I recieved two answers to my question about using eXcursion on WinNT
with PAW, and other CERN packages on a Digital Unix host.
Paul Tyler (pct_at_ansto.gov.au) suggested that it might be a memory or
other resource problem in the NT systems. Unfortunately I don't know
very much about tuning NT - though the problem appeared on both Alpha
and Intel boxes, each with 64M or so of memory. I still suspect an
eXcursion fault. The netscape problem *sounds* like a slow network, but
isn't - it can occur on the local, lightly loaded switched ethernet,
loading pages from the local, lightly loaded web server.
Oliver Klapp (klapp_at_wpcl1.physik.uni-wuppertal.de) suggested enabling
backing store in eXcursion. I *think* I suggested this to my users, but
I shall certainly check again - it sounds like the most obvious reason
for disappearing windows...
I attach my original question below.
Thanks for the help,
Graham
------
This isn't strictly a Digital Unix question, but I can't think of any
forum more likely to be able to help, so I hope it's ok if I go ahead
and ask...
My WinNT users are reporting two problems with eXcursion 3.0 (supplied
as part of Pathworks 32).
First is when they are using various X-based packages from CERN: paw and
higz (I expect only people in the high-energy physics community would be
familiar with these). These packages produce windows containing plots of
various data. However, on an eXcursion terminal, the windows appear and
immediately disappear. We've tried altering many settings in eXcursion
(most obvious perhaps being to enable backing store?), but nothing
helps. The same programs work fine on other X displays, whether the
Digital Unix console, OpenVMS, HDS xterms, or PCs running Hummingbird's
X server.
Second problem is with netscape... running on Digital Unix 4.0B (as
supplied with the system, I think that's netscape 3.01), but displaying
on eXcursion. When netscape displays a page containing a large image,
the whole NT system seems to stall for seconds (10-30) at a time - I'm
not sure what the length of the pause is correlated to; perhaps it's how
long netscape would take to progressively render the image. This is just
an annoyance, but a big one (and there are reasons some people prefer
to run netscape on unix rather than native on NT).
If anyone has any ideas about solutions to either of these problems,
before I have to go looking for an alternative X server for NT, I'd be
very interested!
Received on Fri Feb 27 1998 - 17:14:50 NZDT