[Simh] DECwindows

[Tim Pinkawa]

On 11/19/06, Paul Hardy <pghardy at verizon.net> wrote:
> Thank you Tim, for those helpful instructions - My Windows laptop is now
> able to be a pretty good simulation of a VAXstation!
>
> I'm running SIMH on a Windows (XP Media Center) laptop. I downloaded and
> installed a minimal Cygwin/X as you suggested.
>
> On the VAX side, I had previously got TCPIP configured and started with all
> the usual services. I already had DECwindows 1.2.5 installed (because I
> wanted to run some old software that was built under Motif 1.2, whereas
> DECwindows 1.2.6 has Motif 2.0 I think). The only configuration I had to do
> in the VAX side was to copy XACCESS.TEMPLATE to XACCESS.TXT in
> SYS$SPECIFIC:[TCPIP$XDM].
>
> I could then use the startxdcmp.bat file that comes with Cygwin to bring up
> an X-server and a login window to the VAX. I logged in and was away.
>
> I needed to use different Xwin startup parameters, because the software that
> I wanted to run (like much VMS Motif stuff) expected to have an 8-bit
> pseudo-color visual type (settable colour palette), rather than 32-bit
> Trucolor which is the default.. So the changed lines in startxdcmp.bat
> became:
> SET REMOTE_HOST=192.168.0.200
> %RUN% XWin -ac -fullscreen -depth 8 -query %REMOTE_HOST%
>
> Out of interest, what is the -ac switch to XWin? I couldn't see it in the
> documentation.
>
> I then downloaded Netscape Navigator V3.03 from the HP site
> (http://h71000.www7.hp.com/ebusiness/technology.html) , and I now can browse
> the web (at least to any sites which work with a 10-year-old web browser!).
> Is there any more recent browser available for VMS on VAX (Mozilla, Firefox,
> Opera, etc)?
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Paul  Hardy
> Email: paul at the hardy.demon.co.uk domain
> Exiled in Redlands, CA, USA

I'm glad they were useful. I'm not entirely sure what -ac does, other
than I know that it doesn't work without it. :) It has something to do
with access control. When you connect to XDM without -ac you get an
error like this:
AUDIT: Sun Nov 19 13:21:22 2006: 2940 xwin: client 1 rejected from IP
192.168.1.104

When I first set this all up and got that error message, I just copy
and pasted it into Google and I found out about -ac. XWin says the
following:
-ac                    disable access control restrictions

Thanks for the Netscape link, I didn't know that was still available.
Unfortunately I don't see any more modern browsers for VAX.

Tim