You'll need to find the software for these things; if you can get hold of the official Tektronix XpressWare version 8.0 or later on a CD then that'll make life easier for you. And you probably won't need this document. Otherwise there is the DIY approach...
NCD have some software in the form of patches, accessible by anonymous ftp. There aren't any complete releases, but there are archives which contains much that is useful to be found in the ftp://ftp.ncd.com/pub/nwd/XpressWare/ directory, in particular patches containing bits of version 8.1 of XpressWare; enough to form the basis of a working installation as detailed below.
The terminals boot from a directory on a server via NFS or TFTP, either way, you need to create a directory for the terminal to boot from, and install a number of files.
I have created a directory /export/tekxp/ which is the example used here. If you're creating your directory hierarchy elsewhere, substitute that in the following.
At this point, there's enough installed to do a lot; so skip to section 4; configure the terminal and attempt to boot it.
You should see it retrieve an IP address, then start to load the os.350 file; a progress indicator shows how much of this file has been loaded. This should be followed by a number of messages scrolling up the screen, then X starts and the `TekHostMenu' dialog should come up.
You should now be able to run the telnet client, XDMCP chooser and log on to any machines set up to allow it.
Also a menu (`Launcher') can be brought up with `Shift-Break'; selecting `Console' here brings up a console allowing error messages to be seen, missing files to be identified, and which should help sort out the rest of the configuration.
The following files should be created in the tekxp/boot/config/ directory - create empty files for now as placeholders, using touch.
The terminal reads .pcf fonts compressed with compress; the fonts on Linux are compressed with gzip. So, in order to provide additional fonts for the terminal, you need to put them where they can be read then change the compression type. Now, a problem was found; the compress on my Linux distro objected to filenames longer than 12 characters, but through experimentation it was found the terminal didn't have any such restriction. So, a nasty little script was written to temporarily rename, gunzip, compress, then rename back a directory full of fonts, then run mkfontdir to provide an updated index to the fonts.
So, to add fonts for the x terminals, do the following:
#!/bin/sh
for FILE in *.pcf.gz; do
if [ -w ${FILE} ] ; then
LONG=`basename ${FILE} .pcf.gz`
mv ${FILE} temp.pcf.gz && \
gunzip temp.pcf.gz && \
compress temp.pcf && \
mv temp.pcf.Z ${LONG}.pcf.Z && \
echo "${FILE} --> ${LONG}.pcf.Z"
fi
done
echo "Done converting. Running mkfontdir."
mkfontdir