Xorting out X compatibility on the RS/6000

[Chin Fang]

In article <1991May20.192303.26408 at mercury.cair.du.edu> kacollin at orion.cair.du.edu (KAREN COLLINSON) writes:
>
>I am trying to sort out version compatibility for X on the RS/6000.
>
>What is Dan Greening's client/lib patch?  
>
I already went thru the exercise of applying Dan Greening's patch and am now
typing this response from a xterm (NOT a aixterm).  You need to ftp to 
export.lcs.mit.edu cd contrib, mget ibm.rs6000.fix[1-2].    

Then just follow the very clearly written patching instructions that come with
the patches.  

After applied the patches, I symbolically linked our X11R4 src tree to my 
scratch partition, and proceeded from there.  Dan disabled fonts and rgb, 
he also did so for xinit and xdm.  I went ahead and built both fonts and rgb
and am using them now.   The rgb stuff is almost perfect except my 3003 X 
every now and then cannt refresh properly, eg, for twm pop-up menus.  Or
xcolors have some cells not filled.  But xshowcmap works fine.

Fonts are another story.  Even though xfontsel can show all fonts, but this
is really xclient dependent I think.  Because I have trouble using some fonts
for xterms, eg, new-century-school-book fonts don't work.  So in my .xinitrc
I put in not only R4 fonts but also a few IBM fonts.  They look nice in xterm,
eg right now I am using Rom11 in this xterm.  fixed is too small.

To do so, put xset fp $FONTPATH/misc, $FONTPATH/75dpi.....

The -fp switch of X server won't work.  It sucks!

So far, except the X server, I am using all R4 clients, both standard and
contributed.  The libs patched by Dan is pretty good.  Normally just typing
xmkmf and editing a few lines in Makefile will get things going pretty well.

For xwebster, I have to port Xw, but it's not difficult either.  Sometimes,
AIX linker forgets to search even default libs.  Just a few minutes ago, I 
had to put -L /lib -lc to built SeeTeX 2.7.1, for example.  Otherwise, 
it would complaine about unresolved symbol .moveeq (an entry in libc.a),
this was both surprising and annoying to me.   

Occationally header file hierarchy is different so when you port stuff, that
has to be paid attention to.  I haven't set up bsdcc as mentioned in 
/usr/lpp/bos/bsdport, but have built quite a few things now for X environment
using the R4 stuff patched by Dan.  He deserves many thanks!

One last thing.  Dan indicates in his instructions that xinit and xdm would
not work with IBM's X11R3 server,  but I built xinit and xdm, they seem to 
work. xinit fired up X no problems this afternoon.  xdm did the same too.

So what's the scope?  Could anyone provide me some insight?  I think Dan must
have good reason not to make them built.  But why they work (as far as my
short test indicates)?

As I am working on integrating our RS6000s' software environment into our
multi-platform computing environment, (total five platforms) my objective
is always to eliminate any vendor specific features.  Unfortunately IBM X team
has introduced many their own non-standard things that MUST be eliminated.
Dan's patches have made my work much easier.  We plan NOT to use any IBM
clients at all in our environment.  Everything will be R4 other than the 
server itself.

I think IBM X developement team really should think about this next time 
around to release X stuff.  Please make it more Standard like (read MIT, NOT
IBM, since IBM didn't start it, so please follow MIT, which is not a bad name
to follow anyway!)

Regards,

Chin Fang
Mechanical Engineering Department
Stanford University
fangchin at leland.stanford.edu