With Rob and I both beating on it, he was able to get VNC working on Linux
for System/390 (i.e., Linux running on IBM mainframes). As expected, it
turned out to be an endian-ness issue, but not in VNC itself. The XFree86
code shipped along with VNC needed to be told about Linux/390 (which we knew
and Adam Thornton had done long ago), most especially the fact that it's a
big-endian environment (which we hadn't done before).
Here's the patch against VNC 3.3.3r2 (the Unix source level currently on the
download site), could it please be incorporated into the next rollup?
Thanks for all the advice etc.,
Ross Patterson
Computer Associates
-----Original Message-----
From: Rob van der Heij [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, December 25, 2000 18:22
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: X-masgift: VNC ported to S/390
Finally found the big-endian issue that made VNC fail before.
This is fun. Those who know VNC can skip the explanation.
With Linux for S/390 we run the X-clients (the application) on
S/390 and the X-server (with the screen) on a workstation. The
connection between X-client and X-server takes a lot of bandwidth
(e.g. bringing up Gnome desktop was some 20MB before I could do
anything with it).
VNC (Virtual Network Computing) implements a X-server on the same
host where the X-applications are running (so you have internal
TCP/IP traffic there). The visible display is managed by the VNC
viewer that connects to the VNC server and the data sent is just
the bitmap changes rather than the X-windows structures.
There's VNC viewers for various platforms including Linux and Windoze.
Interesting is the VNC viewer in Java that runs in your Web browser
so you can even connect to your Linux for S/390 desktop with that.
Another neat trick with VNC is that you can disconnect and connect
to the desktop rather than have it rebuilt each time.
I did a quick and dirty rpm package building on the RedHat one:
ftp://penguinvm4.princeton.edu/pub/RPMS/s390/vnc-3.3.3r1-2.s390.rpm
which runs with my versions of glibc etc.
If you want it on SuSE GA you could rebuild the source rpm yourself
ftp://penguinvm4.princeton.edu/pub/SRPMS/vnc-3.3.3r1-2.src.rpm
The documentation and viewers for various platforms are at
http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc
I was quite impressed by the improvement, but do not expect miracles
from it. Since VNC delays sending the updates until the picture is a
bit stable, playing games probably is no fun at all.
The first time you start 'vncserver' it creates an a ~/.vnc/xstartup
for you with an 'xterm' and a window manager in it. When you want to
run Gnome or KDE you should probably take the window manager out or
even replace it with 'kde' or 'gnome-session' (I prefer to start it
through the xterm that was opened and let Gnome or kde take over).
Have fun. Rob
PS Make sure you don't leave a xscreensaver running when disconnected.
[demime 0.97b removed an attachment of type application/octet-stream which had a name
of vnc-3.3.3r2-s390.patch]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, send a message with the line: unsubscribe vnc-list
to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
See also: http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/intouch.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------
