help you implement it.

Not necessarily true - the best way I can think of doing this would to
have the program do all it's user-interactive output on stderr, read
from stdin, and output the chosen directory to stdout. Then, you
could imbed the program in a simple bash function (or ash function, or
rc function), such as "fn cd { cd `{new_cd $*}" (in rc syntax 'cause I
forget the bash syntax).
--
+ Jim Winstead Jr. (CSci '95)
| Harvey Mudd College
| [email protected]
+ This is all my words. Honest!
From: [email protected] (gary b skouson)

Subject: X windows video card support?
Message-ID:
Date: 5 May 92 22:14:58 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (Gary Skouson)
Organization: Brigham Young University, Provo UT USA
Lines: 13
Nntp-Posting-Host: bones.caedm.byu.edu


I looked at the files for X386 and it looked like the only
(well almost only) chipset that is suported is the et4000. I happen
to have a Trident 8900 (I know, I should have looked into things before
I bought it). How much work is it to change things to support this card?
First of all, how much disk space do I need to just get the video
support and then link with the rest? Also how much of the X386 stuff
depends on the et4000? I haven't hacked too much on video stuff, but
I sure would love to have X.


Gary Skouson
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (Alex Liu)

Subject: Re: DOS EMULATION
Message-ID:
Date: 5 May 92 22:49:20 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <1992May5.143429.659@sinkhol
e.unf.edu>
Organization: None to Speak of
Lines: 18
NNTP-Posting-Host: aludra.usc.edu

About DOS emulation and using BIOS/DOS calls. On my Amiga, there are several
DOS emulators available, and these emulators do not implement DOS services
but load MSDOS from a bootable floppie and just implement the BIOS in the
emulator. I think this is the best way to go. Reimplementing all the DOS
calls is way too much and if Microsoft updates MS-DOS, you will have to
update your code too. By just implementing the BIOS, since that is ROM, it
is more static and should be an easier task. (Heck, there is even a PD
BIOS that is available with ASM source code and all) The main disadvantage
is that DOS will not be able to access the Linux partition. But I would guess
that should be possible to do by writing a device driver like OS/2s HPFS.SYS
which would also let you access Linux filesystem from standard MS-DOS (outside
Linuux). This adds some extra complexity, but It is easier (IMHO) than
writing a new MS-DOS...
--
_____________________________________________________________________________
Alejandro Liu |EMail: [email protected] |All mispellings are intentional
3131 Mc Clintock #373F |Voice: 213-745-2431 |Anything mentioned here is not
Los Angeles, CA 90007 | |necessarily true.
From: [email protected] ("Mark W. Eichin")

Subject: as86 sources?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 5 May 92 23:03:11 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (Mr Background)
Reply-To: [email protected] ("Mark W. Eichin")
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 5

On tsx-11.mit.edu, there is ~ftp/pub/linux/binaries/compilers/as86.tar.Z;
however, I can't find corresponding sources. Does anyone have them?
I'd like to use it as a cross assembler under Unix...
_Mark_
MIT Student Information Processing Board
From: [email protected] (Stephen A Uhler)

Subject: Re: MGR for Linux
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 5 May 92 23:51:49 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <1992Apr29.223137.5146@muddcs
.claremont.edu>
Sender: [email protected]
Reply-To: [email protected] (Stephen A Uhler)
Organization: Bellcore, Morristown NJ
Lines: 14
Nntp-Posting-Host: sleepy

In article <[email protected]> [email protected]
nt.edu (Jim Winstead Jr.) writes:
...
>Someone has expressed interest in creating a MGR for Linux mailing
>list - anyone else interested? I don't have the resources to set on
>up currently, and other people have said 'no' to a Mail-Net channel,
>so I'm not sure how this would pan out....

I would certainly be interested in participating in this mailing list.
Although I don't yet have LINUX running (a local 386 machine shortage),
I am pretty familiar with the MGR source code, and would be willing to
help out.

Stephen Uhler
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (Stephen A Uhler)

Subject: Re: MGR for Linux
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 5 May 92 23:55:46 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <1992Apr30.050959.15896
@daffy.cs.wisc.edu>
Sender: [email protected]
Reply-To: [email protected] (Stephen A Uhler)
Organization: Bellcore, Morristown NJ
Lines: 16
Nntp-Posting-Host: sleepy

In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (
Douglas E. Quale) writes:
>In article <[email protected]> [email protected]
ont.edu (Jim Winstead Jr.) writes:
>>
>>A more minor sticking point is that most of the terminal stuff is
>>written to use the BSD sgttyb structures. I've worked with some of it
>>to convert it to Linux/POSIX termios stuff, and that isn't that tough,
...
>but it's not too hard to get 95% of it right, and for the other 5% folks
>would just have to rewrite their source.
>
...
I have the termio version of all of the tty stuff used in MGR, from a system
V.2 port I did in '86. I'd be glad to dig it up if anyone would like

Stephen Uhler
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (Wayne Davison)

Subject: Re: Problems with cdd
Keywords: cdd linux
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 5 May 92 23:06:06 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <1992May05.203935
[email protected]>
Organization: Borland International
Lines: 19

Rajat Datta ([email protected]) wrote:
> To write a new 'cd' you have to modify the shell itself.

Not really. You simply have to make use of the built-in cd in some manner.
For example, if you write the program 'cdd' to output to stdout the path that
it decides to use, you can use a macro to force your shell to use it. For
example:

alias cdd='cd `/usr/local/bin/cdd`'

where cdd does something like:

main()
{
printf("/home/person/src/directory\n");
}
--
Wayne Davison
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (Bennett E. Todd)

Subject: mcc 0.95c+ /bin/login bungles environment
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 5 May 92 23:59:27 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (Mr Background)
Reply-To: [email protected] (Bennett E. Todd)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 13

I found a minor glitch with /bin/login from mcc-interim 0.95c+. I fixed
it by recompiling, using sources I scored from banjo, under uk.mirror.
The binary that resulted worked perfectly, so I can't point at a source
bug:-(.

The problem first became evident with rc(1) as my login shell; for some
reason bash masked or evaded it. What happened was the environment
wasn't being set up properly. I verified this by creating a login whose
login shell was printenv; several crucial variables, including HOME,
were coming out garbage.

-Bennett (curmudgeon)
[email protected]
From: [email protected]

Subject: Help getting started with Linux.
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 5 May 92 23:56:38 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (Notes Person)
Organization: NYU Medical Center, New York, NY 10016, USA
Lines: 24
Nntp-Posting-Host: mcclb0.med.nyu.edu

Hello *,

I have some questions that I need to be clear on before I make some
decisions concerning Linux. First, where can I get the FAQ, the listing
available from this newsgroups mentions some ftp names that I am not familiar
with. Second, what is the recommended size for a Linux partition. Third, will
Linux work with all my floppies (i.e. 1.44, 720). Most of these questions, I
am sure that they will be answered in the FAQ pages.
My final question and probably the most complicated one concerns a new
Floptical Drive from Insite. The people at Insite tell me that their drive
will work just any other floppy drive, the only difference is that it will hold
21 Megs. This Floptical drive works just like a regular floppy drive, it works
with 1.44 and 720 disks. However, when the special media is inserted into the
drive, it give you 21 Megs of continious space.
What I basically want to do, is boot Linux (and other OS's) off this
Floptical Drive. I will be very please if somebody answers these questions. I
would also be willing to write code to support this type of drive, if it turns
out not to be compatible.

Thanks in advance
Edwin
[email protected]
^
That's a Zero.
From: [email protected] (Andrew Beers)

Subject: DVI Previewer
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 5 May 92 06:21:43 GMT
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: State University of New York at Buffalo/Comp Sci
Lines: 20
Nntp-Posting-Host: hadar.cs.buffalo.edu

I switched to Linux last month, wanting the advantages that the Linux
operating system has over MSDOS. One of the things that I am missing about
the DOS-based machine is the DVI previewer, though most of the TeX support
seems to be there already.

I realize that X11 is in the process of being ported to and tested on Linux
systems, giving Linux users access to a host of other software. However, many
Linux users will find themselves short of both real memory and the disk space
necessary to have a real X-based workstation.

Has anyone thought of writing stand-alone graphics appilications such as a DVI
previewer? I'm not sure of the difficulties in doing this, given the
different operating systems and differing graphics hardware, so please inform
me (and all other interested viewers).

Thanks.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Andrew C. Beers, N2LUH [email protected]
SUNY Buffalo, Computer Science {rutgers,uunet}!cs.buffalo.edu!beers
From: [email protected] (Jim Winstead Jr.)

Subject: Re: MGR for Linux
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 00:58:00 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <1992Apr30.050959.15896
@daffy.cs.wisc.edu> <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (The News System)
Organization: Harvey Mudd College, WIBSTR
Lines: 31

In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Stephen
A Uhler) writes:
>In article <[email protected]> [email protected]
(Douglas E. Quale) writes:
>>In article <[email protected]> [email protected]
mont.edu (Jim Winstead Jr.) writes:
>>>
>>>A more minor sticking point is that most of the terminal stuff is
>>>written to use the BSD sgttyb structures. I've worked with some of it
>>>to convert it to Linux/POSIX termios stuff, and that isn't that tough,
>...
>>but it's not too hard to get 95% of it right, and for the other 5% folks
>>would just have to rewrite their source.
>>
>...
>I have the termio version of all of the tty stuff used in MGR, from a system
>V.2 port I did in '86. I'd be glad to dig it up if anyone would like

That would be great - if you could upload it to one of the Linux
archive sites, that would be really great. (Perhaps just ftp.uu.net
or some other temporary repository, instead, since it's not real
useful outside of MGR porting, I would guess..)

On a related note, I've created a MGR channel on Mail-Net. To join,
send mail to [email protected] with 'X-Mn-Admin: MGR' on
the first line, and send mail with 'X-Mn-Key: MGR' to post to the
list. Instructions are available by mailing linux-activists-request
at the same site.

--
+ Jim Winstead Jr. (CSci '95)
| Harvey Mudd College
| [email protected]
+ This is all my words. Honest!
From: [email protected] (Drew Eckhardt)

Subject: Re: X windows video card support?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 00:44:52 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (The Daily Planet)
Organization: University of Colorado at Boulder
Lines: 20
Nntp-Posting-Host: caesar.cs.colorado.edu

In article [email protected] (gary b skouson) writes:
> I looked at the files for X386 and it looked like the only
>(well almost only) chipset that is suported is the et4000. I happen
>to have a Trident 8900 (I know, I should have looked into things before
>I bought it). How much work is it to change things to support this card?

src/mit/server/ddx/x386/drivers needs a t8900 driver, and
src/mit/server/ddx/x386/vga.c needs an entry in the

vgaVideoChipPtr Drivers[] array.

Mostly, the only difference between different SVGA chip sets from the
programmer's perspective is how the bank switching and initialization
is handled.

>First of all, how much disk space do I need to just get the video
>support and then link with the rest? Also how much of the X386 stuff
>depends on the et4000? I haven't hacked too much on video stuff, but

Very little.
From: [email protected] (thomas dunbar)

Subject: newemacs
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 01:13:49 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (Mr Background)
Reply-To: [email protected]
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 5

i'm running the mcc-interim 0.95c+ kernel and emacs 18.57 works fine but
the emacs in newemacs.tar.Z (at tsx-11 in emacs-18.58 dir) loads and
displays one line:
GNU Emacs ... (usg unix v)
as i recall, and then my system locks up. what might the problem be?
From: [email protected] (Jim Burns)

Subject: Re: DIFFERENT Frustrating problem with gcc-2.1
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 01:36:14 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Distribution: na
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology
Lines: 17

in article <[email protected]>, [email protected] (Win Bent) sa
ys:

> My problem is as frustrating the famous "line 1: parse error before (",
> but of a slightly different nature: all programs abort with the
> message "Memory error". No core file, though - shouldn't there be
> one? Then again, what would I do with it, since there's no debugger?

If you are refering to the ~10 lines of error output that start w/general
protection error : 0000, I had the same problem after installing the
mcc-interim version. Turns out that lib92.04.06.a (or whatever the numbers
are) had to be world-executable. Shared programs worked for root, but no
one else.
--
BURNS,JIM (returned student)
Georgia Institute of Technology, 30178 Georgia Tech Station,
Atlanta Georgia, 30332 | Internet: [email protected]
uucp: ...!{decvax,hplabs,ncar,purdue,rutgers}!gatech!prism!gt0178a
From: [email protected] (Erik Green)

Subject: X
Message-ID:
Date: 6 May 92 01:47:47 GMT
Distribution: comp.os.linux
Organization: Long polymers in double-helix formation
Lines: 22
Nntp-Posting-Host: att2.cs.mankato.msus.edu


Well, I managed to get X running (386-25DX, 4 MB RAM, no swap),
with a little work, I was able to make it go in 640x400x256 mode
on my Paradise-based card W/256k VRAM. I have two small problems:

1) I can enter X, and pull-down a menu or two, move the windows, etc. -
the mouse stuff works. The keyboard doesn't(I believe someone else
mentioned this).

2) When I exit, the screen goes back to text mode, but remains blank and
the machine hangs. Sometimes it beeps one or more times.


Any help appreciated, Other than that, everything seems OK.

Thanks Zorst/Linus/Everybody <---- ObThx

--
Erik "Longshot" Green
longshot@(vax1 | att2.cs | krypton | theory.cs).mankato.msus.edu
"Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg
thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul!"
From: [email protected] (Jim Winstead Jr.)

Subject: Re: X
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 02:08:37 GMT
References:
Sender: [email protected] (The News System)
Organization: Harvey Mudd College, WIBSTR
Lines: 28

In article [email protected]
kato.msus.edu (Erik Green) writes:
>
>Well, I managed to get X running (386-25DX, 4 MB RAM, no swap),
>with a little work, I was able to make it go in 640x400x256 mode
>on my Paradise-based card W/256k VRAM. I have two small problems:

Lucky dog, X386 doesn't know about my video card. ๐Ÿ™‚

>1) I can enter X, and pull-down a menu or two, move the windows, etc. -
>the mouse stuff works. The keyboard doesn't(I believe someone else
>mentioned this).

You need to make sure that /dev/tty0 exists, and is set up as major 4,
minor 0. It should work if this is correct.

>2) When I exit, the screen goes back to text mode, but remains blank and
>the machine hangs. Sometimes it beeps one or more times.

That's a known limitation of X (read all the way to the bottom of the
README :), and zorst isn't quite sure if X or Linux is at fault.
Regardless, the code posted today by Tommy Frandsen should help
matters, as it does correctly restore text mode after switching to
various VGA modes. (And it looks great, too! Thanks Tommy.)
--
+ Jim Winstead Jr. (CSci '95)
| Harvey Mudd College
| [email protected]
+ This is all my words. Honest!
From: [email protected] (Allan Adler)

Subject: Re: DOS EMULATION
Message-ID:
Date: 6 May 92 03:17:23 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <1992May5.143429.659@sinkhol
e.unf.edu>

Sender: [email protected]
Organization: M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Lines: 11
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of 5 May 1992 15:49:20 -0700

In article [email protected] (Alex Liu) writes:

there is even a PD
BIOS that is available with ASM source code and all) The main disadvantage
is that DOS will not be able to access the Linux partition.


Where does one get this PD BIOS and its source code?

Allan Adler
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (Networking Research)

Subject: GCC 2.1, probably FAQ, but . . .
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 04:00:10 GMT
Organization: Saint Cloud State University
Lines: 15
Nntp-Posting-Host: eeyore.stcloud.msus.edu


Ok, I know I've seen references to this in the past, generally
as the "infamous 'parse error before ('." Well, anyhow, I'm trying to get
Gcc 2.1 to work on my Linux machine (0.95c+) and I'm getting all sorts of
'parse error before (' messages, in stdio.h, in code, everywhere. I've checked
the ftp sites for info and looked back in comp.os.linux as far as my nntp
server will allow, and I haven't been able to find the solution. Anybody
want to help me out here?


--
-Mark Holden
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (I Reid)

Subject: Oak SVGA-->?, 2 X questions, Oak Svga patch
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 02:18:36 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: Edinburgh University
Lines: 341

Posting contents
----------------

1. SVGA chipset recommendations/warnings wanted
2. 2 X questions (speed & space - realistic estimates wanted from users)
3. Oak SVGA patch for boot up code

1. SVGA chipset
---------------

After yet another unsuccessfull attempt to get my supposedly "register
compatible" Svga board (Oak 067 chipset) to change modes, display
properly etc etc under Linux I have decided to replace it with some
better (and standard).

Requirements: - should be popular, well supported and easily programmed.
- should work under Linux (primary OS) and Dos (yuck)
- should be fully compatible with everything at all levels
- (or at least have known differences).
- preferred capabilities up to 1024x768x256
(interlaced/non interlaced)

The current fron runner is something based on the ET4000 chipset.

Q1. What is important in a SVGA board (for use with Linux)?
Q2. What are the popular chipsets (i.e. likely to be supported)?
Q3. What are the best chipsets? (affordable only please!)
Q4. Anything to be looked for?
Q5. Anything to be avoided?
Q6. What's your personal favourite? (and why)


2. 2 X questions
----------------

As mentioned above, I am looking for a new SVGA board and, when I get
it, I want to try X (using the binaries that appeared on
banjo.concert.net) on my machine. Before I do though, I would
appreciate a realistic estimate of speed and disk requirements for it.

Machine: - well cached 386-33 with 8 Mb Ram
- single user mode only
- no timewasters like xeyes, xclock etc.

If I strip out all the junk and leave some graphics stuff (image
processing), some documenting stuff (Tex?) am I going to have a zippy
machine or will X make things crawl? Disk space.... how much
(realistically)? if I keep the non essentials out (+shared libs)?


3. Oak Svga patch
-----------------

For those afflicted with an Oak 067 chipset (or Oak 037c with a little
work) here is a patch to /usr/src/linux/boot/setup.S to offer 132x60,
132x25 and 132x43 text modes. Of these the 132x60 works (and is nice),
the other 2 don't work (screen blurs). This is probably due to Oak
being somewhat non standard and I can't fix it. I am planning to
replace my Svga board 'cos I'm fed up with the Oak 067 I've got (very
few things recognise it and work well with it, for Linux I don't want
to write personal versions of everything graphical etc etc).

Message Summary: Code to offer/select 132x60 text mode at startup
using the Oak 0-67 Chipset

Message contents: - Patch for /usr/src/linux/boot/setup.S (pre 0.96 kernel)
- C code to identify Oak 037c and 067 chipsets under Linux
- Miscellaneous Oak VGA info


1. That patch....

The following bit of code offers modes 3 (80x25), 43 (132x60), 50
(132x25) and 51 (132x43) when used with my Svga board (Oak 0-67
chipset). Of these only the 80x25 and 132x60 (yummy!) actually work...
the other two are blurred? I have left them in 'cos I hope someone
might be able to solve this puzzle (please).

/*---------------cut-here---------------------------------------------*/
*** setupo.S Sat May 2 16:32:04 1992
--- setup.S Sun May 3 02:42:41 1992
***************
*** 270,276 ****
lea di,moati
lea cx,selmod
jmp cx
! noati: mov ax,#0x200f ! Check Ahead 'clues'
mov dx,#0x3ce
out dx,ax
inc dx
--- 270,339 ----
lea di,moati
lea cx,selmod
jmp cx
! noati: ! Check for Oak 037C and
Oak 067
! mov dx, 0x3de ! I wasn't sure what the # was
! mov ax, #0xd ! supposed to do so I included i
t in
! out dx, ax ! most cases. The first
0x3de must NOT
! mov dx, #0x03df ! have it 'cos otherwise it does
n't work properly
! in ax, dx
! push ax
! mov bx,#0xFF
! not bx
! and ax,bx
! out dx,ax
! in ax, dx
! and ax,#0xFF
! test ax,#0x0
! jnz oak_false
! pop ax
! push ax
! or ax,#0xFF
! out dx,ax
! in ax, dx
! and ax, #0xFF
! cmp ax,#0
! jle oak_false
! pop ax
! out dx,ax
! jmp isoak ! oak 037c recognised but may
be oak 067
!
! isoak:
! mov dx,#0x3DE
! mov ax,#0x11
! out dx,ax
! mov dx,#0x3DF
! in ax,dx
! push ax
! mov bx,#0xFF
! not bx
! and ax,bx
! out dx,ax
! in ax,dx
! and ax, #0x0FF
! test ax,#0x00
! jnz oak_false
! pop ax
! push ax
! or ax,#0xFF
! out dx,ax
! in ax,dx
! and ax, #0xFF
! cmp ax,#0x0
! jle oak_false
! pop ax
! out dx,ax
! lea si,dscoak
! lea di,mooak
! lea cx,selmod
! jmp cx ! oak 067 recognised
!
! oak_false:
! mov dx,#0x3DF
! pop ax
! out dx,ax
! jmp nooak
!
! nooak: mov ax,#0x200f ! Check Ahead 'clues'
mov dx,#0x3ce
out dx,ax
inc dx
***************
*** 657,662 ****
--- 720,726 ----
motrident: .byte 0x07, 0x50, 0x51, 0x52, 0x57, 0x58, 0x59, 0x5a
motseng: .byte 0x05, 0x26, 0x2a, 0x23, 0x24, 0x22
movideo7: .byte 0x06, 0x40, 0x43, 0x44, 0x41, 0x42, 0x45
+ mooak: .byte 0x04, 0x03, 0x4F, 0x50, 0x51

! msb = Cols lsb = Rows:

***************
*** 670,675 ****
--- 734,740 ----
dsctrident: .word 0x501e, 0x502b, 0x503c, 0x8419, 0x841e, 0x842b, 0x843c
dsctseng: .word 0x503c, 0x6428, 0x8419, 0x841c, 0x842c
dscvideo7: .word 0x502b, 0x503c, 0x643c, 0x8419, 0x842c, 0x841c
+ dscoak: .word 0x5019, 0x843c, 0x8419, 0x842b

.text
endtext:
/*---------------cut-here---------------------------------------------*/

2. C code to identify 2 Oak chipsets. This is my quick C translation of
some pascal in a file called whatvga.pas (one of the few things that
actually identifies my VGA correctly :-(). It works for me (Oak 0-67
chipset).... anything else is untested. It is included 'cos
a. it makes it easier to understand the assembly language in the patch a
nd
b. 'cos it might be usefull.

/*---------------cut-here---------------------------------------------*/
#include
#include
#include
#include

#define FALSE 0
#define TRUE 1

#define OAK_037c 0
#define OAK_067 1

int fd_port; /* File descriptor for /dev/port when open */

char testreg2 (long, char, short);
char inb (long);
void outb (long, char);
char tstrg (long, short);

char inb (long addr)
{
char tmp=0;

lseek (fd_port, addr, SEEK_SET);
if (read(fd_port, (char *)&tmp, sizeof(char)) == -1) {
perror ("Read error in inport");
exit (-1);
}
return (tmp);
}

void outb (long addr, char val)
{
lseek (fd_port, addr, SEEK_SET);
if (write(fd_port, (char *)&val, sizeof(char)) == -1) {
perror ("Write error in outport");
exit (-1);
}
}

char testreg (long pt, char rg, short msk)
{
short old, nw1, nw2;

outb (pt, rg);
pt++;
old = inb (pt);
outb (pt, old & (!msk));
nw1 = inb (pt) & msk;
outb (pt, old | msk);
nw2 = inb (pt) & msk;
outb (pt, old);
if ((nw1 == 0) && (nw2 > 0)) return TRUE;
else return FALSE;
}


void main ()
{
char type=0;
char *adaptors[] = {
"Oak 037c video adaptor",
"Oak 067 video adaptor"
};

if ((fd_port = open ("/dev/port", O_RDWR, 0)) == -1) {
perror ("Error opening /dev/port");
exit (-1);
}

if (testreg (0x03de, 0xd, 0xff) == TRUE) {
type = OAK_037c;
if (testreg (0x03de, 0x11, 0xff) == TRUE) type = OAK_067;

printf ("You have a %s.\n", adaptors[type]);
}
else printf ("Not an oak chipset.\n");

close (fd_port);
exit (0);
}
/*---------------cut-here---------------------------------------------*/


3. Miscelllaneous Oak info

OAK Technologies OTI-067 and 037C.

OTI037C apparently has max 256Kb and no banking registers.
OTI-067 has 256K or 512K and banking registers.

3DEh index Dh (R/W):
bit 7 512K if set, 256 else.

3DEh index 11h (R/W):
bit 0-3 Bank no (Read/Write or two separate banks ??)
4-7 Bank no
Note: Some sources gives this register as 3DFh with no index.


Bank Switching: (OAK OTI-067 Only)

Two banks exist in reg 3DEh index 11h.


ID Oak VGA:

if exist($3DE,$d) then
if exist($3DE,$11) then OAK_037
else OAK_067

Modes:

(OTI 067)

4Fh T 132 60 16 (8x8)
50h T 132 25 16 (8x14)
51h T 132 43 16 (8x8)
52h G 800 600 16 planar
53h G 640 480 256 packed
54h G 800 600 256 packed
55h G 1024 768 4 ??
56h G 1024 768 16 planar
57h G 768 1024 4 ??

(OTI037C "UNIQUE" VGA)

50h T 132 25 16 (8x14)
51h T 132 43 16 (8x8)
52h G 800 600 16 planar


(OTI037C with NEL Electronics BIOS)

50h G 640 480 16 planar
51h T 80 30 (16x9)
52h G 1024 480 16 planar
53h T 80 25 (16x8)
54h T 132 43 (8x8)
55h T 132 25 (14x8)
56h T 132 43 (8x9)
57h T 132 25 (14x9)
58h T 80 43 (8x8)
59h T 80 43 (8x9)
5Ah T 80 60 (8x8)
5Bh G 800 600 16
5Ch T 100 37 (16x8)
5Dh T 100 75 (8x8)
5Eh G 800 600 16
6Ah G 800 600 16
6Bh T 100 37 (16x8)
From: [email protected] (Michael Pereckas)

Subject: Re: GNUPLOT 3.0 ported to Linux
Keywords: gnuplot, linux
Message-ID:
Date: 6 May 92 05:04:47 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (News)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 22

[email protected] (Tommy Frandsen) writes:

>Hi!

>I have just uploaded a Linux port of GNUPLOT 3.0 to banjo.concert.net in
>the file /pub/Linux/Incoming/gnuplot.tar.Z. This is a binary only version,
>since my patches to the orignal sources still needs a little tidying up.
>It requires the following to run in graphics mode:
> - The pre-0.96 kernel or newer
> - A VGA-adapter and an analog monochrome or color monitor
>If you use an older kernel or don't have a VGA-adapter you should still be
>able to run gnuplot and get printer or latex output.

I tried it and as soon as it tries to enter graphics mode I get:

d9fl fxxx not implemented
Illegal Instruction

and then the shel prompt. Is this just me, or is something wrong?
The recently released vgalib and it's demo works fine.

Michael Pereckas
From: [email protected] (Eugenio Sanchez)

Subject: REPORT: LINUX running on PS/2 35SX & 55SX
Summary: LINUX runs on some PS/2
Keywords: Linux, PS/2
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 04:55:09 GMT
Sender: [email protected]
Reply-To: [email protected] (Eugenio Sanchez), [email protected]
esm.mx (Mario Rodriguez)
Lines: 15


I've (minimally) tested LINUX 0.95a in the following systems:

PS/2 model 35SX, 1920 Kb of RAM, VGA, 2 3.5" floppy drives

PS/2 model 55SX, 3 Mb of memory, VGA, 1 3.5 " floppy drive


I thought that the 55SX model had MicroChannel, and that LINUX wouldn't
run on them. Is this true? Or the 55SX isn't MCA?

--
Eugenio Sanchez
Xalli, sistemas
President
From: [email protected] (Richard Sharman)

Subject: Re: problem when running a program compiled with gcc 2.1 under 0.95a
Message-ID:
Date: 6 May 92 02:17:43 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: Mitel. Kanata (Ontario). Canada.
Lines: 11
In-reply-to: [email protected]'s message of 1 May 92 13:31:52 GMT

In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (An
ucha Pitak) writes:

I compiled a simple 'Hello World' program with gcc 2.1 under linux 0.95a
and got the following message when I ran the program.

a.out: 1: Syntax error: Unterminated quoted string

I had this, and fixed the problem by moving up to linux 0.95c+,
by downloading the bootimage from tsx-11.

Richard
From: [email protected] (Benjamin Z. Goldsteen)

Subject: What is the current state of Linux? How do I get started?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 06:12:50 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (Net Noise owner)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 17


What is the current state of Linux? What can I expect in terms of
reliability? When I got my new hard drive, I partioned it - I made a
D: of about 15 - 20 MB (can't remember). I would like to be a node on
the Internet - via SLIP (they support that here...). Is that possible?
Can I have people send mail to me (at my node)? Will I be able to read
netnews, ftp, etc? I am only running 2400 baud though...but if I have
to download it eventually, what difference does it make?
Also, how do I get started? I have seen some FAQ's floating around,
but I just need to know the first steps - then I can probably take it
from there. I do know somewhat about unix, but I have never installed
it before...

Thanks
Benjamin Z. Goldsteen
--
Benjamin Z. Goldsteen
From: [email protected] (Eugenio Sanchez)

Subject: REQUEST: Cross-compiling for LINUX
Summary: Tell us your experiences in cross-compiling for LINUX.
Keywords: LINUX, crosscompiling
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 05:55:02 GMT
Sender: [email protected]
Reply-To: [email protected] (Eugenio Sanchez), [email protected]
esm.mx (Mario Rodriguez)
Lines: 12

Hi! I'm relatively new to LINUX, but I have some UNIX programming experience,
so my question is (I think) relatively easy:

Are some of you compiling for LINUX under other platforms? I plan to run
LINUX on 386SX machines with less than 3 Mb of RAM, and I'd like to try
in other systems. I'm specifically thinking of NeXT (Mach) and VAX (Ultrix).

Any comments?

--
Eugenio Sanchez
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (Gunter Windau)

Subject: Re: Possible bug in lp driver, or just me?
Message-ID:
Date: 6 May 92 08:34:39 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (NUnet News Owner)
Organization: University of Nijmegen
Lines: 33

[email protected] (Paul H. Hargrove) writes:

>I am running the Pre-0.96 version of linux on a Zenith Turbosport 386
>with 2Mb memory, and 4 meg swap. The problem I have is this:
>when I type something like:
> cat textfile >/dev/lp1
>I get back:
> cat: write error
>And the printer receives just the first character of textfile.
>I created /dev/lp1 with:
> mknod /dev/lp1 c 6 1
> chmod 666 /dev/lp1

>I have tried 0.95c+, and get the same problem. Is this a problem
>unique to my hardware?

Not quite I think. I had the same results with my 486 clone and a
NEC P7+ printer, and found out that there's a problem in how the
lp device driver handles the out-of-paper, error and off-line signals
on the printer status port. It was something like: if the off-line
signal is active, it doesn't mean anything if the error signal isn't
active too. (may be the other way around...). To find this out I had
to read 4 or 5 printer ref. manuals, and play around with a few
printers. And I can't say those printers behaved the same in the
same situations...
If people are interested, I an post my lp.c and lp.h replacements.
Though I only know they work with the NEC P7+.

=========================================================================
| G\"unter Windau [email protected] |
| CoGro, Dept. Medical Physics & Biophysics |
| Univ. of Nijmegen, The Netherlands |
=========================================================================
From: [email protected] (H.J. Lu)

Subject: Re: REQUEST: Cross-compiling for LINUX
Keywords: LINUX, crosscompiling
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 07:46:20 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (USENET News System)
Organization: Washington State University
Lines: 22

In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Eugenio Sanc
hez), [email protected] (Mario Rodriguez) writes:
>Hi! I'm relatively new to LINUX, but I have some UNIX programming experience,
>so my question is (I think) relatively easy:
>
>Are some of you compiling for LINUX under other platforms? I plan to run
>LINUX on 386SX machines with less than 3 Mb of RAM, and I'd like to try
>in other systems. I'm specifically thinking of NeXT (Mach) and VAX (Ultrix).

NeXT is a bad idea, big endian. You have to use binutils 1.94beta. It
is VERY big.

Find a little edian Unix machine. Cross-compiling for Linux is very
trivial. I am doing it all the time.

>
>Any comments?
>
>--
>Eugenio Sanchez
>[email protected]

H.J.
From: [email protected]

Subject: Swapping problem
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 08:30:57 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (inews)
Organization: Uni Koblenz, Germany.
Lines: 38

Hallo world,

As the subject says I have a problem swapping. First I'm useing MCC-interim
0.95c+ SCSI. My machine is a 486-33 with 8MB, Adaptec 1542B and 2x210MB
Quantum disks. Until the SCSI code handles extended partitions I'll have to
make do with 32MB Linux and 16MB swap (I wanted to give Linux a whole disk).
I ftp'd the following files

linux/SCSI/bootimage-0.95c+
linux/images/rootimage-0.95a - there was no 95c+
linux/binaries/collection/095binar.tar

Installation, no problem. I set up devices for partitions as follows

mknod /dev/sd2 b 8 16 - complete disk
mknod /dev/sd2c b 8 19 - partition 3 (Linux)
mknod /dev/sd2d b 8 20 - partition 4 (Swap)

mkswap -c /dev/sd2d 16384
Setting up swapspace, size = 16773120 bytes

The disk light comes on and I hear it doing stuff for about 3-4 minutes.

swapon /dev/sd2d
Unable to find swap-space signature
Error adding '/dev/sd2d' as swap
swapon: EINVAL

OK, at the moment I don't *need* to swap because I'm waiting for 0.96 before
I ftp everything. But later when X is available I'm going to need it.

If this is a know problem, excuse the noise but I've been reading this group
for months (waiting for SCSI) and haven't seen this posted.
--
Wayne Hodgen | [email protected] | Opinions (c) Me 1991 | Intel SX
Uni Koblenz, | (..!unido!infko!hodgen) | Keeper of the Scrolls, | Just
Rheinau 3-4, | Voice: +49 261 9119-645 | Defender of the Net, | say
5400 Koblenz. | Fax: +49 261 9119-499 | His name is "root". | NO!!!
From: [email protected] (The Master of Symbolic Links)

Subject: Re: X11 won't work? Help!
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 08:54:17 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (USENET Newssystem)
Organization: Inst. fuer Informatik, Technische Univ. Muenchen, Germany
Lines: 27
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of 5 May 92 03:15:26 GMT

>VGA256: pvga1 (mem: 256k clocks: 25 28 0 22 36 52 0 62)
>Too less memory for virtual resolution
>
>Fatal server error:
>No screens found.
>Giving up.
>xinit: Invalid argument (errno 22): unable to connect to X server.
>xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error.
>
>What the blazes is going on here? Why can't I connect? And why does X386
>believe my Paradise card only has 256k of memory?

Hmmm... X386 read the BIOS/ BIOS used ports to find out about the installed
memory on a Paradise board. If you VGA has more memory installed than
X386 finds, you can tell this X386 by specifying 'VideoMemory' in Xconfig
(typical RTFM question).

- Thomas

PS: You are using a Dell System, right ?
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
e-mail: [email protected]

immer ?
nein, nicht immer ...
... aber immer oefter !
From: [email protected] (The Master of Symbolic Links)

Subject: Re: X386 (Was Re: 0.96 out next week)
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 09:07:06 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (USENET Newssystem)
Organization: Inst. fuer Informatik, Technische Univ. Muenchen, Germany
Lines: 76
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of Tue, 5 May 1992 18:06:04 GMT

>Inherently, there is no reason why X can't support a CGA card. In reality,
>why would you want to? There are only two usable graphics modes on a CGA
>card, 320x200x4 colors, and 640x200x2 colors (read the latter as B&W).
>Not very much real estate for very much at all, and you may have problems
>with only 4/16 colors being available.

That's no good idea at all. First of the CGA's memory organisation is so
terrible that you want to forget about writing a driver it. The next thing
is that 800x600 is a definitive minimum for reall using X. Also I think
16 colors is just a good prove of concept, but you definitively want to
have 256 colors at least (and if you only want to look at gif pictures ;-)).

>> X definitely won't work with CGA - it won't even work with normal VGA
>> cards: you need SVGA (and even not just any SVGA card will do). The
>
>Uh, oh. Lets be careful here. X will to work. I've had an X server
>run on a 286 w/EGA in 16 colors. It wasn't very much, but the virtual 800x600
>mode was better. Still, 16 colors is VERY limiting.
>
>> supported cards are et[3|4]000 and some others (pvga? tvga?).
>> Resolutions range from 640x480 to 1192x900 (or something like that), all
>> at 256 colours, depending on what kind of card/monitor combination you
>> have.


X386 1.2 does support SVGA boards with:

Et3000
Et4000
GVGA (Genoa 6000 line)
PVGA (PVGA1A, WD90C00, WD90C11)

The rest is not supported and WILL NOT BE SUPPORTED for several reasons,
which I will not talk about here in a 10page+ posting. If you want to have
reasonable speed, go for an Et4000 board.

>On the other hand, my Sun 1192x900x2 (B&W) driver works just fine for me.
>And ESIX shipped both a B&W and a Color VGA driver with it. X386 may have
>some limitiations in what video cards and video modes it supports, but X
>doesn't.

Well, there is a limit in supported SVGA chips (not in video cards), cause
there are some basic requirements, which not every SVGA chip meets, but
there is no limit in video modes. You can programm every video mode
you want, as long as you have enougth memory, the right dot-clock and a
chipset that will do it physically.

>> Speed probably depends heavily on the SVGA card: on my 386/33 with a
>> no-name et4000 card I get totally acceptable performance: scrolling big
>> windows is slow with other things going on, but not irritatingly so.
>> You don't want to make opaque moves, but I can live without that.
>
>OK, so X was a little slow on my 286 running X-sight. I expect the X
>running on my S3 card to be MUCH faster! (It's also running on a 25Mhz 386DX)

The problem with SVGAs is that the main cpu has to do all the graphics, and
these over the slow ISA bus. Thus a typical limitation is (for the Et4000)
around 4MB/sec over the bus. That translates into around 1.7MPixels/sec
in scrolling. You simply cannot get more out of the SVGA without dirty
incompatible tricks.

On the other hand an S3 based card is about five (5 !!!) times faster under
X. And X386 1.3 does support this. It also support faster boards like the
ATI Ultra and several highend (read high-cost) boards that do 1280x1024.
But this version is not freely available, nor is the source ...

If there is much intrest we (SGCS) might sell it for linox, too.

- Thomas
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
e-mail: [email protected]

immer ?
nein, nicht immer ...
... aber immer oefter !
From: [email protected] (The Master of Symbolic Links)

Subject: Re: VGA graphics library for Linux
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 09:10:26 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (USENET Newssystem)
Organization: Inst. fuer Informatik, Technische Univ. Muenchen, Germany
Lines: 34
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of 5 May 92 10:32:05 GMT

>In my work to port gnuplot to Linux I have written a couple of graphics
>routines that I think could serve as basis for such a library. The
>following is implemented:
> - Support for all standard VGA 16 and 256 color modes
> - Support for non-standard 256 color modes (including mode X)
> - Simple primitives: point and line
> - Complete restoration of the text mode display when returning
> from graphics mode (should also work with SVGA text modes)
> - Handling of console I/O (e.g. disabling of terminal echoing
> in graphics mode)
>This should be sufficient for porting many applications to Linux, but
>it would be nice if we could include the following in the library:
> - Support for SVGA graphics modes
> - Support for EGA and Herculers adapters
> - Advanced primitives: circles, filled polygons etc
> - Faster primitives (recoding of critical parts in assembler)
> - Text output in graphics mode
> - Better error handling (currently none)
>I would be happy if somebody could help with the implementation of
>some of these, but I welcome any comments and suggestions, especially
>on the contens and structure of the library.

I wouldn't hardcode everything like you did. There are too many incompatible
SVGAs around. Why not using the VESA SVPMI standard for getting infos
about the SVGA and how to set displaymodes ?

- Thomas
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
e-mail: [email protected]

immer ?
nein, nicht immer ...
... aber immer oefter !
From: [email protected] (The Master of Symbolic Links)

Subject: Re: X windows video card support?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 09:21:16 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (USENET Newssystem)
Organization: Inst. fuer Informatik, Technische Univ. Muenchen, Germany
Lines: 24
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of 6 May 92 00:44:52 GMT

>Mostly, the only difference between different SVGA chip sets from the
>programmer's perspective is how the bank switching and initialization
>is handled.

Yeah, in theory. The problem with the 8900 is that there are basically two
versions out there, the 8900B and the 8900C. The B rev supports only one
bank, and is therefor unusable for X386. The 8900C rev does support two
banks and therefor might work. The problem is only that setting the
video-modes for TVGA things isn't that trivial. First they must be programmed
TOTALLY different depending on the video-memory you have installed and then
you have to use some UNDOCUMENTED things (I have the driver, but it's not PD).

Thus I would forget about this project unless you are really a SVGA hacker.
Besides this the 8900 has only half of the speed as an Et4000 and therefor
it makes no sense to support this thing ...

- Thomas
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
e-mail: [email protected]

immer ?
nein, nicht immer ...
... aber immer oefter !
From: [email protected] (The Master of Symbolic Links)

Subject: Re: X
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 09:25:31 GMT
References:
<[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (USENET Newssystem)
Organization: Inst. fuer Informatik, Technische Univ. Muenchen, Germany
Lines: 22
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of Wed, 6 May 1992 02:08:3
7 GMT

>That's a known limitation of X (read all the way to the bottom of the
>README :), and zorst isn't quite sure if X or Linux is at fault.
>Regardless, the code posted today by Tommy Frandsen should help
>matters, as it does correctly restore text mode after switching to
>various VGA modes. (And it looks great, too! Thanks Tommy.)

I think this is related to the fact that the CLUT is not restored by
default if the server exits. Some Et4000 boards had problems with that,
so we didn't restore it (in fact these Et4000s simply hang ...).

There is in vga.c a '#ifdef GOOD_ET4000'. You might want to use this code
by default on linox (i.e. remove these #ifdef's). On SYSV/386 the keyboard
driver itself restores the colormap upon server exit.

- Thomas
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
e-mail: [email protected]

immer ?
nein, nicht immer ...
... aber immer oefter !
From: [email protected] (The Master of Symbolic Links)

Subject: Re: Logitech Mouse and X11
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 09:14:25 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (USENET Newssystem)
Followup-To: alt.os.linux
Organization: Inst. fuer Informatik, Technische Univ. Muenchen, Germany
Lines: 21
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of 5 May 92 15:15:58 GMT

>Now I would gladly give up this functionality to have my Logitech mouse work
>with X. I download the binaries, and EVERYTHING works, except for the MOUSE.
>This problem was mentioned in a previous post, and I want to reiterate it.
>I know my mouse is working fine - off ttys1 (cat tells me this and the code
>mentioned above). Since the Logitech mouse is actually an option in Xconfig,
>why in the world doesn't it work? I have tried to change the Xconfig file
>in every way - it started with something like:

Which Logitech do you own ? The 'Logitech' keyword is only for the old
S9/C9/S7/C7 mice. The newer ones, which were a technologic step back
do understand only an extended 'MicroSoft' protocol ('MouseMan'), and thus
you cannot use the good old Logitech driver ....

- Thomas
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
e-mail: [email protected]

immer ?
nein, nicht immer ...
... aber immer oefter !
From: [email protected] (Rogier Wolff)

Subject: Re: Writing an OS - questions !!
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 09:51:12 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <[email protected]> <
[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (UseNet News System)
Organization: Delft University of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering
Lines: 39
Nntp-Posting-Host: neuron.et.tudelft.nl

[email protected] (Rhys Weatherley) writes:

>Thanks for posting that Linus - it's very good to read how it all began. I
>hope that the FTP site administrators save away your message as a piece of
>Linux folklore. I especially liked the bit about you being proud of your
>two AAAA... and BBBB... processes. ๐Ÿ™‚

>Cheers,

I once "ported" XINU to a PDP 11. (It was written on one, but you don't
get some, necessary software with the book, and you'd need a VAX that we
didn't have to run it. Also some PDP11s have hardware MUL and DIV while
others don't)

Anyway we ran the same test: One process printing "process A" and the
other "process B". This resulted in the following output:

process A
process A
process A
prpocess A
process A
process A
procress A
process A

And we where thinking of bugs in the tty code, when it struck that the
output buffer was filling, and process B was mad runnable untill it
printed exactly one character. This blocked process B, and would wait
until the buffer cleared. Next process A would be made runnable again,
and be allowed to fill most of the buffer again.....

Yes, we where also proud that this worked!

Roger
--
If the opposite of "pro" is "con", what is the opposite of "progress"?
(stolen from [email protected])
EMail: [email protected] ** Tel +31-15-783644 or +31-15-142371
From: [email protected] (Ken Corey - Operator)

Subject: Re: X windows video card support?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 12:28:23 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <1992May
[email protected]> <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (UNT USENet Adminstrator)
Organization: University of North Texas
Lines: 13

>TOTALLY different depending on the video-memory you have installed and then
>you have to use some UNDOCUMENTED things (I have the driver, but it's not PD).

There's a non-PD driver for the board that might work under Linux?

>Thus I would forget about this project unless you are really a SVGA hacker.
>Besides this the 8900 has only half of the speed as an Et4000 and therefor
>it makes no sense to support this thing ...

Wait a minute. What about those of us who can't afford to run out and pop down
another $80+ for more hardware? Just because it's difficult doesn't mean
anything, does it?

-Ken
From: [email protected] (Joel M. Hoffman)

Subject: Re: X11 won't work? Help!
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 12:56:16 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <[email protected].
DE>
Sender: [email protected] (USENET News system)
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park
Lines: 12
Nntp-Posting-Host: next.wam.umd.edu

In article <[email protected]> [email protected]
-muenchen.de (The Master of Symbolic Links) writes:
>>VGA256: pvga1 (mem: 256k clocks: 25 28 0 22 36 52 0 62)
>>Too less memory for virtual resolution
>
>Hmmm... X386 read the BIOS/ BIOS used ports to find out about the installed
>memory on a Paradise board. If you VGA has more memory installed than
>X386 finds, you can tell this X386 by specifying 'VideoMemory' in Xconfig

How much VideoMemory is required? Will X run with an SVGA card attached
to a lowly VGA monitor?

-Joel
From: [email protected] (Magnus Alvestad)

Subject: Re: X windows video card support?
Message-ID:
Date: 6 May 92 19:09:50 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (Bergen University Newsaccount)
Reply-To: [email protected]
Organization: /Home/kurs1/ip208/.organization
Lines: 21
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of Wed, 6 May 1992 12:28:23 GMT


[XWindows driver for Trident 8900(B?)]

Wait a minute. What about those of us who can't afford to run out
and pop down another $80+ for more hardware? Just because it's
difficult doesn't mean anything, does it?

Agreed. After all, Quarterdeck does it in Desqview/X - so it is
possible. My knowledge of the Trident board implies that it is not at
all so hard to program as he implies.

We could always gang up and make a driver I suppose? I have some
documentation, need a little bit more. Someone would have to link it
with the code. Anyone?

-Magnus
--
,----------------------------------------------------------------.
| Magnus Alvestad |
| |
`----------------------------------------------------------------'
From: [email protected] (Teresa Selling)

Subject: Minimal boot and root together on 1.44 floppy...possible?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 14:24:51 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (USENET News System)
Organization: Indiana University at South Bend
Lines: 6
Nntp-Posting-Host: peabody.iusb.indiana.edu

I was wondering if it's possible to get a minimal root disk on the same
boot floppy for emergency purposes. I anyone has found a way to do this
please let me know. I imagine it would involve using something similar
to shoelace to read in the boot image, but I have no idea where to begin.
--
Teresa Selling, IUSB, Indiana.
From: [email protected] (The Master of Symbolic Links)

Subject: Re: X11 won't work? Help!
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 14:15:49 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <[email protected].
DE>
<[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (USENET Newssystem)
Organization: Inst. fuer Informatik, Technische Univ. Muenchen, Germany
Lines: 21
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of Wed, 6 May 1992 12:56:16 GMT

>>>VGA256: pvga1 (mem: 256k clocks: 25 28 0 22 36 52 0 62)
>>>Too less memory for virtual resolution
>>
>>Hmmm... X386 read the BIOS/ BIOS used ports to find out about the installed
>>memory on a Paradise board. If you VGA has more memory installed than
>>X386 finds, you can tell this X386 by specifying 'VideoMemory' in Xconfig
>
>How much VideoMemory is required? Will X run with an SVGA card attached
>to a lowly VGA monitor?

Depends upon you virtual/real resultution. If you want to use 640x480 you
have to have at least 640 * 480 bytes = 307200 bytes ....

- Thomas
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
e-mail: [email protected]

immer ?
nein, nicht immer ...
... aber immer oefter !
From: [email protected] (Brett J. Vickers)

Subject: Re: Swapping problem
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 15:38:38 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Reply-To: [email protected] (Brett J. Vickers)
Organization: Univ. of Calif., Irvine, Info. & Computer Sci. Dept.
Lines: 22
Nntp-Posting-Host: bonnie.ics.uci.edu

[email protected] writes:
>As the subject says I have a problem swapping. First I'm useing MCC-interim
>0.95c+ SCSI. My machine is a 486-33 with 8MB, Adaptec 1542B and 2x210MB
>Quantum disks.
>
>swapon /dev/sd2d
>Unable to find swap-space signature
>Error adding '/dev/sd2d' as swap
>swapon: EINVAL

I've seen a lot of people having this problem; I've had it too. No one's
been able to offer a solution or work-around to it yet, though. It seems
that the problem is occuring for people who are using SCSI. I've tried
all the suggestions here -- syncing after mkswap, trying both swap files
and swap partitions, etc. Nothing works.

Has anyone using a 1542B been able to get a swap file working? If so,
please post details.

--
[email protected] | "Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there
[email protected] | is the danger of oppression." - James Madison
From: [email protected]

Subject: password
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 14:50:35 GMT
Sender: mulcihy@mimas (David Mulcihy 283-4279)
Organization: nasa-jsc
Lines: 5

I have linux. How do I go about setting up passwords?
Is there a password program to encrypt passwords?

David Mulcihy
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (Jay Maynard)

Subject: Re: X windows video card support?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 16:12:58 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <1992May6.092116.2
[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: UT Health Science Center Houston
Lines: 14
Nntp-Posting-Host: oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu

In article <[email protected]> [email protected]
-muenchen.de (The Master of Symbolic Links) writes:
>Besides this the 8900 has only half of the speed as an Et4000 and therefor
>it makes no sense to support this thing ...

Are you going to buy ET4000s for all of us who have Trident cards? If not,
then why shouldn't we support it (no, I'm not asking you to write the driver,
just to get out of the way of those who would)?

I have a Trident 9000; where does it fit into all of this?
--
Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL | Never ascribe to malice that which can
[email protected] | adequately be explained by a .sig virus.
"[...] have you noticed how many people have joined you on the back of
Rosinante to help subdue this particular windmill?" -- Dan Herrick
From: [email protected] (Paul H. Hargrove)

Subject: Re: Possible bug in lp driver, or just me?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 16:40:31 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: Cornell University, Ithaca New York, USA
Lines: 24
Nntp-Posting-Host: theory.tc.cornell.edu

In article [email protected] (Gunter Windau) writes:
>[email protected] (Paul H. Hargrove) writes:
>
...My original post deleted...
>
...Gunter's description of his similar problem deleted...
>
>If people are interested, I an post my lp.c and lp.h replacements.
>Though I only know they work with the NEC P7+.
>
>=========================================================================
>| G\"unter Windau [email protected] |
>| CoGro, Dept. Medical Physics & Biophysics |
>| Univ. of Nijmegen, The Netherlands |
>=========================================================================

I tried to e-mail to you, Gunter, but my mail bounced. Post the files if you
wish, but if not PLEASE e-mail them to me. I NEED my printer and will try
almost anything.

--
Paul H. Hargrove
[email protected]
"A witty saying proves nothing." --Voltaire
From: [email protected]

Subject: My modem wont work under Linux
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 16:46:37 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (The News Administrator)
Reply-To: [email protected]
Organization: Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Lines: 23
Nntp-Posting-Host: manager.nextwork.rose-hulman.edu


My modem on com4 works fine under DOS (uhg!)

It won't initialize with kermit, and doesn't do anything for xcomm or pcomm-

Any ideas?

I have a machine hooked to ttys2, but nothings happens to the port. I tried to

use the modem on com1 with everything else diabled, but still nothing.

I have tried to initialize ttys4 with setterm, and I have tried reset. I am
out of clues.

Does anyone else have these problems?

I tries a roomates external modem, and it worked with no problems.
--
Joseph T. Batt - deranged CS undergrad...
-----------------------------------------------------
\ [email protected] = &(Joseph T. Batt); \
\ \
\ Real programmers start counting with zero. \
------------------------------------------------------
From: [email protected] (Michel Eyckmans (MCE))

Subject: Support for tape drives?
Keywords: tape
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 09:28:28 GMT
Sender: [email protected]
Reply-To: [email protected]
Organization: IMEC vzw Leuven
Lines: 17

Hello,

I'd like to know the current status of tape drive support
under Linux. Are people working on it and, if so, what
kinds of drives will be supported?

Thanks in advance

MCE


--
=============================================================================
#include

M. Eyckmans (MCE) [email protected]
=============================================================================
From: [email protected] (Damian Hamill)

Subject: Re: Executable Magic numbers
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 13:55:42 GMT
References:
Reply-To: [email protected] (Damian Hamill)
Followup-To: comp.os.linux
Distribution: comp.os.linux
Organization: Crosfield Electronics, Hemel Hempstead, United Kingdom.
Lines: 23

In article [email protected]
kato.msus.edu (Erik Green) writes:

> I have a question or two: Does _anyone_ out there know what
>magic numbers/unique ID signature are on/in GCC 2.1 binaries?

[and]

>If anyone knows a numeric signature/ byte offset combination that definitively
>says "Linux GCC 2.1 executable", please mail it to me. Different sigs
>for shared and static executables would be a bonus, but I have little hope
>on this point.

I think it would be a good idea if binaries contained a header or
signature which identified the OS & version, machine, cpu & possibly
also compiler and libraries. This might seem overkill but would
significantly aid the development of distributed systems of differing
architectures.

Any thoughts?

>-Erik

Damian
From: [email protected] (Todd Radel)

Subject: Re: X11 won't work? Help!
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 17:29:51 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <[email protected].
DE>
Organization: University of Delaware
Lines: 23

In article <[email protected]> [email protected]
-muenchen.de (The Master of Symbolic Links) writes:
>>VGA256: pvga1 (mem: 256k clocks: 25 28 0 22 36 52 0 62)
>>Too less memory for virtual resolution
>>
>Hmmm... X386 read the BIOS/ BIOS used ports to find out about the installed
>memory on a Paradise board. If you VGA has more memory installed than
>X386 finds, you can tell this X386 by specifying 'VideoMemory' in Xconfig
>(typical RTFM question).

Err...actually, I did do that. Then it came up with "512k" but otherwise
did exactly the same. Finally, I did something (don't know what) that
got it to clear the screen, but it displayed garbage. I tried the dot-clock
settings for a Paradise, but no luck. On the other hand, my Microsoft
Windows 640x480x256 driver won't work either. I guess it's just a bum
video card.



--
Todd Radel | "Scheme is evil and must be destroyed."
CIS/English | -- anyone from CISC180 --
University of Delaware | No, I'm NOT a sysop any more, thank you
Internet: [email protected] | very much. I'm well now.
From: [email protected] (gary a moyer)

Subject: where's the missing file for dungeon?
Summary: well?
Keywords: dungeon, games
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 4 May 92 17:40:05 GMT
Sender: [email protected]
Lines: 4

I got the dungeon binary off of tsx-11, however, there seems to be a
missing data file: dtextc.dat. Anyone know of its whereabouts?
thx. [email protected]

From: [email protected] (Paul Nakada)

Subject: X386 and lame SVGA cards
Message-ID:
Date: 6 May 92 18:39:34 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (Oracle News Poster)
Organization: Oracle Corporation, Redwood Shores, CA
Lines: 16
Nntp-Posting-Host: pnakada.us.oracle.com
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.


Linux Hackers -

I've got a Trident SVGA card which isn't supported under X386.
Shouldn't there be a way to use it as a plain VGA card (640x480)?
Aren't all SVGA cards the same if treated as VGA? Windows doesn't
have any problems with the default VGA driver and my card, it's just
the higher resolutions which need trident specific drivers. So, is
there an Xconfig for plain VGA cards?

Thanks.

- Paul
--

Paul Nakada | Oracle Corporation | [email protected]
From: [email protected] (Rajat Datta)

Subject: Re: Problems with cdd
Keywords: cdd linux
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 17:58:52 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <1992May05.203935
[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (NNTP News Poster)
Organization: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Lines: 19
Disclaimer: This posting represents the poster's views, not necessarily those of
IBM
Nntp-Posting-Host: shravani.watson.ibm.com

In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Rajat D
atta) writes:
>To write a new 'cd' you have to modify the shell itself. Under Linux,
>that will mean changes to bash or ash. If bash, you might be able to
>do this with a shell function. Exactly what does your cdd do?
>Perhaps we can help you implement it.
>

What I should have said is "you have to modify the actions of the
shell". Obviously you don't have to actually modify the source code
of the shell, as quite a few people have pointed at once.

I prefer to do this via a bash shell function, rather than as a
separate executable, if at all possible. It reduces the working set
size I have to move if and when I have to move to a new environment
(like moving my rs/6k workstation environment at work to my 386 linux
environment at home).

--
rajat ([email protected])
From: [email protected] (Darren Senn)

Subject: Re: DOS EMULATION
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 18:30:29 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <1992May5.143429.659@sinkhol
e.unf.edu>
Sender: [email protected]
Reply-To: [email protected]
Organization: Curiosity Confederacy
Lines: 19

In article , [email protected] (Allan A
dler) writes:
> there is even a PD
> BIOS that is available with ASM source code and all) The main disadvantage
> is that DOS will not be able to access the Linux partition.
>
> Where does one get this PD BIOS and its source code?

ftp simtel20.army.mil (192.88.110.20) (or a suitable mirror)
cd PD1: (or /pub/msdos/sysutl)
binary
get bios-asm.arc

This is the PD BIOS that I mentioned last month. It is 8086 BIOS, but it
should be pretty straightforward to augment to 386 or 486 BIOS level.

--
Darren Senn Phone: (408) 479-1521
[email protected] Snail: 1785 Halterman #1
Wasurenaide -- doko e itte mo soko ni anata wa iru yo. Santa Cruz, Ca 95062
From: [email protected] (I Reid)

Subject: Sierra DAC and X-Linux: feasible?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 18:35:21 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: Edinburgh University
Lines: 21

Further to my posting last night, I have more or less decided on a
Tseng 4000 based board to replace my non linux friendly (supposedly
register compatible) Svga board.

My reasons for this are that I want a good, well supported chipset
that is recognised by everything, is fast, and is usable with "off the
shelf" software (e.g. X). The Tseng 4000 seems to meet these
requirements admirably.

I am wondering whether to spend the extra money (about 20 pounds/ 35
dollars) and get a Sierra Hicolour DAC on the board and would
appreciate any comments. I can write my own code to use the chip but,
time being limited these days, it probably isn't justifiable unless
"off the shelf" software can make use of it. Since X is now available
for Linux I wondered whether it can make use of this DAC? It is always
nice if the code has already been written but if not, does the
underlying framework of X allow for this sort of colour range?

Iain

p.s. All replies by email please 'cos I want to buy the board quite soon.
From: [email protected] (Rob J. Nauta)

Subject: this newsgroup
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 09:00:16 GMT
Organization: Sex, UNIX & Rock 'n Roll
Lines: 9

Please don't use this newsgroup anymore. It's been obsoleted by
comp.os.linux. Crossposting to both groups is unneccesary.

Rob
--
+-----------------------+
| Rob J. Nauta | "In the end, all time spent is wasted time."
| [email protected] |
| Phone: +31-40-833777 |
From: [email protected]

Subject: How do I set up mail?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 18:45:40 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (USENET News System)
Organization: Jus' me.
Lines: 13

I'm having a heck of a time guessing about this...
Can someone tell me how to set up mail from scratch
on the 0.95+ interim release?

"smail" assumes that I've already *got* "mail", but I *don't*!
I'd be tickled pink if I could just get _local_ mail working...

Please help... Don't be worried that your reply will be one
of many, 'cause I didn't get *ANY* responses to my last request.

Thanks in advance,

Rick Miller [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
From: [email protected] (Mika Pekka Liljeberg)

Subject: Re: X windows video card support?
Message-ID:
Date: 6 May 92 19:41:43 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (Uutis Ankka)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Finland
Lines: 52
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of 6 May 92 09: 21:16 GMT

In article <[email protected]> [email protected]
-muenchen.de (The Master of Symbolic Links) wrote:
>>Mostly, the only difference between different SVGA chip sets from the
>>programmer's perspective is how the bank switching and initialization
>>is handled.
>
> Yeah, in theory. The problem with the 8900 is that there are basically two
> versions out there, the 8900B and the 8900C. The B rev supports only one
> bank, and is therefor unusable for X386. The 8900C rev does support two

Why do you say a single bank is unusable? I see no reason whatsoever not
to emulate two banks with a single one. Of course there would be some
performance penalty, but you can always use ass-embler to even it out.

> banks and therefor might work. The problem is only that setting the
> video-modes for TVGA things isn't that trivial. First they must be programmed
> TOTALLY different depending on the video-memory you have installed and then
> you have to use some UNDOCUMENTED things (I have the driver, but it's not PD).

You actually make it sound interesting. ๐Ÿ™‚

> Thus I would forget about this project unless you are really a SVGA hacker.
> Besides this the 8900 has only half of the speed as an Et4000 and therefor
> it makes no sense to support this thing ...

...unless, of course, you happen to own a Trident and not an ET4000.
Heck, I've got a Trident with a 8800CS chip myself and I don't think
it's a lost cause. Ok, so I admit it might be a good time to upgrade
(perhaps I will), but the next thing I would be dissatisfied with would
be my trusty old NEC Multisync II. My whole system is slowly getting
to be vintage; I'd much rather upgrade the mother board than spend
several thousand FM on new display hardware. Point made, I guess.

Actually, when starting to write this article, I was thinking that it
would be nice, if the X-server was also distributed in object code
form. This way the odd person, who was a proud owner of, say, a
TarararaBoomGA would have a fairly easy time of writing his very own
display driver and linking it with the rest of the server. And O.B.Z.
wouldn't have to worry about every goddamn piece of cardboard with a
crt chip on it. The resulting separately written drivers could then
be incorporated in the next X386 release. Let's face it, if you're
writing a driver for the guy who won't leave you in peace until
you've written it, you _might_ still do an adequate job. If, on the
other hand, you're writing it for yourself, you make damn sure it's
the best you can manage.

There's lots of would be coders out here, folks. ๐Ÿ˜‰ Give us a chance.

Mika
--
Mika Liljeberg Email: [email protected]
Helsinki University [email protected]
Dept. of Computer Science
From: [email protected] (Bennett E. Todd)

Subject: elle(1) and rc(1) ports uploaded to tsx-11.mit.edu
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 18:43:06 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (Mr Background)
Reply-To: [email protected] (Bennett E. Todd)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 21

I uploaded my ports of elle and rc to tsx-11.mit.edu; they are in
~ftp/pub/linux/sources/usr.bin. The files are elle.src.tar.Z,
elle.src.diffs.Z, rc.src.tar.Z, and rc.src.diffs.Z. In both cases the
src.tar.Z file is the original sources from before I started my Linux
port, and the src.diffs.Z file is suitable (after uncompressing) for
feeding into patch -p1.

elle (Elle Looks Like Emacs) is a very small, simple emacs-style editor.
It is substantially smaller even than Jove. It's keyboard bindings are
more like GNU Emacs's. It is missing a lot of the sexy features that
make bigger emacses (like jove) luxurious, including electric-C mode,
shell windows, subprocesses, compile/find-error, and so on. However,
again unlike jove, it can edit arbitrary binary files. It is the
smallest, simplest editor I've seen yet that is really pleasant for jobs
like patching the bootimage.

Rc(1) is a shell designed by Tom Duff for Plan 9. This implementation is
by Byron Rakitzis and friends. It is a small, simple shell.

-Bennett (curmudgeon)
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (Brian Olsen)

Subject: Help needed with X11
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 19:16:00 GMT
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: University of Missouri - Rolla
Lines: 26
Originator: [email protected]


Hello!
I've just recently pulled down X11 from banjo and have followed all
of the instructions in README.USER.

When I run /usr/bin/X11/startx, the screen blanks out and I get an error

Fatal server error: no screens found

giving up.
xinit .....

Since I've an ATI Wonder with 512k and an interlaced monitor that
640x350 and 640x400 at 31.5kHz and 70Hz
640x480 at 31.5kHz and 60Hz
800x600 at 35kHz and 56Hz
1024x768 at 35kHz and 87Hz

I decided to try running it at 640x480x256. I've used the entry for
the ATI wonder card in the vga.dbase and have commented out all of the
other resolutions in ModeDB except the two 640x480 entries (the 25 and 28MHz
entries were indicated in the ATI entry in vga.dbase)

Any help would be appreciated.
Brian
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (Kevin Cummings)

Subject: Re: where's the missing file for dungeon?
Keywords: dungeon, games
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 19:09:10 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: cummings@hammer (Kevin Cummings)
Organization: Prime Computer R&D
Lines: 21

In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] (gary a moyer) writes:
> I got the dungeon binary off of tsx-11, however, there seems to be a
> missing data file: dtextc.dat. Anyone know of its whereabouts?

I went back and found it in the source distribution. This file only
contains the data base and text messages for the entire game!
Don't know why it wasn't included with the binary, since you can't
run without it. Hint, Hint.

=================================================================
Kevin J. Cummings Prime Computer Inc.
20 Briarwood Road 500 Old Connecticut Path
Framingham, Mass. Framingham, Mass.

Work: [email protected]
Home: [email protected]

Std. Disclaimer: "Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration,
I've come to the conclusion that your new
defense system SUCKS..." -- War Games
=================================================================
From: [email protected] (THE Upholder of Truth)

Subject: Re: password
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 19:40:41 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Lines: 23

[email protected] writes:
>I have linux. How do I go about setting up passwords?
>Is there a password program to encrypt passwords?

In answer to the above question, it's in the FAQ (part2) and the binaries
are located on most FTP sites in a file called shadow-bin.tar.Z (I found
it on tsx-11.mit.edu).

However, after messing with these binaries for about 6 hours now, I have
yet to get useradd to properly add users. it *CLAIMS* that the users
are added, and the /etc/passwd file is modified, but neither login nor
usermod or userdel will recognize that the user was added (and the passwd
binary modifies the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files, but not properly...
I sets a passwd, but that passwd won't let me in.. I had to reinstall from
scratch 'cause I didnt' test it from another virtual term...)

*ANY* help would be appreciated.. I'm running 0.95c+ on a Gateway 2000
486/33 with 8Megs ram and a 40Meg Linux partition.
--
The Upholder of Truth I am not only ready to
[email protected] (BSD/ASCII mail) retract this, but also
[email protected] (NeXT mail) deny I said anything. =)
[email protected] (anon. mail) This is *NOT* CCSO's opinion.
From: [email protected] (Kevin Cummings)

Subject: Re: X386 and lame SVGA cards
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 19:13:59 GMT
References:
Sender: cummings@hammer (Kevin Cummings)
Organization: Prime Computer R&D
Lines: 34

In article , [email protected] (Paul N
akada) writes:
>
> Linux Hackers -
>
> I've got a Trident SVGA card which isn't supported under X386.
> Shouldn't there be a way to use it as a plain VGA card (640x480)?
> Aren't all SVGA cards the same if treated as VGA? Windows doesn't
> have any problems with the default VGA driver and my card, it's just
> the higher resolutions which need trident specific drivers. So, is
> there an Xconfig for plain VGA cards?

The question, as i read it, is why can't X386 support 640x480x16 mode.
The answer I read earlier today is that they don't think its worth the
effort to do so. They believe that only 256 colors modes are worth
supporting, and 320x200x256 is too small a screen to use X on, even
in a virtual 800x600x256 screen driver (which needs 512K bytes
of video memory to do without swapping to system memory). So what I
heard them say was that if your video card has less than 512K of
video memory, don't expect to be able to use X386.

I don't agree with them, but they have the source, and I don't.

=================================================================
Kevin J. Cummings Prime Computer Inc.
20 Briarwood Road 500 Old Connecticut Path
Framingham, Mass. Framingham, Mass.

Work: [email protected]
Home: [email protected]

Std. Disclaimer: "Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration,
I've come to the conclusion that your new
defense system SUCKS..." -- War Games
=================================================================
From: [email protected] (Kevin Cummings)

Subject: Re: DOS EMULATION
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 19:49:36 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <1992May5.143429.659@sinkhol
e.unf.edu> <[email protected]>
Sender: cummings@hammer (Kevin Cummings)
Organization: Prime Computer R&D
Lines: 37

In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] (Darre
n Senn) writes:
> In article , [email protected] (Allan
Adler) writes:
> > there is even a PD
> > BIOS that is available with ASM source code and all) The main disadvanta
ge
> > is that DOS will not be able to access the Linux partition.
> >
> > Where does one get this PD BIOS and its source code?
>
> ftp simtel20.army.mil (192.88.110.20) (or a suitable mirror)
> cd PD1: (or /pub/msdos/sysutl)
> binary
^^^^^^

Gack! This should be TENEX, not binary! WSMR-SIMTEL20 is a DEC 20
machine running TOPS-20 with 36 bit words (thus the funny pathname!). It stores
binary files as 32 bits of data followed by 4 bits of 0. If you get the files i
n
binary mode (with a sufficiently dumb FTP program), it will stream the bits at y
ou
and you will not get what you want. Use tenex mode to ensure that FTP throws
away the 4 bits of 0 that you don't want!

> get bios-asm.arc
>
> This is the PD BIOS that I mentioned last month. It is 8086 BIOS, but it
> should be pretty straightforward to augment to 386 or 486 BIOS level.

=================================================================
Kevin J. Cummings Prime Computer Inc.
20 Briarwood Road 500 Old Connecticut Path
Framingham, Mass. Framingham, Mass.

Work: [email protected]
Home: [email protected]

Std. Disclaimer: "Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration,
I've come to the conclusion that your new
defense system SUCKS..." -- War Games
=================================================================
From: [email protected] (Curtis Yarvin)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386,comp.unix.bsd,comp.os.linux

Subject: Anyone working on free 8514/S3 X support?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 20:55:58 GMT
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 6

I'm probably going to write a free 8514/S3 driver for X this summer, and I'd
be interested in hearing from anyone else who's working on the same thing,
so we can avoid duplicated effort.

Curtis Yarvin
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (Darren Senn)

Subject: Re: DOS EMULATION
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 21:08:11 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <1992May5.143429.659@sinkhol
e.unf.edu> <[email protected]> <1992
[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected]
Reply-To: [email protected]
Organization: Curiosity Confederacy
Lines: 15

In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] (Kevin
Cummings) writes:
> > ftp simtel20.army.mil (192.88.110.20) (or a suitable mirror)
> > cd PD1: (or /pub/msdos/sysutl)
> > binary
> ^^^^^^
>
> Gack! This should be TENEX, not binary! WSMR-SIMTEL20 is a DEC 20 [...]

WHOOOPS! Silly me. ๐Ÿ™‚ I'm so used to using the mirrors, that I forgot
about that little-used command.

--
Darren Senn Phone: (408) 479-1521
[email protected] Snail: 1785 Halterman #1
Wasurenaide -- doko e itte mo soko ni anata wa iru yo. Santa Cruz, Ca 95062
From: [email protected] (Risto Kankkunen)

Subject: Re: REQUEST: Cross-compiling for LINUX
Keywords: LINUX, crosscompiling
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 21:46:42 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Organization: University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science
Lines: 12

>Are some of you compiling for LINUX under other platforms? I plan to run
>LINUX on 386SX machines with less than 3 Mb of RAM, and I'd like to try
>in other systems. I'm specifically thinking of NeXT (Mach) and VAX (Ultrix).

I just got the 0.95c kernel successfully cross-compiled on a Sparc. You
need gas 1.38, gcc 2.1, binutils 1.94 and a bit of patching here and
there. The last problem I had was that compiling with -fomit-frame-
pointers resulted in general protection errors. Removing that option
solved the problem, and also made the kernel smaller.

--
no sig today
From: [email protected] (Ted Goldblatt)

Subject: Re: Writing an OS - questions !!
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 22:46:52 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Organization: Telematics Intl., Inc.; Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Lines: 103

In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (V. Narayanan) writes:
>
>Hi folks,
> For quite some time this "novice" has been wondering as to how one goes
>about the task of writing an OS from "scratch". So here are some questions,
>and I would appreciate if you could take time to answer 'em.
>
>1) How would you typically debug the kernel during the development phase?

I can only speak from the point of view of building a system on non-PC
type hardware. I don't know how relevent this is to someone who wishes
to build a system on a PC type platform as it normally exists, especially
if it is for hobby type use as opposed to "for real" (i.e., if you don't
have _lots_ of time and _lots_ of money to spend).

The first step was (would be) to build (if not already present) a
"debug monitor". (Actually, I once worked on a system without this,
but that was on a machine that had a "real" front panel :-), so it's
too far in the past to think about.)

The debug monitor is actually a collection of software, normally
resident in a ROM/EPROM. On the system I currently work on, this
includes automatic hardware health checks, stand-alone I/O support
for the console, disk, and network (the equivalent of a PC's BIOS,
I believe), assorted initialization functions, and (most important
for this discussion) a command interpreter.

The command interpreter's commands allow such things as examining and
modifying memory and registers, planting breakpoints, and loading and
running programs (e.g., off of disk). Using the breakpoint capability,
breakpoints can be planted in the O/S (which is just another program
to the monitor), and the examine and modify capabilities can be used
when a breakpoint is hit to see what is going on.

Now (you ask), how do you debug the debug monitor? For that, we use
hardware debugging facilities, principally emulators and logic
analyzers. An emulator gives you capabilities similar to those of
the debug monitor, but totally external to the system (they don't
depend on any of the system's facilities to work). It generally
plugs into the microprocessor socket, replacing the micro.

The tool I use much more often is a logic analyzer, which also plugs
into the micro socket. However, rather than giving you monitor-like
capabilities, the analyzer can just look at what is happening on the
chip's pins. It provides you a way to capture the micro's
interactions with the "outside world" (mostly memory). Its benefits
are that (most) logic analyzers have very elaborate facilities for
conditionally choosing _what_ is captured (triggering and selection)
as well as the ability to watch other things in parallel (bus
activity, I/O chips, etc.) with cross correlation and time stamping.
These gadgets are _very_ useful, especially for watching interactions
of multiprocessors and other concurrent activities. Even with a good
debug monitor available on our system, I still make heavy use of a
logic analyzer for O/S debugging. The major downsides are that they
tend to be low-level debugging tools (assembly level, maybe with
symbols, sometimes with limited support for C), and they are expensive
(the one I generally use is a good one, and supports 3 processors and
a 2 channel digital scope simultaneously, but it cost $45K).

>2) Can you test the kernel functionality by running it as a process on a
> different OS? Wouldn't the OS(the development environment) generate
> exceptions in cases when the kernel (of the new OS) tries to modify
> 'priviledged' registers?

This is very dependent on the underlying H/W (it assumes all necessary
requests would be trapped cleanly, and that the machine model captures
sufficient information). In many cases, for this to work, the
underlying O/S would have to be changed to emulate the required
facilities transparently. This may or may not be possible. Also,
timing would be completely different, so this approach would have
limited benefit in finding timing related problems, and might not work
at all if the system in question was real-time or had timing
constraints of its own. However, this idea _is_ the basis for virtual
machine systems (e.g., VM/370), and (if it can be employed) is very
useful. Note that true virtual machine operation (as opposed to S/W
emulation) cannot be done on all processors. The Moto 68010, 68020,
and 68030 do support this, but the 68040 _does not_. I don't know the
Intel line well enough to tell, but I have heard that the chips can
virtualize lower members of the family but not themselves.

>3) Would new linkers and loaders have to be written before you get a basic
> kernel running?

Certainly not before. Whether they were needed before the system was
useful depends in part on what the system's intended facilities are
and what object module and load module formats were chosen. Linkers
need not be O/S dependent (though they normally are at least
somewhat), and loaders need not be complex (especially in a system
that uses demand paged loading - of course in this case, you just
pushed the work into your virtual memory system :-)).

>4) Was Linux developed in a DOS environment? Maybe Linus could shed some light
> on this subject.

Left for Linus ๐Ÿ™‚





--
Ted Goldblatt [email protected] (305) 351-4367
Telematics Intl., Inc. Ft. Lauderdale, FL
From: [email protected] (Linus Benedict Torvalds)

Subject: Re: X386 and lame SVGA cards
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 22:01:43 GMT
References: <[email protected]
ime.COM>
Organization: University of Helsinki
Lines: 36

In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Kevin
Cummings) and others write:
> > [ no support for some cards, or even standard 640x480x16, as it's
> > not "worth it" ]
>
>I don't agree with them, but they have the source, and I don't.

Well, in fact you /do/ have source: just get the X11r5 distribution and
hack on it. That's how the original X386 was created (well, it wasn't
based on r5, but you get the idea). The linux X-server certainly isn't
based on any proprietary code.

There seem to be several drivers that implement standard VGA modes (just
look at "real" unixes), but sadly, none of them seem to be freely
distributable, and so aren't part of the standard distribution. The
X386 drivers included are written by Roell, and it's not really fair to
criticize him for not writing drivers for all the possible card
combinations. He did them for free, after all (sadly (for us - I doubt
he minds) he seems now to get paid for his effors, so he no longer makes
them available for no chanrge). If you want to lay the blame somewhere,
do it at IBM who didn't come up with a good standard for video cards.

The reason there doesn't seem to exist any 16-colour drivers for free is
simply because nobody seems to have wanted to write them: 16-colour
programming isn't fun, and the results aren't as pleasing as 256 colour
modes. Not surprisingly, 256 colour mode is more popular. Also, not
surprisingly, chipsets that are easier to program (ie et4000) get the
drivers.

What I'm trying to say is that X386 is free, and that nobody got paid
for producing it: don't be surprised if it doesn't support all hardware.
Even as I'm not going to write a PS2 version of linux (unless somebody
gives me a PS2 + docs etc), I assume roell didn't want to write a
version that he felt was "uninteresting".

Linus
From: [email protected] (Hongjiu Lu)

Subject: Re: X386 and lame SVGA cards
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 20:24:15 GMT
References:
Sender: [email protected] (USENET News System)
Organization: Washington State University
Lines: 26

In article , [email protected] (Paul N
akada) writes:
|>
|> Linux Hackers -
|>
|> I've got a Trident SVGA card which isn't supported under X386.
|> Shouldn't there be a way to use it as a plain VGA card (640x480)?

Don't let resolution fool you. Plain VGA use 4 bits color. X386 uses 8 bit
color.

|> Aren't all SVGA cards the same if treated as VGA? Windows doesn't
|> have any problems with the default VGA driver and my card, it's just
|> the higher resolutions which need trident specific drivers. So, is
|> there an Xconfig for plain VGA cards?
|>

NO. Plain VGA has no 8 bit color.

|> Thanks.
|>
|> - Paul
|> --
|>
|> Paul Nakada | Oracle Corporation | [email protected]

H.J.
From: [email protected] (Michael K. Johnson)

Subject: Re: DOS EMULATION
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 5 May 92 23:43:13 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <1992May5.143429.659@sinkhol
e.unf.edu>
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: St. Olaf College; Northfield, MN USA
Lines: 8
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of 5 May 92 14:34:29 GMT


There is a free bios available that could be distributed with such a
product, as well. I think that it is at wuarchive. If anyone working
on this project want the file and can't find it, mail me, and I'll be
happy to scrounge for it.

michaelkjohnson
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (Mr Chang)

Subject: Linux .95 and X11
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 08:44:17 GMT
Sender: [email protected]
Reply-To: [email protected] (Mr Chang)
Organization: Charles Sturt University-Riverina, Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia
Lines: 15


Linux users,

I have used Linux 0.1 last year. Due to heavy work load in
Uni., I've given up following the development of Linux. Recently
I've known that X11R5 is running on Linux now!
After scanning through some of the FTP sites carrying Linux, I've
found that most of the sites are filled with lots of stuff for Linux.
What are the minimum I need to download in order to run X11R5?? Which
kernel images, utilities, and which FTP sites is the best??
Thanks in advance for any one who will answer my questions.
Happy Linuxing!!

S.Chang
=======
From: [email protected] (Erik Green)

Subject: My X setup
Message-ID:
Date: 7 May 92 00:11:02 GMT
Distribution: comp.os.linux
Organization: Long polymers in double-helix formation
Lines: 54
Nntp-Posting-Host: att2.cs.mankato.msus.edu


Since sooooo many people have asked, here is _precisely_ what I'm
using for X386:

386-25DX w/4 MB of 70ns SIMMs, no swap
ST-157A-1 43 MB HD, Bios setting 17
3.5" Floppy as A:, 5.25" Floppy as B:
Compuadd serial mouse on COM1(ttys1)

Video:

Generic 8-bit VGA card, 256k VRAM, Paradise Chipset
Analog VGA monitor(Goldstar)

Clocks:
25 28 57 72 78 68 50 62

Mode Line:
"640x400" 25 640 648 768 800 400 412 414 449

as you can see, I'm using my card in 640x400 mode, 256 colors. The only
problem is that you just can't update an 8-bit card in this mode completely
during the vertical retrace, so I have a little snow.

I have seen people post things like:

"X is only barely useable at 800x600x256, it makes no sense to support
anything less"

X at 640x400 beats the hell out of a text terminal. Of course, _I_ haven't
been spoiled by using workstations, either. Our school is so backward,
I occasionally use a Decwriter to read news(300 baud).

or

"We can only port X to certain cards becausof their chipset/VRAM/etc."

In other words, you don't know how. It should be possible, since we are
directly programming the VGA chipset anyway, to hack out a 640x400x256
mode that will work on most standard VGA cards. Maybe something similar
to the much talked-about mode X.


X is much nicer on my system than MS-Windows, which I stuck in my drawer,
even with 4 MB. I'm going to try to go to at least 8, maybe 16 megs of
ram in the next few months, though.

-Erik

--
Erik "Longshot" Green
longshot@(vax1 | att2.cs | krypton | theory.cs).mankato.msus.edu
"Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg
thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul!"
From: [email protected] (Craig Metz)

Subject: 33Mhz 386 and IDE hard drives
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 00:04:43 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (Mr Background)
Reply-To: [email protected] (Craig Metz)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 8


With all the people complaining about how their 33Mhz machine won't
work with their hard drive unde Linux, I'd like to voice the opposite. I have
a SCI RAM 386/33Mhz (Greenleaf motherboard) and a Seagate ST1144A, and al
versions from 0.12 to 0.95c+ work flawlessly at the full 33Mhz. At least it
works for somebody...

-Craig
From: [email protected] (H.H. Bergman)

Subject: Re: Support for tape drives?
Summary: QIC-02 RSN -- Beta testers wanted
Keywords: tape
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 6 May 92 23:12:16 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Organization: Faculty of Arts & Letters, Groningen University, The Netherlands
Lines: 40

In article <[email protected]> [email protected] writes:
>Hello,
>
> I'd like to know the current status of tape drive support
> under Linux. Are people working on it and, if so, what
> kinds of drives will be supported?
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> MCE
>
I'm working on tape drive support for my Wangtek 5150 tape drive
with a QIC-02 interface. There may be other people working on adding
support for the Colorado-type of drive, which attach to the floppy
disk controller. My driver won't work with that kind of drive. I'm
not even sure it will work with other QIC-02 tape drives, but if at
all possible, I will try to.

So far I've got GNU mt(1) running and have been able to dump a full
'tar' of my Linux partition on tape, but there a quite a few bugs
left. I hope to have something ready for beta testing in a week or so,
maybe a bit longer. There is some rush involved, because I may
lose net access in July. ๐Ÿ™

TO ALL: If you have a tape drive with QIC-02 interface, preferably
a Wangtek 5150, have a full backup on floppies ;-), have some experience
with tapes, AND are not afraid to try some buggy code, send me some
mail and I'll keep you updated.

>
>--
>=============================================================================
>#include
>
>M. Eyckmans (MCE) [email protected]
>=============================================================================

-Hennus Bergman
[email protected] [until July 3, 1992]
[email protected] [keep trying 'till it doesn't bounce :-(]
From: [email protected] (Eugenio Sanchez)

Subject: REQUEST: How to read a DOS file from LINUX
Summary: Want to know how to use a DOS disk from LINUX
Keywords: LINUX, mtools, DOS
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 01:35:13 GMT
Sender: [email protected]
Reply-To: [email protected], [email protected]
Organization: Xalli, sistemas. MEXICO
Lines: 11
X-Planation: I couldn't think of a good one, so it's up to you to be clever!


I now this is a FAQ, but I couldn't imagine the complete answer...

How do I read a DOS floppy from LINUX? I already have the mtools package.
Fine. But how do I install it in my root disk?

Please, add the answers to the FAQ list.
--
Eugenio Sanchez
Xalli, sistemas
President (yeah, sure...)
From: [email protected] (Hongjiu Lu)

Subject: New binutils.tar.Z
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 00:19:54 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (USENET News System)
Organization: Washington State University
Lines: 4

I just put a new binutils.tar.Z on banjo.concert.net under /pub/Linux/GCC.
It just contains a bug fix and now it can handle g++ 2.1 symbols.

H.J.
From: [email protected] (Eugenio Sanchez)

Subject: Suggestion: Multiformat compress
Summary: Why not use a multiformat 'compress'?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 01:50:43 GMT
Sender: [email protected]
Reply-To: [email protected]
Organization: Xalli sistemas. MEXICO/MEXIQUE
Lines: 30
X-Planation: "Guadalajara en un llano, Mexico en una laguna" - Mex. folk song


It seems, from the long-threaded discussion about the pros and cons of
the different compacting utilities, that every user will have their personal
choice. I myself use Zip/Unzip for the sake of portability, but it won't be
an issue for a lot people out there.

So, why not create a general 'compress' that can be fed with *any* compac-
ted file? Say, if I want to compress my files using the Zip format, I would
use:

compress -zip files...

or, for other formats:

compress -zoo files...
compress -arc files...
compress -lhz files...
compress -arj files... <- Does anybody have sources 4 this?

Obviously, no switches mean that you're using the .Z format (but we can intro-
duce a -Z switch...) ๐Ÿ™‚

I know, most people will say that this program would be ridicully big,
but I think it's viable. The problem is, to recognize the file format at
uncompress time. The sources are there; why not try to use them?

--
Eugenio Sanchez
Xalli, sistemas
President
From: [email protected] (Ron Pool)

Subject: Re: X386 and lame SVGA cards
Message-ID:
Date: 7 May 92 03:12:21 GMT
References: <[email protected]
ime.COM>
<[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: Cornell University
Lines: 36
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of 6 May 92 22: 01:43 GMT
Nntp-Filt-2: Fenchurch version 0.3 by Uncle Mikey for Cornell University
Nntp-Posting-Host: aruba.nysaes.cornell.edu
Nntp-Auth: trusted
Errors-To: [email protected]

In article <[email protected]> [email protected]
I (Linus Benedict Torvalds) writes:
>In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Kevin
>Cummings) and others write:
>> > [ no support for some cards, or even standard 640x480x16, as it's
>> > not "worth it" ]
>>
>>I don't agree with them, but they have the source, and I don't.

>Well, in fact you /do/ have source: just get the X11r5 distribution and
>hack on it. That's how the original X386 was created (well, it wasn't
>based on r5, but you get the idea). The linux X-server certainly isn't
>based on any proprietary code.

>What I'm trying to say is that X386 is free, and that nobody got paid
>for producing it: don't be surprised if it doesn't support all hardware.
>Even as I'm not going to write a PS2 version of linux (unless somebody
>gives me a PS2 + docs etc), I assume roell didn't want to write a
>version that he felt was "uninteresting".

> Linus

It sounds like the source for X386 as ported to Linux may not be made
available. This is certainly fair, but I'd like to know if this is going
to be the case or not, so I can decide whether to use X386 or not. I
very much like the fact that source is available for everything I'm using
in Linux right now, except for possibly X386 and gcc2.1 (as ported to Linux).
I imagine the source for gcc2.1 will be available later (this is actually
required under the GPL, but I've no interest in hacking on gcc itself --
I'm plenty happy hacking with it and find it to work _very_ well for me).
I will want to be able to hack on X386 though.

Does anyone know if the X386 source for the Linux port will be available
at any time? It's no big deal to me if source won't be available as
I have no burning need to use X11 at home yet.

Ron Pool, [email protected]
From: [email protected] (Edward J.M. Colbert)

Subject: X386
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 01:45:24 GMT
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: University of Maryland, Astronomy Department
Lines: 5

What is X386? Is this a version of XR? that will run under linux?

If so, where can I get the files and instructions for installation?

Ed
From: [email protected] (Jim Winstead Jr.)

Subject: Re: Suggestion: Multiformat compress
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 02:46:57 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (The News System)
Organization: Harvey Mudd College, WIBSTR
Lines: 31

In article <[email protected]> [email protected] writes:
> So, why not create a general 'compress' that can be fed with *any* compac-
>ted file? Say, if I want to compress my files using the Zip format, I would
>use:

I would *strongly* suggest not taking what sources you can find and
jamming them together to make a new program. Far better, write a
simple script that will do what you suggested, passing the necessary
arguments to the appropriate compression package. That way you avoid
the legal problems, and you don't need a new release when one compression
package gets updated (just drop in the new version, it shouldn't break
the shell script).

> I know, most people will say that this program would be ridicully big,
>but I think it's viable. The problem is, to recognize the file format at
>uncompress time. The sources are there; why not try to use them?

For uncompressing, you should be able to use the 'file' program and
have a shell script parse it's output. No need to get overly fancy.
The /etc/magic file I have doesn't have rules for zip/zoo/etc, but
they shouldn't be hard to figure out (and in many cases are already
documented).

Part of the philosophy of Unix is to be able to do things by
collections of small tools. You don't need to keep writing bigger
programs.
--
+ Jim Winstead Jr. (CSci '95)
| Harvey Mudd College
| [email protected]
+ This is all my words. Honest!
From: [email protected] (James R. Saker Jr.)

Subject: X11 fussy on partition selections?
Keywords: X11,linux,partitions,nogo
Message-ID:
Date: 7 May 92 03:37:21 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (UNO Network News Server)
Organization: University of Nebraska at Omaha
Lines: 29

I've run into a problem w/ the latest X11 bootimage dying when it doesn't
locate root and I'm wondering if it doesn't like my partition setup:

Here's the startup message:

8 virtual consoles
4 pty's
lp_init: lp1 exists (0)
sock_init: initializing family 1 (AF_UNIX)
Drive 0:

part 1 start 35 size 143605 end 143639 /* DOS partition */
part 2 start 307440 size 107100 end 414539 /* Linux root */
part 3 start 143640 size 120000 end 263639 /* Linux user/ */
part 4 start 263640 size 43800 end 307439 /* Linux swap */

Partition table ok.
magic match failed
Kernal panic: Unable to mount root.

---
Is X looking for Linux on the first partition on drive 0 (or does it not
like looking for root on the last physical partition -- part 2)?

Any similar problems?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. Jamie Saker [email protected] .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From: [email protected] (Jay Pfaffman)

Subject: pre-0.96 & inaccessable memory as non-root
Keywords: segmentation fault
Message-ID:
Date: 7 May 92 03:50:42 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 17


I installed the pre-0.96 release on two machines and have successfully
installed it on one of them. On the other, though, no one but root
can login. I played with changing UID, and found that the first
memory access after changing to something other than root I get a
segmentation fault. Have I done something stupid? It works fine on
another machine. (I'm using it now).

Another note. This is exciting. X is running (I don't have it, but I
believe what I hear). Simple graphics stuff is running. As soon as
there is a decent DVI viewer, I'll no longer need DOS. Thanks Linus.
Thanks all. This is exciting.
--
Jay Pfaffman, Computer Coordinator [email protected]
Dwight-Englewood School
315 E. Palisade Ave. 201-569-9500
Englewood, NJ 07631-0489
From: [email protected]

Subject: vgatest works if in 80 x 25 mode
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 04:30:55 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (Mr Background)
Reply-To: [email protected]
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 11

vgatest works if in 80 x 25 mode. If set TM-4000 chipset to 132 x 28
mode on bootup, vgatest is reduced in vertical height and doesn't sync
horizontally. sync vertically VGA card is Compuadd Hi-Rez with NEC 2A
(factory repaired, works okay 640x480 but fails to sync in 800 x 600
mode ---- VGA card spec 35.5 kHz and monitor 35 kHz ---- previous VGA
card (deceased) ran at 35.1 kHz I believe ) Nothing like standards.

BTW: vgalinux is good enough for me to move my version of spider from
Minix mini-x to Linux and abandon Minix.

John
From: [email protected] (Karl R. Buck)

Subject: Getting X386 running ...CHEAP.
Message-ID:
Date: 7 May 92 06:47:08 GMT
Organization: Kansas State University
Lines: 25
NNTP-Posting-Host: matt.ksu.ksu.edu

I am so amazed that I managed to get X11 running with so few assets, I
thought I'd share my experience with others in case there are those
who still think it takes a monster ($$$) system to run X.

System:
I have a 386sx-20 with a lowly 40mb hard drive, 5mb of memory and a
Mono-VGA monitor. I did have an OAK chipset card but I'm selling it
after finding a ET-4000 board second hand ($65).

Configuration:
I simply followed the instructions in the readme, tried a few modes
and found that the 640x480 25mhz mode worked fine. Certainly it is
nothing like working on a Sun 20 inch monitor but the ability to pan
the desktop helps. Hopefully someone will port vtwm in the future. I
just commented all other options out in the Xconfig, and it worked.

Disk space is my only real problem now. Some time in June/July the
cost per Mb for a hard disk is supposed to take a nose dive because of
retooling of many of the major disk manufacturing plants. Still, 15mb
is a lot smaller than I expected, even for just the basic stuff.

Thanks to all who have worked to get X working!

--
Karl Buck, [email protected] ๐Ÿ™‚
From: [email protected] (Tor Lillqvist)

Subject: Re: X386 and lame SVGA cards
Message-ID:
Date: 7 May 92 14:06:30 GMT
References: <[email protected]
ime.COM>
<[email protected]>

Sender: [email protected]
Organization: Technical Research Centre of Finland, Laboratory for Information
Processing (VTT/TIK)
Lines: 19
In-reply-to: [email protected]'s message of 7 May 92 03:12:21 GMT

In article [email protected]
ell.edu (Ron Pool) writes:

I very much like the fact that source is available for everything
I'm using in Linux right now, except for possibly X386 and gcc2.1
(as ported to Linux).

Excuse me, but am I missing something? Why is there lots of these
announcements "source for this and that for Linux is available"? If
Linux is POSIX compliant, most of the better free software (like GCC)
should be pretty straightforward to compile from the official sources.
Why is there a need for special Linux versions of the source?

Or is it simply the case that most Linux users are not used to compile
and install free software, and thus need a lot of handholding even for
trivial configuration things like do signal handlers need to be
reinstalled each time or not, or strchr vs. index.
--
Tor Lillqvist,
working, but not speaking, for the Technical Research Centre of Finland
From: [email protected] (The Master of Symbolic Links)

Subject: Re: X windows video card support?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 08:16:56 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
<[email protected]> <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (USENET Newssystem)
Organization: Inst. fuer Informatik, Technische Univ. Muenchen, Germany
Lines: 29
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of 6 May 1992 16:12:58 GMT

>Are you going to buy ET4000s for all of us who have Trident cards? If not,
>then why shouldn't we support it (no, I'm not asking you to write the driver,
>just to get out of the way of those who would)?

Certainly not. All I'm saying is that it doesn't make that much sense. A SVGA
is almost intolerable slow for X. Even the faster ones. Thus it makes no
sence for me supporting all these lowend SVGA. That's for the same reason
that there is no support for 320x200x256 (I was asked for this, too).

You can do the driver support by yourself, if you want. But them again I
think after using X on a slow SVGA you are going to buy a faster SVGA
abyway. Most people I talked to wanted to upgrade to a faster graphics
board and found it quite fair to have only the *reasonables* supported.

>I have a Trident 9000; where does it fit into all of this?

All I said for the TVGA8900C is true for the TVGA9000. I simply wouldn't
go for it.

- Thomas

PS: I don't use X if I have only a SVGA plugged into my system. It's to slow..
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
e-mail: [email protected]

immer ?
nein, nicht immer ...
... aber immer oefter !
From: [email protected] (The Master of Symbolic Links)

Subject: Re: Sierra DAC and X-Linux: feasible?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 08:23:19 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (USENET Newssystem)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Inst. fuer Informatik, Technische Univ. Muenchen, Germany
Lines: 24
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of 6 May 92 18:35:21 GMT

>I am wondering whether to spend the extra money (about 20 pounds/ 35
>dollars) and get a Sierra Hicolour DAC on the board and would
>appreciate any comments. I can write my own code to use the chip but,
>time being limited these days, it probably isn't justifiable unless
>"off the shelf" software can make use of it. Since X is now available
>for Linux I wondered whether it can make use of this DAC? It is always
>nice if the code has already been written but if not, does the
>underlying framework of X allow for this sort of colour range?

Well 32k colors are a nice thing. But as performace sucks with 256 colors,
32k colors would only give you half the performance. Besides this you'll get
only 800x600 and a so called TrueColor visual which is not supported by
all X-clients (at least no gif viewer under X I know). So it does make only
sence if you are in a accellerated graphics enviournement.

- Thomas

--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
e-mail: [email protected]

immer ?
nein, nicht immer ...
... aber immer oefter !
From: [email protected] (The Master of Symbolic Links)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386,comp.unix.bsd,comp.os.linux

Subject: Re: Anyone working on free 8514/S3 X support?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 08:26:35 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (USENET Newssystem)
Organization: Inst. fuer Informatik, Technische Univ. Muenchen, Germany
Lines: 18
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of Wed, 6 May 1992 20:55:58 GMT

>I'm probably going to write a free 8514/S3 driver for X this summer, and I'd
>be interested in hearing from anyone else who's working on the same thing,
>so we can avoid duplicated effort.

Actually I did such a beast - but it's only commercial work. I would not
recommend you doing this thing, unless you are really good at X. It took
me quite while to make it stable and fast. A starting point could be the
X11R4 IBM 8514/A server. But then again this guy is so buggy that it makes
sence to start from scratch (read I tried this and gave up).

- Thomas
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
e-mail: [email protected]

immer ?
nein, nicht immer ...
... aber immer oefter !
From: [email protected] (H.J. Lu)

Subject: Re: Getting X386 running ...CHEAP.
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 07:36:41 GMT
References:
Sender: [email protected] (USENET News System)
Organization: Washington State University
Lines: 52

In article [email protected] (Karl R. Buck) wr
ites:
>I am so amazed that I managed to get X11 running with so few assets, I
>thought I'd share my experience with others in case there are those
>who still think it takes a monster ($$$) system to run X.
>
>System:
>I have a 386sx-20 with a lowly 40mb hard drive, 5mb of memory and a
>Mono-VGA monitor. I did have an OAK chipset card but I'm selling it
>after finding a ET-4000 board second hand ($65).
>
>Configuration:
>I simply followed the instructions in the readme, tried a few modes
>and found that the 640x480 25mhz mode worked fine. Certainly it is

Here is the tip.

Video Ram Maximum Real Reslution
--------------------------------------------
256K 640x408
512K 840x624
1024K 1024x1024(1152x900)

The point is x * y <= video ram (bytes).

To configure your video card, you have to use clock.exe and the docs.
You have to know something about monitor.

I configured my ET4000 (1MB) with 1152x900 virtual reslution and 928x696
real reslution. I didn't use interlace mode since it is not very good
for my eyes.

If there are enough interests, I can dig the docs and clock.exe, and
put it on some ftp sites.

>nothing like working on a Sun 20 inch monitor but the ability to pan
>the desktop helps. Hopefully someone will port vtwm in the future. I
^^^^^
tvtwm? It should be trivial. I did it for AT&T SVR3.2.2/386 before.

>just commented all other options out in the Xconfig, and it worked.
>
>Disk space is my only real problem now. Some time in June/July the
>cost per Mb for a hard disk is supposed to take a nose dive because of
>retooling of many of the major disk manufacturing plants. Still, 15mb
>is a lot smaller than I expected, even for just the basic stuff.
>
>Thanks to all who have worked to get X working!
>
>--
>Karl Buck, [email protected] ๐Ÿ™‚

H.J.
From: [email protected] (Linus Benedict Torvalds)

Subject: Re: pre-0.96 & inaccessable memory as non-root
Keywords: segmentation fault
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 08:14:36 GMT
References:
Organization: University of Helsinki
Lines: 21

In article [email protected] (J
ay Pfaffman) writes:
>
>I installed the pre-0.96 release on two machines and have successfully
>installed it on one of them. On the other, though, no one but root
>can login. I played with changing UID, and found that the first
>memory access after changing to something other than root I get a
>segmentation fault. Have I done something stupid? It works fine on
>another machine. (I'm using it now).

Ok, this is probably the shared libraries that bite you: pre-0.96 added
more sanity checks than earlier versions, and won't load in the shared
libraries unless they are readable and executable by the user. Check
that the shared libraries in /lib/libXX.YY.ZZ all have the correct
permissions.

Due to a bug in the early crt0.s, not being able to load the shared
library results in a segmentation fault: this should be fixed in the
newer gcc-2.1 versions, but programs compiled with the old ones will
fail without any error-message.

Linus
From: [email protected] (Peter Orbaek)

Subject: Re: password
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 08:34:56 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (Peter Orbaek)
Organization: DAIMI: Computer Science Department, Aarhus University, Denmark
Lines: 22

[email protected] writes:

>I have linux. How do I go about setting up passwords?
>Is there a password program to encrypt passwords?

You might want to get hold of admutil-1.0.tar.Z which includes a plain passwd
program.

You can ftp admutil-1.0.tar.Z from ftp.daimi.aau.dk:/pub/Linux-source
or from nic.funet.fi

If you want a more advanced solution get the shadow-package.

>David Mulcihy
>[email protected]

- Peter.
--
Peter Orbaek ----------------- [email protected] | ///
Hasle Ringvej 122, DK-8200 Aarhus N, DENMARK | ///
| \\\///
"Strong typing is for people with weak memories" | \XX/
From: [email protected] (Joel M. Hoffman)

Subject: X and VC's
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 11:58:58 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (USENET News system)
Organization: University of Maryland at College Park
Lines: 4
Nntp-Posting-Host: rac2.wam.umd.edu

When running X in one VC, can the others still run in text mode?

-Joel
([email protected])
From: [email protected]

Subject: Re: Password encryption bogus?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 13:31:17 GMT
References:
Sender: [email protected] (USENET News System)
Organization: Jus' me.
Lines: 15

[email protected] (Karl R. Buck) writes:
>I noticed something strange while loggin in today:
>
>The last letter in my password is a capital letter. When I log in it
>will accept both the capital and lowercase letters as valid and let me
>in. I have not tested this any further to see if it does this for
>other types of passwords.

How *LONG* is your password, Karl? I can't say this for certain
about Linux, but on most *N*X systems I've used, only the first
*EIGHT* *CHARACTERS* really "count" (the rest is ignored).

(Of course, more specifics about Linux' security would be appreciated!)

Rick Miller [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
From: [email protected] (JAMES LEWIS NANCE)

Subject: Cross compilers-a question
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 11:47:43 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (USENET News System)
Reply-To: [email protected] (JAMES LEWIS NANCE)
Organization: Project EOS - North Carolina State University
Lines: 12

I have seen two references on the net to the difficulty of using cross
compilers across archetectures that do not use the same endian data storage
schemes. I do not understand why this would be true. My LIMITED understanding
of a compiler is that it is a program which writes machine language and data
into a file. If this were the correct understanding, then it would seem that
cross compilation would be easy regardless of the archetecture of the machines.
The only thing required would be to recompile the compiler on the machine
you wanted to cross compile on. Obviously, my understanding is incorrect.
Can someone please enlighten me.

Thanks,
Jim Nance
From: [email protected] (Brian E. Gallew)

Subject: Re: Swapping (Was Re: X386 (Was Re: 0.96 out next week))
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 13:48:17 GMT
Organization: Junior, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon, Pitt
sburgh, PA
Lines: 37
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>

Excerpts from netnews.comp.os.linux: 5-May-92 Re: Swapping (Was Re: X386
.. by Darren [email protected]
> Often I run multiple compiles, and this usually makes me swap. I've only
> had one problem with swapping, and that shows up a lot: if I've got a compile
> that starts and stops under a vc that I'm not viewing, and any swapping
> happens, then some of the child processes of the compile will get messed

I just ran into an interesting swapping problem last night.
Setup:
10MB partition
SCSI 0.96 kernel
GCC 2.1
emacs (18.57?)
2MB RAM
1MB swapfile

I started a compilation from within emacs because I like to be able to
save my error messages AND see them. I then realized that I had logged
in on another virtual console, so I switched to it and did an exit.
Almost immediately, I got what looked like a (cat /dev/sd2 > /dev/tty2).
My compile was still running on tty1, but tty2 was filling with
garbage. After killing the compile, the output on tty2 stopped, but I
had to press ^C a couple of times to get a login prompt. Also, when I
restarted my compile, I got a bad_swapfile error (or something very like
that). This forced me to reboot the system, after which everything
worked fine again. Any ideas?


-Brian

You drop the bomb -more-
It goes off... -more-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| My cluelessness is more real than apparent... |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| DEC measures their benchmarks with a calendar!! |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [email protected] (Ron Pool)

Subject: Re: X386 and lame SVGA cards
Message-ID:
Date: 7 May 92 14:55:11 GMT
References: <[email protected]
ime.COM>
<[email protected]>


Sender: [email protected]
Organization: Cornell University
Lines: 40
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of 7 May 92 14: 06:30 GMT
Nntp-Filt-2: Fenchurch version 0.3 by Uncle Mikey for Cornell University
Nntp-Posting-Host: aruba.nysaes.cornell.edu
Nntp-Auth: trusted
Errors-To: [email protected]

In article [email protected] (Tor Lillqvist) w
rites:
>In article [email protected]
nell.edu (Ron Pool) writes:
>
> I very much like the fact that source is available for everything
> I'm using in Linux right now, except for possibly X386 and gcc2.1
> (as ported to Linux).
>
>Excuse me, but am I missing something? Why is there lots of these
>announcements "source for this and that for Linux is available"? If
>Linux is POSIX compliant, most of the better free software (like GCC)
>should be pretty straightforward to compile from the official sources.
>Why is there a need for special Linux versions of the source?

I'm not sure why you chose to quote only that part of what I said --
you didn't even include my question in there. The reason I asked about source
for X386 is that someone else has already ported it. I wanted to know whether
I should bother porting it myself or if I could get the diffs from the author
and begin my work from there (I want to add support for Trident cards).

>Or is it simply the case that most Linux users are not used to compile
>and install free software, and thus need a lot of handholding even for
>trivial configuration things like do signal handlers need to be
>reinstalled each time or not, or strchr vs. index.

That comment doesn't make sense to me. X386 is working for me right now,
so it's not a question of not being able to configure, compile, or install
it. I'm looking to enhance X386. I'm certainly capable of porting it myself,
but if I don't need to then I'd rather spend my time on something more
intersting (to me).

By the way, Michael K. Johnson ([email protected]) let me know via email that
he thinks Zorst is making diffs available on banjo.concert.net. Thanks
Zorst! Thanks Michael! (also, thanks Linus and hlu!)

>Tor Lillqvist,
>working, but not speaking, for the Technical Research Centre of Finland

Thanks for commenting on my question.

Ron Pool, [email protected]
From: [email protected] (Massimo Fasciano)

Subject: Re: X386 (Was Re: 0.96 out next week)
Message-ID:
Date: 7 May 92 15:53:18 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: Universite de Montreal -- Laboratoire Incognito
Lines: 50
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of 6 May 92 09: 07:06 GMT

In article <[email protected]> [email protected]
-muenchen.de (The Master of Symbolic Links) writes:

|> That's no good idea at all. First of the CGA's memory organisation is so
|> terrible that you want to forget about writing a driver it. The next thing
|> is that 800x600 is a definitive minimum for reall using X. Also I think

Agreed.

|> 16 colors is just a good prove of concept, but you definitively want to
|> have 256 colors at least (and if you only want to look at gif pictures ;-)).

Why would you need at least 256 colors? Most of our SUN Sparcstations
run X on big B&W displays and for most tasks, B&W is acceptable. On a
SVGA, 16 colors would be very easy to provide up to 800x600 (i believe
Win 3.1 ships with a generic 800x600 SVGA driver) and would be enough
for many applications, except viewing GIF pictures of course ๐Ÿ™‚

|> X386 1.2 does support SVGA boards with:

|> Et3000
|> Et4000
|> GVGA (Genoa 6000 line)
|> PVGA (PVGA1A, WD90C00, WD90C11)

What chipset is used by the ATI VGA Wonder+ (i own one)? Is it a
proprietary ATI chipset? If so, why is it not supported? Lack of
features? Non-standard? It seems fast enough, although much slower
than ET4000 i suppose...

|> The rest is not supported and WILL NOT BE SUPPORTED for several reasons,
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
|> which I will not talk about here in a 10page+ posting. If you want to have
|> reasonable speed, go for an Et4000 board.

If i remember correctly, when DJ Delorie ported G++ (32 bit protected
mode) to DOS, the only supported chipset was ET3000/4000, but after a
while (a very short while) all other popular chipsets (ATI, Trident,
etc...) were supported by independant video drivers, although i think
the Trident video drivers were hard to implement because of some
"feature" in the chipset's memory bank switching. Please correct me if
i'm wrong...

I hope all of us ATI or Trident or (insert your own unsupported
chipset here) card owners will be able to use X on our Linux boxes...


--
=================================================================
= Massimo Fasciano E-MAIL: [email protected] =
=================================================================
From: [email protected] (Chris Watts)

Subject: Fidonet Mailers and timezone.
Summary: whereis timezone,anybody got a fidonet mailer
Keywords: fidonet,timezone
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 14:19:01 GMT
Organization: Bristol Polytechnic, England
Lines: 13

I was trying to port rfmail to linux but, has anybody else ported
this software yet.

Does anybody know of a copy of the timezone header files for linux
to get this working.

Does anybody have any alternative fidonet software for linux.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris watts
Email: Internet [email protected]
Janet [email protected]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [email protected] (Joseph Dougherty)

Subject: mtools and man "color" troubles: help!
Keywords: mtools color man yuk blecch help
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 14:34:25 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (Joe Dougherty)
Distribution: comp.os.linux
Organization: University of North Florida, Jacksonville
Lines: 26


I need help.
I tried compiling mtools 2.0.5 with the file package on tsx that
combines the executables into one file. I replaced the makefile from mtools
as instructed in the docs and began the compile (I'm using the latest g++).
The object files were build and were being pounded together when the compile
quit and I got the following:
mrd.o: Undefined symbol _got_signal referenced from text segment

I get this error three times, then three more times for mwrite.o
before the make quits with an Error 1.
Any suggestions?

Man:
I installed groff from tsx, compiled and installed man 1.01 from
tsx, and it works okay, but...sometimes, when calling up man of my
man pages, I get a page formatted with the screwiest colors. Some text
is red, some green, some black (difficult to read on a black background).
Is there someway to correct this. I use linux in 80x30 most of the time,
with white letters on a black screen.

Thanks for help and suggestions. E-mail me if you don't want to
clutter the group. Thanks

Joe Dougherty
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (Paul Nakada)

Subject: Wow! X is great!
Message-ID:
Date: 7 May 92 16:38:54 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (Oracle News Poster)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Oracle Corporation, Redwood Shores, CA
Lines: 27
Nntp-Posting-Host: pnakada.us.oracle.com
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 | [email protected]
From: [email protected] (Thierry Priol)

Subject: Re: X386 and lame SVGA cards
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 16:42:45 GMT
References:
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: IRISA, Rennes (Fr)
Lines: 20

From article , by [email protected]
s.cornell.edu (Ron Pool):
>
> I'm not sure why you chose to quote only that part of what I said --
> you didn't even include my question in there. The reason I asked about source
> for X386 is that someone else has already ported it. I wanted to know whether
> I should bother porting it myself or if I could get the diffs from the author
> and begin my work from there (I want to add support for Trident cards).
>

I remember that somebody has added support for Trident cards to X386.
Check poincare.geom.umn.edu in /scott/X386-Trident.tar.Z

It will help you as soon you will have the source of X386.

Thierry PRIOL
--
Thierry PRIOL Phone: 99 84 72 10
IRISA / INRIA U.R. Rennes Fax: 99 38 38 32
Campus Universitaire de Beaulieu Telex: UNIRISA 950 473F
35042 RENNES CEDEX - FRANCE E-mail: [email protected]
From: [email protected] (Daniel Pereicich Russell)

Subject: ESDI drive compatibility
Message-ID: <_ssv#[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 18:33:02 GMT
Lines: 14
Nntp-Posting-Host: aix.rpi.edu


Does anyone have Linux running on an ESDI drive/controller?
I have a WD 1007A-WAH card and a CDC 94166-161 (WREN III) drive.
The rest of my hardware is a Gateway 2000 386/33 w/Diamond Speedstar
(et4000). I also have an IDE drive for DOS use only. Any ideas?
Right now when I go into pfdisk I get an error that says it can't
read from or write to the disk (this is with the IDE disabled). I
think I might not have the disk set up right, but I'm wondering if
I need to do something special to get it to work with Linux. It
used to be a Xenix drive, so I know it does work with 'exotic' OSs.
Many thanks,
Dan
=====
Dan Russell | [email protected]
From: [email protected] (David W. Summers)

Subject: X386, Shared Libs, and OS/2 2.0 Boot Manager, etc.
Summary: 1. What to do about zapped shared libraries. 2. How to boot from OS/2 B
oot Manager
Keywords: X386 OS/2 2.0 BOot Manager
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 18:38:44 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (NetNews Administrator)
Organization: University of Arkansas
Lines: 58
Nntp-Posting-Host: cseg03.uark.edu

Hello Linux NetLanders! ๐Ÿ™‚

Two problems:

(1) I was just getting ready to try X386 for the first time today and somehow
managed to zap my /lib/libXX.YY.ZZ (Shared library file), I THINK.

I think this is what happened because I was doing something (probably going
to fast in a speed zone ๐Ÿ™‚ in the /lib directory and all of a sudden a
lot of my programs like 'cat', 'ln', 'mv', 'cp', etc., started bombing
when I tried to use them. I assume I zapped the shared library.

I used 'echo *' in /lib and didn't see the libXX.YY.ZZ (the dated) library
there. I tried linking it in from /usr/lib but that didn't seem to help.
Same problem.

Then, I had to go to work (here at school) so I ran out of time.

****
What would be the best way to verify that this is the problem and fix it?
****

I can't even use 'mv', 'cat', 'ln', 'cp', etc., because they seem to be
compiled with the shared library, so I'm in a "catch-22" situation.

Ideas? I can probably muddle through and eventually find it but I thought
I'd ask "The Net (TM :-)" and get suggestions from people wiser than I.

(2) I posted last week about wanting to be able to boot Linux from
OS/2 2.0 Boot Manager.

I tried to install ShoeLace in a OS/2 2.0 Primary partition but all it
does is scroll "8000:0000" or something similar and hit on the disk a lot.

Does anyone have any ideas? I was successfull installing ShoeLace on
an IDE drive with Linux 0.12 back in January or so, so I assume it is
something to do with SCSI.

My setup:

JDR AMI/386-25
Adaptec AHA1542B
8Meg Ram
Linux (SCSI) pre0.96 (I THINK).

The only response I got was from some guy asking me to forward on the
information to him if I received anything.


Any ideas, explanations, gentle flames, suggestions, procedures, FTP sites, etc.
GREATLY appreciated!

- David Summers
([email protected])
--
"Never under-estimate the bandwidth of a station-wagon
David Summers full of tapes, hurtling down the highway."
[email protected] - Tanenbaum, "Computer Networks"
From: [email protected] (Darren Senn)

Subject: Re: Swapping (Was Re: X386 (Was Re: 0.96 out next week))
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 19:05:50 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
Organization: Curiosity Confederacy
Lines: 28

In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] (Brian E. G
allew) writes:
> 10MB partition
> SCSI 0.96 kernel
> GCC 2.1
> emacs (18.57?)
> 2MB RAM
> 1MB swapfile
> [...]
> Almost immediately, I got what looked like a (cat /dev/sd2 > /dev/tty2).
> My compile was still running on tty1, but tty2 was filling with
> garbage. After killing the compile, the output on tty2 stopped, but I
> had to press ^C a couple of times to get a login prompt. Also, when I
> restarted my compile, I got a bad_swapfile error (or something very like
> that). This forced me to reboot the system, after which everything
> worked fine again. Any ideas?

I've never gotten any response like that, but then again, my system's quite
a bit different from your's:
486/25 4Mb RAM + 5Mb swapfile
65Mb / partition + 26Mb /home partition
ESDI drive
0.95c+ (MCC) kernel
GCC 2.1

--
Darren Senn Phone: (408) 479-1521
[email protected] Snail: 1785 Halterman #1
Wasurenaide -- doko e itte mo soko ni anata wa iru yo. Santa Cruz, Ca 95062
From: [email protected] (Darren Senn)

Subject: GCC 2.1 for the 486.
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 19:10:19 GMT
Reply-To: [email protected]
Organization: Curiosity Confederacy
Lines: 10

Is anyone working on getting GCC 2.1 setup for 486's? I pulled the source
off of the net yesterday, and the configuration looks pretty ugly. If
not, could the person who did the GCC 2.1 (386) port send me their GCC
configuration? Currently, I'm basing my configuration on the i486-sysv4
configuration.

--
Darren Senn Phone: (408) 479-1521
[email protected] Snail: 1785 Halterman #1
Wasurenaide -- doko e itte mo soko ni anata wa iru yo. Santa Cruz, Ca 95062
From: [email protected] (Darren Senn)

Subject: Re: ESDI drive compatibility
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 19:40:27 GMT
References: <_ssv#[email protected]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
Organization: Curiosity Confederacy
Lines: 23

In article <_ssv#[email protected]>, [email protected] (Daniel Pereicich Russell) writ
es:
> Does anyone have Linux running on an ESDI drive/controller?
> I have a WD 1007A-WAH card and a CDC 94166-161 (WREN III) drive.
> The rest of my hardware is a Gateway 2000 386/33 w/Diamond Speedstar
> (et4000). I also have an IDE drive for DOS use only. Any ideas?
> Right now when I go into pfdisk I get an error that says it can't
> read from or write to the disk (this is with the IDE disabled). [...]

In order to get my ESDI drive working with Linux I had to:
a) Low-level format my ESDI drive with an extra sector in each track.
Other OS's are good about remapping on their own, but Linux
can't do that yet, so I did it in hardware.
b) Remap my drive so that it had fewer than 1024 cylinders. My drive
has 1300 cylinders, but since Linux uses the standard DOS
partition table, I was restricted to 10-bits to represent
cylinder numbers, which limits me to 1024 cylinders.
I've never heard of having _both_ and IDE and ESDI drive on a single
bus, however, so you might be having a problem with that.

--
Darren Senn Phone: (408) 479-1521
[email protected] Snail: 1785 Halterman #1
Wasurenaide -- doko e itte mo soko ni anata wa iru yo. Santa Cruz, Ca 95062
From: [email protected] (Rob Coleman)

Subject: Diamond Speedstar
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 19:42:36 GMT
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology
Lines: 14

A number of people on this newsgroup have spoken of the advantages of
getting an ET4000 based card for use with X. Is the "stealth" version
of the Diamond Speedstar a better (read: faster, more useful) card to
get than the "regular" Diamond Speedstar+? The Stealth is supposed to
be Diamond's version of an S3 coprocessed card - is this still register
compatible with the lesser non-coprocessed card? The price difference
between the two cards is $169 vs. about $259 for the Stealth. Is the
difference worth the extra expense?

Questions, questions..
Thanks in advance.
--
Rob Coleman ][ [email protected] ][ "I think I'm going bald!"
Comp. Sci. ][ Georgia Institute of Technology ][ -Rush/COS
From: [email protected] (Al Clark)

Subject: Re: 33Mhz 386 and IDE hard drives
Message-ID: <#[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 19:29:32 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest)
Lines: 15

In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Crai
g Metz) writes:
>
> With all the people complaining about how their 33Mhz machine won't
>work with their hard drive unde Linux, I'd like to voice the opposite. I have
>a SCI RAM 386/33Mhz (Greenleaf motherboard) and a Seagate ST1144A, and al
>versions from 0.12 to 0.95c+ work flawlessly at the full 33Mhz. At least it
>works for somebody...
>
> -Craig

I have a Cache 33Mhz main board, with Seagate ST1144A, and no problems.
0.12 through 0.95c+ with gcc2.1.
--
Al - [email protected] - My opinions are my own.
*** Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty! ***
From: [email protected] (Paul Allen)

Subject: Sources (was: Re: X386 and lame SVGA cards)
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 20:32:15 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (Mr Background)
Reply-To: [email protected]
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 49


[email protected] (Tor Lillqvist) wrote:
|In article [email protected]
nell.edu (Ron Pool) writes:
|
| I very much like the fact that source is available for everything
| I'm using in Linux right now, except for possibly X386 and gcc2.1
| (as ported to Linux).
|
|Excuse me, but am I missing something? Why is there lots of these
|announcements "source for this and that for Linux is available"? If
|Linux is POSIX compliant, most of the better free software (like GCC)
|should be pretty straightforward to compile from the official sources.
|Why is there a need for special Linux versions of the source?

Linux appears to be considerably better than Minix when it comes to
ease of porting stuff, but there still seems to be some level of "port"
required for some software. I'm asuming that this will get better
as Linux matures and becomes more complete.

|Or is it simply the case that most Linux users are not used to compile
|and install free software, and thus need a lot of handholding even for
|trivial configuration things like do signal handlers need to be
|reinstalled each time or not, or strchr vs. index.

Many people who aren't used to compiling things are installing and
attempting to run Linux because it's available as a complete binary-
only distribution. Some of these folks will need handholding when
they start trying to customise things.

The last time I looked on tsx-11, the binaries to sources space ratio
was about 2:1. In many cases, Linux diffs for a package are included
with the binary rather than being separated out under the sources
hierarchy. (So you have to ftp a half meg of binary in order to get
the 20Kb of diffs!) When I commented on the apparent disregard for
sources (the "Binaries considered harmful" thread of a month ago), I
got a uniformly negative reaction from several of the major players
in the Linux arena. I found this surprising, since Unix software has
historically been distributed almost exclusively in source form.

If I were running things, Linux would be distributed as a minimal
binary bootstrap kit and sources (or diffs) for everything else.
It would be easy to assemble a complete source hierarchy without
having to deal with huge unwanted binaries. New users would need
to ftp the bootstrap kit in order to get started, but sources and
diffs would suffice after that. (Fortunately for me, I'm not running
things. I'd probably have half the net mad at me! :-))

Paul Allen
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (Kevin Cummings)

Subject: Re: X386 and lame SVGA cards
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 20:33:44 GMT
References: <1992May6.202415.5451@serv
al.net.wsu.edu>
Sender: cummings@hammer (Kevin Cummings)
Organization: Prime Computer R&D
Lines: 42

In article <[email protected]>, [email protected]
(Hongjiu Lu) writes:
> In article , [email protected] (Paul
Nakada) writes:
> |>
> |> Linux Hackers -
> |>
> |> I've got a Trident SVGA card which isn't supported under X386.
> |> Shouldn't there be a way to use it as a plain VGA card (640x480)?
>
> Don't let resolution fool you. Plain VGA use 4 bits color. X386 uses 8 bit
> color.
>
> |> Aren't all SVGA cards the same if treated as VGA? Windows doesn't
> |> have any problems with the default VGA driver and my card, it's just
> |> the higher resolutions which need trident specific drivers. So, is
> |> there an Xconfig for plain VGA cards?
> |>
>
> NO. Plain VGA has no 8 bit color.
>

Well, er, ah, yes it does, but I'm sure everyone listening will agree
that 320x200x256 is not very useful for X.

Also, don't forget modes like mode X which aren't BIOS supported, but
every VGA which is 100% IBM compatible will support. I'm sure that
some of these can have 256 colors as well.

As for standard (BIOS supported) resolutions > 320x200, if it has 256 colors,
then it is probably an SVGA, and not all manufacturers address it the same way.

=================================================================
Kevin J. Cummings Prime Computer Inc.
20 Briarwood Road 500 Old Connecticut Path
Framingham, Mass. Framingham, Mass.

Work: [email protected]
Home: [email protected]

Std. Disclaimer: "Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration,
I've come to the conclusion that your new
defense system SUCKS..." -- War Games
=================================================================
From: [email protected] (Risto Kankkunen)

Subject: Re: Cross compilers-a question
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 20:45:45 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Organization: University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science
Lines: 12


Well, the endianess is a problem basicly because the compilers and
binutils like to process and do IO with ints and floats directly. This
means that the host and target formats must agree. It's quite possible
to handle those generally and read/write them byte by byte, but that's
much more tedious.

Anyway, with gcc 2.1 and binutils 1.94, it doesn't matter, wheter the
host is big or little endian.

--
no sig today
From: [email protected] (Alex C. Liu)

Subject: Just a suggestion for Archive managers...
Keywords: find . -ls
Message-ID:
Date: 7 May 92 21:10:19 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (Alex Liu)
Organization: None to Speak of
Lines: 12
NNTP-Posting-Host: aludra.usc.edu

Would it be possible if the archive maintainers at tsx-11 or
banjo.concert add a "find . -ls" listing of the files in addition to
the "ls-lR" format? (I think the find format is more convenients
since it stores whole paths, makes it easier to make FTP scripts for
off hours downloading)


--
_____________________________________________________________________________
Alejandro Liu |EMail: [email protected] |All mispellings are intentional
3131 Mc Clintock #373F |Voice: 213-745-2431 |Anything mentioned here is not
Los Angeles, CA 90007 | |necessarily true.
From: [email protected] (Joakim Rosqvist)

Subject: Where is 'w'?
Message-ID:
Date: 7 May 92 21:23:07 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (News Administrator)
Organization: Dep. of Info.Proc, Umea Univ., Sweden
Lines: 4
Originator: [email protected]

As happy as I am with Linux (I never knew my computer was this fast!),
I would be even happier if I had 'w'. Where can I find it?

/Basic
From: [email protected] (Rick Wong)

Subject: fsck and inode
Summary: inode 266 not cleared
Keywords: filesystem,inode
Message-ID:
Date: 7 May 92 20:50:25 GMT
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Lines: 25




I am need to filesystems in unix, so please bear with me.


when I ran the following command
fsck -m /dev/hda7
I got these output

inode 266 not cleared
inode 267 not cleared
inode 282 not cleared
.
.
inode 301 not cleared



When I first installed linux on my hd, fsck -m /dev/hda7 returns an empty output
. Is this inode not cleared thing similar to DOS's lost cluster.
by the way i always do sync couple of times before I reboot so the file system i
s not being corrupted by that method. And my hd is 200meg IDE 15ms and my mother
board uses 386dx-25 cache with AMI BIOS



thanx in advance
From: [email protected] (Michael K. Johnson)

Subject: Re: Diamond Speedstar
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 20:46:09 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: St. Olaf College; Northfield, MN USA
Lines: 28
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of 7 May 92 19:42:36 GMT


In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Rob Coleman) write
s:
A number of people on this newsgroup have spoken of the advantages of
getting an ET4000 based card for use with X. Is the "stealth" version
of the Diamond Speedstar a better (read: faster, more useful) card to
get than the "regular" Diamond Speedstar+? The Stealth is supposed to
be Diamond's version of an S3 coprocessed card - is this still register
compatible with the lesser non-coprocessed card? The price difference
between the two cards is $169 vs. about $259 for the Stealth. Is the
difference worth the extra expense?

The stealth card is much better -- but there is not currently an X
server for it. I know of two people who have said that they will be
writing S3 drivers, but I don't know if they will support your card.
They most likely will. You will find that the stealth is 5+ times as
fast as the "regular" card for graphics, once there is a driver for
it, because it is highly accelerated.

So: If you want X /now/, get the regular one. If you want X
/sometime/, think about it. If you want a /fast/ video card, get the
stealth version. But be forewarned that the stealth is /not/ et4000
based, and will not run x under linux right now, so it depends on what
you want to do with it.

Hope this helps.

michaelkjohnson
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (Kevin Cummings)

Subject: Re: Diamond Speedstar
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 21:13:39 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Sender: cummings@hammer (Kevin Cummings)
Organization: Prime Computer R&D
Lines: 71

In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] (Rob Coleman) writ
es:
> A number of people on this newsgroup have spoken of the advantages of
> getting an ET4000 based card for use with X. Is the "stealth" version
> of the Diamond Speedstar a better (read: faster, more useful) card to
> get than the "regular" Diamond Speedstar+? The Stealth is supposed to
> be Diamond's version of an S3 coprocessed card - is this still register
> compatible with the lesser non-coprocessed card? The price difference
> between the two cards is $169 vs. about $259 for the Stealth. Is the
> difference worth the extra expense?

Being the proud owner of a brand spanking new (OK, its a month and a half
old already!) Diamond Stealth VRAM video card, let me say this about that:

Yes, the Stealth is register level compatible with any other clone VGA
card. Programming the Stealth at the register level, it is not as fast
as a turbo-ed SVGA card like the SpeedStar+. On the other hand, it's
no dog either. It's still miles faster than the standard IBM VGA card.

What makes the S3 based cards worth the extra money is their ability
to move on screen data very quickly. However, this is not a standard
VGA operation. In order to do this, you need special drivers to take
advantage of the extra hardware the S3 makes available to you.

For example, I can run my Stealth under MS-Windows 3.1 using the 1024x768
Stealth drivers for windows. If I then put up a LARGE window containing
a bitmapped 256 color picture (.BMP, .GIF, .JPG), I can then move this
window around the screen with virtually NO redraw time. The uncovered
area gets re-painted at extraordinary speeds, and the newly covoered area
takes advantage of the S3's BITBLIT function to move the picture seemingly
instantaeously. This in and of itself, I felt, was worth the extra
money. (I'd like to say the same for the 640x480x32K mode, but I don't
have any 15bit picture display programs yet to try it with.)

If you won't be using your new video card under MS-windows, or X-windows
in the future, then there is no need to spend the extra bucks. The
SpeedStar+ is faster at drawing new graphics, the Stealth is faster at
moving around existing graphics.

Both video cards are available with the Sierra HiColor RAMDAC.
BUT, due to an S3 limitation (all scan lines must start at a power of
two memory address in the S3 video memory), the Stealth card is
not capable of 800x600x32K while the Diamond SpeedStar+ is (assuming
you bought the versions with 1MB of VRAM).

On the other hand, the Stealth is capable of producing a 1280x1024x16
interlaced screen while the SpeedStar+ is not. I beleive that both
cards are 1024x768x256 capable using either interlaced or non-interlaced
monitors.

Make an imformed decision, and base it on your needs (or wants B^).
If you will be a windows user, the Stealth is the way to go. If you
want the 1280x1024 capability today, the Stealth is the way to go.

If you need/want the 800x600x32K mode, the SPeedStar+ is the way to go.

If you don't care about any of the above, the SPeedStar+ is cheaper.

Good luck with your decision.

=================================================================
Kevin J. Cummings Prime Computer Inc.
20 Briarwood Road 500 Old Connecticut Path
Framingham, Mass. Framingham, Mass.

Work: [email protected]
Home: [email protected]

Std. Disclaimer: "Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration,
I've come to the conclusion that your new
defense system SUCKS..." -- War Games
=================================================================
From: [email protected] (Erik Green)

Subject: To randy
Message-ID:
Date: 7 May 92 22:14:09 GMT
Distribution: comp.os.linux
Organization: Long polymers in double-helix formation
Lines: 38
Nntp-Posting-Host: att2.cs.mankato.msus.edu



Sorry to quote myself, but I'm using a pretty stupid mailer at the moment,
i.e. it doesn't save headers with a text file of the message, and it
never gets return addresses right either. So, to the person who sent
me the message below, here is my reply.


>>Since sooooo many people have asked, here is _precisely_ what I'm
>>using for X386:

>> 386-25DX w/4 MB of 70ns SIMMs, no swap
[stuff deleted]

>Are you really using X in only 4 meg of RAM without swapping? Can you compile
>using gcc that way? Damn!

I haven't compiled the kernel yet, but small programs(ps,df) compiled OK.


>> "Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg
>> thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul!"

>What does this mean? I even tried to Rot13 on it. I'm stumped.

"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them.
One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them."

-From Tolkien's _The_Lord_of_the_rings_, in the old tongue of Mordor.
(The inscription on the One Ring)

>-Randy
-Erik
--
Erik "Longshot" Green
longshot@(vax1 | att2.cs | krypton | theory.cs).mankato.msus.edu
"Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg
thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul!"
From: [email protected] (Gunter Windau)

Subject: Re: Possible bug in lp driver, or just me?
Message-ID:
Date: 7 May 92 20:25:08 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <1
[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (NUnet News Owner)
Organization: University of Nijmegen
Lines: 426



Here's my source for the Linux lp device driver. Actually it
is by Jim Wiegand, with some modifications. The two files
replace ...linux/include/linux/lp.h and ...linux/kernel/chr_drv/lp.c.

It works for my NEC P7+, but I'm not sure if it will for other
printers. Note that the off-line bit in the status register is
ignored if LP_IGNORE_SELECT is defined in lp.c. Don't ask why,
but there was no other way around this with the printer mentioned
above.

----------->8--->8----snip---snip------>8------->8-----------


/*
$Header: /usr/src/linux/include/linux/lp.h,v 1.2 1992/01/21 23:59:24 james_r_wie
gand Exp james_r_wiegand $
*/

/*
** some modifications by Gunter Windau ([email protected])
*/

#include
#include
#include
#include
#include

/* usr/include/linux/lp.h c.1991-1992 James Wiegand */
/* caveat: my machine only has 1 printer @ lpt2 so lpt1 & lpt3 are
implemented but UNTESTED */
/*
Per POSIX guidelines, this module reserves the LP and lp prefixes
*/
#define LP_EXIST 0x0001
#define LP_SELEC 0x0002
#define LP_BUSY 0x0004
#define LP_OFFL 0x0008
#define LP_NOPA 0x0010
#define LP_ERR 0x0020

#define LP_TIMEOUT 20000

#define LP_B( minor ) lp_table[( minor )].base
#define LP_F( minor ) lp_table[( minor )].flags
#define LP_T( minor ) lp_table[( minor )].lp_task
#define LP_S( minor ) inb(( LP_B( minor ) + 1 ))
#define LP_R( minor ) lp_table[ minor ].remainder

/*
since we are dealing with a horribly slow device
I don't see the need for a queue
*/
#ifndef __LP_C__
extern
#endif
struct lp_struct
{
int base;
int flags;
/* number of characters yet to be printed in current block */
int remainder;
/* needed for busy determination */
struct task_struct *lp_task;
};

/*
the BIOS manuals say there can be up to 4 lpt devices
but I have not seen a board where the 4th address is listed
if you have different hardware change the table below
please let me know if you have different equipment
if you have more than 3 printers, remember to increase LP_NO
*/
#ifndef __LP_C__
extern
#endif
struct lp_struct lp_table[] = { { 0x3bc, 0, },
{ 0x378, 0, },
{ 0x278, 0, }};
#define LP_NO 3

/*
bit defines for 8255 status port
status port
base + 1
*/
#define LP_PBUSY 0x80 /* active low */
#define LP_PACK 0x40 /* active low */
#define LP_POUTPA 0x20
#define LP_PSELECD 0x10
#define LP_PERRORP 0x08 /*e active low*/
#define LP_PIRQ 0x04 /* active low (not sure about this...)*/
#define LP_PUNUSED 0x07
#define LP_OK 0xDF

/*
defines for 8255 control port
base + 2
*/
#define LP_PIRQEN 0x10
#define LP_PSELECP 0x08
#define LP_PINITP 0x04 /* active low */
#define LP_PAUTOLF 0x02
#define LP_PSTROBE 0x01

/*
the value written to ports to test existence. PC-style ports will
return the value written. AT-style ports will return 0. so why not
make them the same ?
*/
#define LP_DUMMY 0x0

/* this is the port delay time. your mileage may vary */
#define LP_DELAY 1000

/* function prototypes */
int lp_reset( int minor );
void lp_init( void );
int lp_char( char lpchar, int minor );
int lp_write( unsigned minor, char *buf, int count );


----------->8--->8----snip---snip------>8------->8-----------


/*
$Header: /usr/src/linux/kernel/chr_drv/lp.c,v 1.9 1992/01/06 16:11:19
james_r_wiegand Exp james_r_wiegand $
*/

/*
** some modifications by Gunter Windau ([email protected])
*/

#define LP_IGNORE_SELECT /* ignore offline flags on printer */
/* port; some devices need this. */
#define __LP_C__
#include

/* #include */

void lp_delay( void )
/*
** generate delay between lp port i/o
*/
{
unsigned int count;

count = LP_DELAY;
while (count) {
count--;
}
}

void lp_error( int status )
{
printk( "\nlp:");
if (!(status & LP_PBUSY)) printk(" -BUSY-");
if (status & LP_POUTPA) printk(" -PAPER OUT-");
if (!(status & LP_PSELECD)) printk(" -OFF-LINE-");
if (!(status & LP_PERRORP)) printk(" -FAULT-");
printk("\n");
}

int lp_reset( int minor )
{
int retval;

outb( LP_PSELECP, ( LP_B( minor ) + 2 ));
lp_delay();

outb( LP_PSELECP | LP_PINITP, ( LP_B( minor ) + 2 ));
lp_delay();

retval = LP_S( minor );
lp_delay();

return retval;
}

void lp_init ( void )
{
int offset = 0;
int testvalue = 0;

for( offset = 0; offset < LP_NO; offset ++ )
/*
** take on all known port values
*/
{
/*
** write to port & read back to check
*/
outb( LP_B( offset ), LP_DUMMY ); /* !!! is it really true??? */
lp_delay();

testvalue = inb( LP_B( offset ) );
lp_delay();

/*
** if port exists, fill in table
*/
if( testvalue == LP_DUMMY || testvalue == 0 )
{
LP_F( offset ) |= LP_EXIST;
lp_reset( offset );
printk( "lp_init: found lp%d\n", offset );
}
}
}

int lp_char( char lpchar, int minor )
{
int retval = 0;
int status;
unsigned long count;

/*
** get printer status, don't worry about ACK and BUSY.
*/
status = LP_S( minor ) | LP_PACK | LP_PBUSY | LP_PUNUSED;
#ifdef LP_IGNORE_SELECT
status |= LP_PSELECD;
#endif
lp_delay();

if (!(status == LP_OK)) {
/*
** report error and return
*/
printk("\n\rlp%d error pos. 1\n\r", minor );
lp_error( status );
return status;
}

count = LP_TIMEOUT;
do {
/*
** wait for busy bit to set
*/
retval = LP_S( minor );
lp_delay();
/*
** give up time to the kernel - i think
** this loop reeaaaalllly goes to Helllll when the print
** buffer gets filled up
*/
schedule();
count --;
} while( !( retval & LP_PBUSY ) && count );

if( !count ) {
/*
** die on timeout, report error.
*/
printk( "\n\rlp%d timeout\n\r", minor );
status = LP_S( minor ) | LP_PACK | LP_PUNUSED;
#ifdef LP_IGNORE_SELECT
status |= LP_PSELECD;
#endif
return status;
}


/*
** send char to lp
*/
outb( lpchar, LP_B( minor ) );
lp_delay();

/*
** take strobe high
*/
outb( (LP_PSTROBE | LP_PINITP), ( LP_B( minor ) + 2 ));
lp_delay();

/*
** take strobe low
*/
outb( (LP_PINITP), ( LP_B( minor ) + 2 ));
lp_delay();

status = LP_S( minor ) | LP_PACK | LP_PBUSY | LP_PUNUSED;
#ifdef LP_IGNORE_SELECT
status |= LP_PSELECD;
#endif
return status;
}

int lp_write( unsigned minor, char *buf, int count )
{
int retval;
int loop;
int tcount;
char c;
char *bufp;

/* check for lp existence */

/*
** check for valid no
*/
if( minor > LP_NO - 1 ) return -ENODEV;

/*
** check lp table
*/
if(( LP_F( minor ) & LP_EXIST ) == 0 ) return -ENODEV;

/*
** check process table for process using specified lp
*/
if(( LP_F( minor ) & LP_BUSY ))
{
for( tcount = 0; tcount < NR_TASKS; tcount ++ )
{
if( !task[ tcount ]) break;

/*
** check that task that used lp is still alive
*/
if( task[ tcount ] == LP_T( minor ) ) {
/*
** task alive
*/
tcount = -1;
break;
}
}

/*
** check PID status only if task is alive. else,
** lp_table[ minor ].lp_task is invalid
*/
if( tcount == -1
&& LP_T( minor )->pid != current->pid
&& LP_T( minor )->state != TASK_ZOMBIE )
{
return -EBUSY;
}
}

/*
** ALWAYS reset the task when not busy
** otherwise we would never wake up
*/
LP_T( minor ) = current;
LP_F( minor ) |= LP_BUSY;

/*
** keep track of current char
*/
LP_R( minor ) = count;
bufp = buf;

for( loop = 0; loop < count; loop ++, bufp ++ )
{
/*
** took me a while to figure this out
*/
c = get_fs_byte( bufp );

/*
** try to output a character
*/
retval = lp_char( c, minor );

/*
** clear flags
*/
LP_F( minor ) &= ~LP_NOPA;
LP_F( minor ) &= ~LP_SELEC;

if(retval == LP_OK) {
/*
** the character is assumed to be sent
*/
LP_R( minor ) --;
}
else {
/*
** error handling follows...
*/
lp_error(retval);

if( retval & LP_POUTPA ) {
/*
** the required out-of-paper notice
*/
LP_F( minor ) |= LP_NOPA;
return -ENOSPC;
}

if( !( retval & LP_PSELECD )) {
/*
** offline fault
*/
LP_F( minor ) &= ~LP_SELEC;
return -EFAULT;
}

if( !(retval & LP_PERRORP )) {
/*
** hmmm.... something's definitely wrong in here
*/
LP_F( minor ) |= LP_ERR;
return -EIO;
}
}
}

return count;
}

----------->8--->8----snip---snip------>8------->8-----------

Hope these help a little.

Gunter.

=========================================================================
| G\"unter Windau [email protected] |
| CoGro, Dept. Medical Physics & Biophysics |
| Univ. of Nijmegen, The Netherlands |
=========================================================================
From: [email protected] (Kolja Kaehler)

Subject: X stuff on european ftp site ?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 23:12:36 GMT
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: Techn. University of Berlin, Germany
Lines: 13

I'm currently having a hard time downloading those megabytes from banjo,
so: could someone *please* make X386 available at nic.funet.fi or
(being selfish ๐Ÿ˜‰ any german site ?
(I'd also prefer to have the binaries from xuser* untarred, so I won't have to
get ~4mb at once, but would be able to pick the most important things first)

Maybe I'm too impatient, but I just can`t wait to get X up and running ๐Ÿ™‚

Kolja

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kolja Kaehler
From: [email protected] (Karl R. Buck)


Subject: Re: Getting X386 running ...CHEAP.
Message-ID:
Date: 7 May 92 23:43:40 GMT
References: <[email protected]
.edu>
Organization: Kansas State University
Lines: 33
NNTP-Posting-Host: matt.ksu.ksu.edu

[email protected] (H.J. Lu) writes:

>In article [email protected] (Karl R. Buck) w
rites:
>>I am so amazed that I managed to get X11 running with so few assets, I
>>thought I'd share my experience with others in case there are those
[...]

>I configured my ET4000 (1MB) with 1152x900 virtual reslution and 928x696
>real reslution. I didn't use interlace mode since it is not very good
>for my eyes.

Yes, I have a feeling my cheapo monitor would go spastic if I tried to
put into any other mode but 640x480, but it sure would be nice to get
higher res. Using the tiny font makes the xterm a reasonable size but
it is kind of hard to read.

>If there are enough interests, I can dig the docs and clock.exe, and
>put it on some ftp sites.

Well, I looked through the tutorial on setting up clocks in the
Xconfig. It does not look like fun at all. I think anything you could
contribute to make this procedure less painful would be most welcome.

>>nothing like working on a Sun 20 inch monitor but the ability to pan
>>the desktop helps. Hopefully someone will port vtwm in the future. I
> ^^^^^
>tvtwm? It should be trivial. I did it for AT&T SVR3.2.2/386 before.

No, there also exists vtwm which is not quite as fancy but seems to
take up less memory and give you the nice little virtual desktop.

--
Karl Buck, [email protected] ๐Ÿ™‚
From: [email protected] (Theodore Ts'o)

Subject: Re: Sources (was: Re: X386 and lame SVGA cards)
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 23:36:20 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (Mr Background)
Reply-To: [email protected]
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 44


From: Paul Allen
Reply-To: [email protected]

The last time I looked on tsx-11, the binaries to sources space ratio
was about 2:1. In many cases, Linux diffs for a package are included
with the binary rather than being separated out under the sources
hierarchy. (So you have to ftp a half meg of binary in order to get
the 20Kb of diffs!)

If this is true, then that is a bug. I generally try to break stuff
apart into a source tar file and a binary tar file, although there may
have been a few exceptions. (Hint for potential uploaders --- please
upload the binaries in a separate file from the sources/diffs!)

When I commented on the apparent disregard for
sources (the "Binaries considered harmful" thread of a month ago), I
got a uniformly negative reaction from several of the major players
in the Linux arena. I found this surprising, since Unix software has
historically been distributed almost exclusively in source form.

What I thought I heard as the general consensus (although I may be
biased since that's what *I* believe :-), wasn't that sources was bad
and that you should upload binaries. Rather, the consensus was that
people should upload sources or diffs whenever possible, but making
binaries available shouldn't be considered a bad thing.

I don't think it can be "harmful" to give people the option of either
grabbing sources or grabbing binaries. Even people who are comfortable
compiling distributions may not want to waste the time and disk space to
recompile the world. And if you attempt to force people who don't know
how to compile distributions, they will more likely just give up on
Linux rather than actually sitting down and learning the foibles of
make, learning how to edit appropriate config files, learning what
#ifdef POSIX, #ifdef SVR4. Eventually, this is something which all good
Unix hackers should know how to do. But that doesn't mean that you
start people out with that.

But if you don't like binaries, just pretend that the "bin" or
"binaries" subdirectory on your favorite FTP site doesn't exist. And if
you find yourself needing to grab 1/2 meg of binaries just to get a
diff, you should let your FTP administror know.

- Ted
From: [email protected] (R.A.Knucklebuster)

Subject: Beginner's Problems with Boot
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 23:00:24 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (News System)
Reply-To: [email protected]
Organization: University of Chicago
Lines: 17

I just discovered linux today, ftp'd it to my hard disk, and created
the initial boot disk and root disk.

For some reason, I get the login prompt, but I am unable to login at all.
'root' doesn't work. I simply get some tasking statistics printed and
the login prompt reappears.

Can anyone tell me the obvious thing I'm missing?

Send email to [email protected]

Thanks!
--
Ben Sussman
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
From: [email protected] (Jay Maynard)

Subject: Re: X windows video card support?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 7 May 92 23:24:56 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: UT Health Science Center Houston
Lines: 10
Nntp-Posting-Host: oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu

In article <[email protected]> [email protected]
muenchen.de (The Master of Symbolic Links) writes:
>PS: I don't use X if I have only a SVGA plugged into my system. It's to slow..

Maybe you need to work on X' speed, then; DESQview/X runs just fine on my
Trident 9000...
--
Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL | Never ascribe to malice that which can
[email protected] | adequately be explained by a .sig virus.
"[...] have you noticed how many people have joined you on the back of
Rosinante to help subdue this particular windmill?" -- Dan Herrick
From: [email protected] (Scott Beckstead)

Subject: Re: Linux-Activists Digest #145
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 8 May 92 00:47:00 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (Mr Background)
Reply-To: [email protected] (Scott Beckstead)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 9



Ok I've seen a lot of discussion about wing-ding high fallutin Svga
thinga ma bobbers but I need to know if X will run with a lowly hercules
card. I don't really need the color and I like having an X environment
to work in. Besides I haven't the cash to go out and by a $1000 +
worth of monitor and card. Please tell me it will. It works on a sun 2
with a monochrome screen why no a hercy.
Scott
From: [email protected] (Budi Rahardjo)

Subject: Re: GCC 2.1, probably FAQ, but . . .
Summary: Me too
Keywords: gcc 2.1
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 8 May 92 00:00:12 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
Followup-To: comp.os.linux
Organization: University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Lines: 18

[email protected] (Networking Research) writes:
:
: Ok, I know I've seen references to this in the past, generally
: as the "infamous 'parse error before ('." Well, anyhow, I'm trying to get
: Gcc 2.1 to work on my Linux machine (0.95c+) and I'm getting all sorts of
: 'parse error before (' messages, in stdio.h, in code, everywhere. I've checked
: the ftp sites for info and looked back in comp.os.linux as far as my nntp
: server will allow, and I haven't been able to find the solution. Anybody
: want to help me out here?

Same here. Could some kind soul _post_ the solution, so that some of us

can use gcc 2.1. I guess now is the time to put gcc 1.4 back ....
I need it to compile my program.

-- budi
--
Budi Rahardjo
Unix Support - Computer Services - University of Manitoba
From: [email protected]
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386,comp.unix.bsd,comp.os.linux

Subject: Re: Anyone working on free 8514/S3 X support?
Message-ID:
Date: 8 May 92 01:06:41 GMT
References: <[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (Garry M. Paxinos)
Organization: Metro Link Incorporated.
Lines: 27
In-Reply-To: [email protected]'s message of Thu, 7 May 1992 08: 26
:35 GMT

In article <[email protected]> [email protected]
muenchen.de (The Master of Symbolic Links) writes:

>I'm probably going to write a free 8514/S3 driver for X this summer, and I'd
>be interested in hearing from anyone else who's working on the same thing,
>so we can avoid duplicated effort.

Actually I did such a beast - but it's only commercial work. I would not
recommend you doing this thing, unless you are really good at X. It took
me quite while to make it stable and fast. A starting point could be the
X11R4 IBM 8514/A server. But then again this guy is so buggy that it makes
sence to start from scratch (read I tried this and gave up).

We agree on that, our first 8514 server was based on the IBM code ( I guess
we percervierd(sp?) a little more :-), it turned into a pretty stable
server after alot of work. However, a rewrite from scratch netted us 25k
more xstones....

Take care,
Pax.
--
Email : [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
USNail : 3868 NW 21 Ct. Coconut Creek, Fl 33066 Voice : 305-973-8478
UUCP : {uflorida.edu!novavax, mthvax, cse.fau.edu, attmail}!ankh!pax
--
Email : [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
USNail : 3868 NW 21 Ct. Coconut Creek, Fl 33066 Voice : 305-973-8478
UUCP : {uflorida.edu!novavax, mthvax, cse.fau.edu, attmail}!ankh!pax
From: [email protected] (Chin Fang)

Subject: Re: X windows video card support?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 8 May 92 02:57:19 GMT
References: <[email protected]> <[email protected]>
<[email protected]> <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected] (Mr News)
Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
Lines: 31

In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] (Jay Maynard) writes
:
|> In article <[email protected]> roell@informatik.
tu-muenchen.de (The Master of Symbolic Links) writes:
|> >PS: I don't use X if I have only a SVGA plugged into my system. It's to slow
..
|>
|> Maybe you need to work on X' speed, then; DESQview/X runs just fine on my
|> Trident 9000... ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^(a)

Then do the following test... my personal favorite. Ftp ftp.uu.net,
cd to comp.sources.unix and get the full index. Now open a xterm, to say,
80x45 (should be reasonable for 800x600 or anything close) and then issue
the following:

time cat index

to see how long it takes. Of course, you need to provide MSDOS the time(1)
utility but that's up to you. Afterwards, find a UNIX workstation running
pure MIT X11R5 (suggested model, any Sun SPARC 1, 1+, or 2 *with GX support*)
and do the same test. Roell's taste (and his X386 v1.3 using certain
graphic adapters) is even higher than what Sun can offer ๐Ÿ™‚ If DESQview/X can
beat or match X performance on a GX assisted Sun, then your comment (a) is
fair ๐Ÿ™‚

I like this test, because I often have to edit big text files (documentations
or large source codes), and text scrolling performance is important to me.
They are some other popular X benchmarking programs, like the X Consortium
endorsed x11perf. But porting such clients to MSDOS? Urrr ๐Ÿ™ ๐Ÿ™ ๐Ÿ™

Take easy,

Chin Fang
[email protected]


End of newsgroup comp.os.linux.



  3 Responses to “Category : UNIX Files
Archive   : INTLX019.ZIP
Filename : INTLX019.TXT

  1. Very nice! Thank you for this wonderful archive. I wonder why I found it only now. Long live the BBS file archives!

  2. This is so awesome! ๐Ÿ˜€ I’d be cool if you could download an entire archive of this at once, though.

  3. But one thing that puzzles me is the “mtswslnkmcjklsdlsbdmMICROSOFT” string. There is an article about it here. It is definitely worth a read: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/mtswslnk/