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Next: 4 Terminal Setup Up: Tektronix XP400 Guide Previous: 2 Server Configuration

Subsections


3 Terminal Software

3.1 Officially

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...

3.2 Unofficially

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.

3.2.1 Download, unpack and install the patch file.

  1. Download ftp://ftp.ncd.com/pub/nwd/XpressWare/Patches/V8.1/p1v81106.tar.Z (17529 KB.)
  2. In your tekxp/ directory, create the following directories.
    boot/ 
    boot/config/
  3. Extract the file p1v81106.tar.Z to a temporary directory somewhere.
    uncompress p1v81106.tar.Z 
    tar -xvf p1v81106.tar
  4. cd to the patchV8.1.106/ directory which should have appeared when you extracted the archive.
  5. Run the INSTALL_PATCH script, giving as argument the location of your boot directory.
    ./INSTALL_PATCH /export/tekxp/boot 
    You'll be asked which terminals you wish to install software for, answer `n' to all but `XP350'
  6. Rename the sample configuration files placed in the boot/config/ directory
    cd /export/tekxp/boot/config 
    mv xp_cnf.txt xp.cnf 
    mv ntp_conf.txt ntp.conf

3.2.2 Attempt to boot

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.

3.2.3 Add missing configuration files

The following files should be created in the tekxp/boot/config/ directory - create empty files for now as placeholders, using touch.

The terminal also looks for an rgb.txt file containing RGB values and their corresponding names; on my system /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb.txt was copied into boot/config/ directory; the terminal doesn't like comments in this file so the first line was deleted.

3.2.4 Install additional fonts

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:

  1. Create a directory /export/tekxp/boot/fonts/
  2. Copy at least the 75dpi, 100dpi and misc fonts into fonts/75dpi/, fonts/100dpi/ and fonts/misc/ respectively.
  3. Create the convertfont script.
    
    #!/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
    
    
  4. Run convertfont in each font directory. You should see messages of the form `fontname.pcf.gz -> fontname.pcf.Z' scroll up your console, finally mkfontdir is run to create a new fonts.dir file, hopefully without errors.
  5. Examine the fonts.alias in each directory - remove any commented lines (lines starting with an exclamation mark) as the terminals don't like this.
  6. Edit /export/tekxp/boot/config/fonts.tbl and list, one entry per line, the full path to each font directory added, eg.
    /export/tekxp/boot/fonts/100dpi
    /export/tekxp/boot/fonts/75dpi
    /export/tekxp/boot/fonts/misc
  7. Reboot the terminal.


next up previous
Next: 4 Terminal Setup Up: Tektronix XP400 Guide Previous: 2 Server Configuration
Katharine Manton
2004-08-11