Unix PC Beginner Q's

[sam at uxe.cso.uiuc.edu]

	I've been asked to port some software that I wrote for the Sun 3 to
the Unix PC.  They gave me a Unix PC running 3.5, a 40mb harddrive, 1meg of
memory and an ethernet card.  I've run into a number of problems trying
to get all of this to work. 

	The most painful problem is this : I installed the ethernet card and 
software and plugged it into our network ( class B 128.174.180.xxx ).  Easy,
huh?  Everything seems to work.  BUT.  The machine is guarenteed to crash
with a "kernal parity error" within the hour if I leave it plugged into
the network.  Also if I try and ftp a "large" file of 50K the machine crashes.
Waiting the 5 to 10 minutes for it to come back up cuts down on development
time a little.  What am I doing wrong?

	The other problems come with porting the software.  The program is a 
terminal emulator to talk to the Plato computer system ( big educational
computer with a custom communcations protocol based loosely on the tektronix
4014 protocol.)  I need as much resolution as possible in the Y direction
because Plato expects 512 lines vertical ( up to the emulator to scale as
appropriate.)  /usr/include/sys/iohw.h says that the width is 720 ( great )
and that the height is 348.  348 scales out ok on other computers.  But I
can't use the whole screen.  Does anybody have a set of graphics routines that
will draw dots, lines, blocks and copy bitmaps that take advantage of the
whole screen?  I wrote some really gross routines using the wrastop function
and wrastop is the one who tells me that I have a bounds error if I try to 
write to the bottom of the screen.

	The other problem is handling the keyboard.  I need a simple routine 
that is non-blocking ( have to handle graphics and such coming over the serial
port) and can give me a raw code for the keyboard?

	Lots of probs, huh?  Well -- writing it on the Sun under SunView was a 
piece of cake, as was writing it on the ibm-pc.  I've heard that I should
avoid UA if I can -- is that right?  Any advice?  Anyone want a copy when it
is done? 

Final questions : Can you get direct (not wrastop) access to screen memory?
		  Has anybody ever ported X to this machine? 

Kurt Mahan	mahan at uinova.cerl.uiuc.edu
		mahan/s/cerl ( on plato )