X11 on Symbolics LISP Engineering

Enhanced X11 Keyboard

Wed, 20 Jul 2016 04:15:00 +0000

Well, after living with the default keyboard mapping for Genera under X-Windows, I decided to make an optimized one for an 87-key ANSI layout. The design goals were:

Utilize all the 16 top row keys efficiently, with most common functions in logical places
Utilize the 6-key quadrant for other common functions
Leave the arrow keys for cursor motion (because even though I have been using Emacs for at least 26 years I like my arrow keys)

Some of the important things that these led me to were:

Genera Xquartz Keyboard

Sun, 17 Jul 2016 19:42:01 +0000

It has taken some effort, but I finally created a reasonable (and close-to-default) keyboard layout and mapping for Genera for using a modern, 87-key “tenkeyless” keyboard under Xquartz. I became reasonably familiar (at a reading level) with Flavors and Genera’s X implementation while reverse engineering all this stuff. I also used the apropos function a lot, of course.

This layout stays very close to the default one provided by Genera while adding a few tweaks such as:

MacIvory III Setup and X11

Tue, 12 Jul 2016 04:57:57 +0000

As I haven’t had the time to continue to debug the XL1201 hardware problems, I turned back to the MacIvory III and an Intel i7 NUC I had.

First I set up Ubuntu 14.04 on the NUC with NFS and the “time” service, so I could use it as an always-on server for the Symbolics computers. This way I can put the full size SCSI computer away when I’m not actually imaging SCSI drives.

Genera X11 Fonts on Mac

Sun, 03 Jul 2016 17:50:53 +0000

Although away, I have my laptop with me and decided to try to get Xquartz running with the Genera X11 fonts.

Find the Genera X11 fonts (in bdf format) and transfer them to your Mac. I put them in ~/x11/fonts/genera/. On Genera system they will be in the LMFS somewhere and can be transferred using NFS.
- If necessary: On the Mac, rename the fonts to lower case and get rid of any Genera version number. tr is good for case conversion and for i in * ; do echo $i `echo $i | sed ’s/\.~.*//’` ; done works to remove version numbers. (Man, this blog software makes it difficult to put commands with backticks and backslashes into code blocks.)
Alternatively, you can mount the ISO9660 partition of your Genera 8.3 distribution CD on the Mac using a command like mkdir /Volumes/CD ; sudo mount_cd9660 -e /dev/disk3 /Volumes/CD and then copy the bdf and other X11 font files. (By default macOS mounts the HFS partition so you will only see the MacIvory files.)
- Add the g option to the mount_cd9660 to see the Genera version numbers appended to the filenames - but you’ll have to remove these when you copy the files.
- (Add the r option to the mount command to see the file system without Rockridge format, for curiosity sake. This also changes the version number format and makes them all caps. You can also use the j option to disable Joilet.)
- sudo umount /Volumes/CD to unmount it; the regular diskutil unmount and other Mac utilities won’t unmount this.

AdmiralA:~/x11/fonts/genera$ diskutil list
...
 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
 0: Apple_partition_scheme +636.7 MB disk3
 1: Apple_partition_map 32.3 KB disk3s1
 2: Symbolics_ISO9660 615.4 MB disk3s2
 3: Apple_HFS MacIvory Support 4.2 21.0 MB disk3s3
...
AdmiralA:~$ ls -l /Volumes/CD/sys.sct/x11/fonts/bdf/genera/ | head -5
total 6476
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 14302 Dec 19 1989 13fgb.bdf.~3~
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 10623 Dec 19 1989 16fg.bdf.~3~
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 12451 Dec 19 1989 18fg.bdf.~3~
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 17481 Dec 19 1989 20vr.bdf.~3~

In the directory with all the font files, run the mkfontdir program, which will make a file called fonts.dir which seems to contain a mapping from a filename to a font name.

AdmiralA:~/x11/fonts/genera$ mkfontdir
AdmiralA:~/x11/fonts/genera$ fgrep genera-cptfont fonts.dir 
cptfont.bdf genera-cptfont
cptfontb.bdf genera-cptfontb
cptfontbi.bdf genera-cptfontbi
cptfontc.bdf genera-cptfontc
cptfontcb.bdf genera-cptfontcb
cptfontcc.bdf genera-cptfontcc
cptfonti-german.bdf genera-cptfonti-german
cptfonti.bdf genera-cptfonti
cptfontr.bdf genera-cptfontr

In the Xquartz xterm window, add this font directory to the font path (xset fp+ ~/x11/fonts/genera) and activate it (xset fp rehash).
Using FontForge I looked at various fonts and determined that genera-cptfont seems to be the normal Genera console font.
Test that the fonts are installed by using one: xterm -fn genera-cptfont -fb genera-cptfontb. Note that as it turns out, these two fonts are not compatible with xterm’s needs (identical bounding boxes) so just use xterm -fn genera-cptfont.

Autoboot Serial/Telnet and X

Sat, 02 Jul 2016 01:43:26 +0000

I’ve decided to take a minor detour when I get back from the gaming convention to make a disk image for someone with an XL400 without a working console. My goal here will be to make a world which will auto boot into the FEP with the serial port I/O enabled for FEP commands if possible, and then auto-load and start a world which will put a Genera/Lisp command prompt on the serial port and/or be listening on (TCP) Telnet on a defined private IP address for remote connections. Then, using Telnet, the user can run Start X Screen and use Genera from an X Windows server. Hopefully this will get him up and running until he has an opportunity to repair his console.

Displaying Genera on iMac

Wed, 29 Jun 2016 19:11:12 +0000

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.