Look and feel (was Re: problem with xterm on RS6000NN)

[Chin Fang]

In article <7536 at vela.acs.oakland.edu>, amaranth at vela.acs.oakland.edu (Paul Amaranth) writes:
|> In article <5048 at meaddata.meaddata.com> phw at meaddata.com (Pat Ward) writes:
|> >What is it that you want xterm to do - that aixterm doesn't do? 
|> 
|> Well, decent tektronix emulation support...[rest deleted]

I imagine "look and feel" does play a role here.  aixterm doesn't behave the
same as the standard xterm.  In a mult-platform site like ours, that means more
hassle (no matter how small).  We even put standard X11R4 on a few our NeXTs :-)
Uniformity is important to a site which supports many (in our case 9763) users 
and many of them are novice computer users (not to mention UNIX :-(.

For this reason, I had to rewrite xinit script to make it behave the *SAME*
as the standard X11R4 xinit binary.  Also it calls .xsession instead of the
now obsolete name .xinitrc.  Same for .Xresources instead of .Xdefaults.
(check with Project Athena people :-)

In so doing, both users and SA benefit. Less learning effort/maintenance time :-)

We don't use any Xstations.  So no need of the non-standard lpp stuff :-)
I will see if it's possible to rm -rf the whole thing in this summer.

Besides, a 33Mhz 386 box (ISA, EISA, or MCA) running the freely available 
Thomas Roell's superfast X386 server can handly beat almost any Xstations
both in price and performance, and you get src (and a friendly tutorial too :-)
So we don't bother with Xstation stuff :-)

Hardware: $4000 is enough to get you a *VERY* solid piece.
386 UNIX: $1200 for an unlimited license ESIX SYSV R4.03 (90% the same as SUNOS)
X386:     $0,   131.159.8.35, anonymous-ftp, /pub/i386/X11R4

Performance: it handly beats my SUN SPARC 1+ in many benchmarks with a plain SVGA.
             It runs comfortably in 8 megs (something RISC machines NEVER can :-(

It supports any many SVGAs up to 1152x900x16 and 8514 compatible too.  (TI support coming) So why pay big bucks for a *Xterm*???????

If I want 8bit char support, I use Janpanses contributed kterm (I have it on 
our RISC 6000s :-).  If I like color xterm, I do the following:

ftp -i export.lcs.mit.edu
ftp>cd contrib
ftp>mget col*term.tar.Z
 
Then start hacking :-)

In conclusion, I would venture offer my opinion that any vendor is welcome to
add any special features, as long as feature from a well known  baseline (eg, X11R4 from MIT) is kept intact.  May I say that single vendor workstation shops
are still not that common and therefore interoperability of a system is still
important?

Sincerely,

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