Displaying Genera on iMac

Well, on a whim I decided to see if I could get Genera running on my iMac’s X display. (This way I can spare the 3620 Console from use while I figure out how to recap it.) It was a frustrating few hours fighting with XQuartz, actually.

First, I installed the latest XQuartz and made it listen on port 6000.1

Then I set up my iMac as host NEON in the Genera Namespace Editor and typed Start X Screen NEON :Geometry 1600x1200+100+100. Boom, Genera just showed up on my iMac X server.

Later, Halt X Screen stops it.

More details are in the Symbolics X Window System User’s Guide on Bitsavers.

Anyway, I ran out of time as I’m leaving for the long weekend with the boys to a gaming convention, but here is a screenshot to enjoy.

Genera 8.3 on iMac via X

Since I got this iMac from a previously failed venture, and there was one user of it before me and I never bothered to reinstall, I wonder if he had set something up that caused things to be messed up for me now.

  1. Most of my time was spent fighting with XQuartz, which wass extremely confusing. The .pkg installed it, as best as I can tell, in an /OldLaptop-YYYYMMDD/Applications/Utilities directory, which is actually a backup of my old 2011 MBP. Some X stuff also seemed to be in /opt/X11. Even after entirely turning off the firewall, setting Preferences, setting various flags with defaults write, and even logging out and in, I couldn’t get XQuartz to listen on TCP. Eventually I tunneled port 6000 using the socat utility with the command socat TCP-LISTEN:6000,resueaddr,fork UNIX-CLIENT:\"$DISPLAY\" in the Xterm`. ↩︎