VP/ix & Computone

[Bill Kennedy]

First, many thanks for the responses I got regarding my problems with
VP/ix (Simul-Task), AT&T 386 UNIX, and the Computone AT-4 smart card.
I was unable to get any of the terminals on the smart card to come up
under VP/ix while the same ones would work OK as COM1 or COM2.  There
are some pretty good answers, I'll summarize.

First off, if you install VP/ix *after* you have installed the Computone
driver you must remove it and re-install it.  The reason for that is
that the driver installation procedure goes and looks for VP/ix and puts
in the necessary hooks and handles if it finds it.  My driver is V4.0
and requires V3.00 EPROM's or later.  The driver and new EPROM's can be
had for $25, call Computone at (404) 475-2725 (Carl in tech support
helped me a lot).  I can assure you it's kind of creepy to be able to run
a PC screen oriented problem on a serial terminal, it's great!

With respect to the COM1/COM2 thing, thanks to Bill Bunton at tntdev.tnt.com
it makes sense.  There you are on COM1 and you type "dos".  OK, VP/ix has to
go out and figure out what standard DOS resources you can have.  If you are
already on COM1, VP/ix can't let you have it as a standard DOS device so it
tells you and pauses so it's sure you saw the report.  I suspect I'd have
gotten a similar message if lp was printing or I had a floppy file system
mounted.  Those guys thought of a lot of stuff I'd have overlooked...

Thanks again for the help, I hope this article keeps someone else out of yet
another dead end street with my footprints in it...
-- 
Bill Kennedy  usenet      {killer,att,rutgers,sun!daver,uunet!bigtex}!ssbn!bill
              internet    bill at ssbn.WLK.COM