HP Envizex questions. Lots of em.

[Marten van Wezel]

Hello, I'll try to be brief, since I have quite a few Q's here ;) Perhaps this will also be helpful to others like me who have gotten one of them through some computer dept who didnt need xterminals anymore.

Anyway. Situation: I have an HP Envizex C2731A x terminal, on my backend network connected to a linux server that carries the enware 7.1 software. It gets its ip through bootp and loads the necessary data through NFS. This moreorless works even though I must comment that it often freezes a few times during bootup (for short periods, 10 seconds) and sends out weird packets. After it went through booting it works fine.

The questions. Brace! :)

1/ On booting the terminal reports it can't load color database. Windowmaker segfaults (on linux) when i try to run it (while complaining a lot about colors) though this might be unrelated. Other programs complain as well but do run. Do I need to try to fix this? Will it improve anything?

2/ The terminal has 14Mb memory installed, but reports free 72pin slots. Is it worth my time to put in extra memory? What will it do with the extra? Cache fonts? Will it actually take vanilla simm's or do I need HP brand ones?

3/ I've heard that this terminal might support MPEG-1 playback. Is this true? And if so, I dont think this envizex has audio out (the holes for the jacks are there, but no jacks I don't think), so my linux box will need to take care of that.. Any tips, thoughts?

4/ When I connected a normal (vanilla again :) ) ps2 keyboard it got detected as DEUTSCH (German) and some keys on it work, and some result in garbage on the screen.. Probably because of some weird character mapping. Is there a solution to this?

5/ I've connected a logitech ps2 mouse (since the old mouse has nearly bought it).. but this mouse has a mouse wheel.. how can I make use of it? The middle mouse button works fine.

6/ This terminal reports to have 2Mb video memory. Why can it only do 256 colors? PC vga cards with 2Mb can do 1024x768x32k at least.. or is the term actually doing more?

7/ *boggle* this just in: NFS client 192.168.2.2 (the xterm) tried to NFS mount /home/marten/.kde/share/fonts/override ... why that? Plus, how can the KDE system instruct the xterminal to start trying to NFS-download fonts or did it decide to try that all by itself?

8/ There's a floppy drive in this terminal, can I somehow use this device? How do I address it? It is 1.44Mb, right?

9/ What's the advantage of installing a X font server? Will it help anything? Most things seem to display well without it. Exept for #10 below, I admit. but web pages render nicely, even with scaled fonts and so on.

10/ While running KDE typing letters into a terminal, everything works fine, but if I use the KWord program (which renders documents with fonts, obviously) I am getting 'packet loss' i.e. when I type 'hello I am Marten' I get "hloIarnnnn" on the screen. (yes I just tried this :) ) - updating the screen doesnt help so somehow the keyboard data doesnt arrive at the linux machine. This isnt a problem when I try it on KWord running on the linux server console itself, so dont think it's a KDE error. Anyone know what gives?

11/ When i terminate the X client (in this case KDE), it leaves the terminal in such a state that it often doesnt care to come back up and start being an Xserver again for new programs. Is there any way to tell the xterm to 'reset'? (without going through the entire bootup process, if possible).

I think that's it. :) If anyone can answer any of these questions I would be eternally grateful. (Or, until I forget all about it, whichever comes first :) )

[Charles Slivkoff]

1/ The loading of rgb.txt could be complicated if you are using Enware 6.x. Try copying or linking the rgb.txt files from Enware (not sure exactly where the Linux install would have put these) to "rgb.txt.". Yes, that a trailing ".". Another option is to load Enware/Netstation 7.x.

2/ The SIMMs I believe are fairly standard. The SIMMs from the 715/712, though do NOT work in the Xterminals. 14MB should be sufficient unless you want to run several local-clients. Running mwm locally would make for a considerable reduction in network traffic (see hpxt.mwm wrapper script). There's also xterm, hpterm, xlock, xclock. Find the "modules.ld" file for a full listing.

3/ There was limited support for an MPEG SIMM, in Envizex P and Entria+ models. Not the A-series, though.

4/ Use "F12" to display the configuration screen after booted & change the keyboard layout option.

5/ No. The PS/2 driver does not support wheel mice. In fact, it is possible that it could hang the X server.

6/ Current PC graphics have a considerable amount of flexibility with how the framebuffer is allocated. The Envizex A was fairly state-of-the-art for 1993. Do you know of any PC graphics HW circa 1993 that supported 1280x1024 at VESA refresh rates? Some of the RAM is being used for "Backing Store" and "Save Unders", as well as off-screen pixmaps.

7/ There is probably a "xset fp+ /...." that is being called. The X server running on the terminal can only assume that the path is relative to its software install root. If you need to manipulate the font-path, the best option is to use a font-server on the Linux side. Reference it using: "xset fp+ tcp/linuxbox:7100", or whatever port on which it's listening.

8/ Via NFS. Assuming that the drivers have been properly loaded (usually are), /hpxtfd should be NFS exported. Try "showmount -e myxtermip".

9/ In addition to 7/ above, using the font server exclusively for fonts will recover ~500Kb of RAM. Also, the loading should be slightly faster as the terminal will not have to potentially uncompress *.pcf.Z font files. Also, the Xterminal will not scale fonts. If you want to make outline fonts (Type1, TrueType, etc) available to the terminal, a font-server is the only way to go.

10/ Unknown, but I'd start with the font-server. Since the KDE term works OK, I'd be suspicious of KWord or one of it's libs. Is your KDE install all 1.x or a mixture with 2.0?

11/ Are you terminating the XDMCP session manager process? This would be the executable that the Xsession script is "exec"-ing. For most this is the window manager, but GNOME uses gnome-session (CDE has dtsession). Take a look at the process heirarchy "ps -efH" and find the xdm/kdm/gdm & it's children. The first one that your login owns is the one that would need to die for the Xserver to reset. Another possibility is that the XDMCP support on the Linux end is flakey. I've seen this with RH 6.x. The standard "3-finger" salute [ctrl]+[alt]+[del] should function as an X server reset sequenece. You might need to experiment with Left/Right key combinations. If you can't get one to work, try [ctrl][shift][break]. Or, "remsh myxtermip reset".

-chuck

P.S. Check your installation for a copy of the Enware Technical Reference guide. There should be a PCL version (for printing to LaserJet) and a PS version that you can view with GhostScript. If you can't find it, let me know.