Howdy from an X learner
 

Hi all,

I'm back slacking after a three decade hiatus. I used slackware back around 1.0 release - seems to me like it was 11 disk images or something like that including X. I downloaded it via a VMS gateway at the school where my wife was going to school and used rawrite to write the images to floppy (call it 92/93). Anyway I used it for a bit back then and liked it but understood nothing about how it worked. Fast forward to the present and hitting the highlights, I did Windows for a while, with an occasional foray into Redhat, then Debian, then in 2005, Mac OS X, then FreeBSD, and more of various distros, pretty much preferring the Debian/FreeBSD worlds. When Slackware 15 was announced, I burned an ISO, got it running on my Thinkpad T430 for a week or two, then needed the machine back for some serious work.

Over the Christmas and New Year holiday, I began seriously studying X Windows (read about it over on my blog - https://decuser.github.io/operating-...ev-on-mac.html. As I did so, I became interested in a more understandable and "pure" system, where I knew what was there and why and could control what was going on. I heart debian, mint, mx, and co., but they install a lot of stuff that isn't strictly necessary and they cater to folks installing modern systems while relegating basic systems to the 'yeah, you can install it, but good luck getting it configured' heap. FreeBSD was the purest unix-like of the bunch, but I really wanted a Linux environment to do my explorations on.

I looked around at dozens of distros, looking for the perfect one - one that would support a TWM setup with XDM serving queries, with limited cruft, and so on. Wow! It was harder than it sounds to narrow things down - the biggest thing I found was a huge set of systemd distros... not really my cup of tea for this dive. Long story, a tiny bit shorter, I rediscovered Slackware and think that it will be perfect for my next few years of exploration around X Windows programming and learning more about system administration.

It looks like y'all are a friendly bunch... I'm sure hoping so, cuz I will probably fire off many seemingly random questions that run the gamut from 'any beginner oughta know that' to 'that's pretty esoteric' and parts between as I try to figure out stuff that may be long forgotten by most folks.

So howdy. I am happy to say that my T430 is running Slackware 15.0 64bit w/linux 5.15.80. TWM and XDM are running great and I' m getting ready to do some remote client tests and program up a few xlib clients in the new environment. I appreciate y'all for being nice to newbs and look forward to learning more about Slackware, X, and system administration in the coming months.

Will

Back in the days connecting to X from remote meant things like setting the DISPLAY environment variable and using xhost to tell which remote clients were allowed to connect to display :0.

Nowadays however, by default Xorg does no longer allow this kind of network connection. Instead users are supposed to use ssh to tunnel X. From the man page of Xorg:

regards Henrik

Look into the nested Xservers, like XNest or Xephyr for testing. Then you can have multiple displays on one system. Are you really a DEC$USER?

Yes, I began my long and storied tech life on a DEC Rainbow 100B running Dos 3.10b and CPM whoknowswhat. I got slackware downloaded using the Rainbow and it's 300 baud modem. These days, I do a lot of excursions with PDP-11 via opensimh - research unix and dec oses like RT-11, RSTS/e, etc. :).

Interesting blog post especially how you substituted twm for XQuartz in MacOS. Your mention of xterm led to me looking at mrxvt from slackbuilds a multi tab rxvt only thing is it doesn't support utf-8. There is a fork mrxvt-utf8 on github which does support utf-8, tried to build it but failed with errors. Hasn't been updated for 7 years might be getting behind the times by now.

btw there appears to be a typo in section 5 on your blog. The heading "Build xeyes from source" is repeated twice. The second heading should read "Build basicwin from source"

Thanks, now I'm not even using TWM in XQuartz, I'm just starting from Terminal, where astra is my slackware 15 host. It's glorious.

I fixed the typo and appreciate your pointing it out.

For the old-school "Party like it's 1996" X11 feel I use CRUX these days. Slackware has had to adopt many of the freedesktop.org complications (such as elogind) in order to keep KDE happy, and while that's a valid choice, it's not really what I am looking for.

Mind you, CRUX isn't perfect either and has its own quirks, but as a jumping-off point it is closer to my end-goal than modern Slackware now is.


Anyway, "salute" from another X11/Xlib amateur programming archaeologist! ;)

Hello and welcome decuser.

I followed the link to your blog https://decuser.github.io/pdp-11/rt-...mh-pdp-11.html . I have spent a very happy afternoon installing simH and then following your excellent guide to setting up RT-11 v5.3 in a SimH PDP-11.

I have to say that the tutorial was of outstanding quality. I have RT-11 up and running on a simulated PDP-11 and have completed the tutorial as far as switching to RT-11XM. Thank you again. I'm looking forward to investigating this - no goal at the moment, other than having fun and just experience using it.

Thanks for the kind words. Getting stuff running in simh is tons of fun, but not for the faint of heart. It took me a long while to get comfortable with the environment. Lots of calls to my dad asking - what's a disk pack, and seriously, the disks were as big as washing machines? - you gotta be kidding me, in simh, they're tiny (just a word of text - RP02, RK05, etc.) :). I started my tech life in the '80's most of that stuff's from the 60's and 70's.

I probably need to update some of them (the RT-11 ones for sure) for OpenSIMH.

Look for advent - it's Colossal Cave... in Fortran IV, and it's fun to get up and running. I've got notes around here somewhere...

Thanks. I tried CRUX and while I'm pretty much able to figure out Slackware, even if I'm a little (lot) rusty, CRUX was just a little bit too DIY for where I'm at now... maybe after I get my Slackware legs back, I'll try it again. I like the philosophy and minimalism.

The tutorial is very clear and packed full of interesting tech detail. simh is fun, and looks like very high quality code to my (very) inexpert eye (clearly commented etc - I could get orientated and installed it without any headaches) . Without your tutorial I would have struggled to get RT-11 running though.



I will look for that and have a go at getting it running. I enjoy Colossal Cave. "Welcome to Adventure!! Would you like instructions?" :) I've spent hours in that cave!

Hello decuser , Mind you the name you chose leads me in two directions ...

One as @jayjwa mentions DEC$USER

The other as Decus'er ...

Which leads to , also hope you may have in the past been a member of Decus (D.e.c. Users Society) ?
There is still a rich archive at eisner.encompasserve.org , in 'Notes' .
Running under OpenVMS 8.4 running on AlphaServer DS20 500 MHz .

But with HPE's decission to no longer continue the Hobbiest VAX license(s) . THat is a dead beast at best .
Some *BSD's will run on the Vax hardware & maybe someday also Linux .

Thank You for the RT11 install document , Tho Fyi opensimh will create a RL01 or RL02 disk from the sim> prompt .

JimL

I used to use it; it's been broken a long time now. Just use urxvt.

Hmmm...

Late to the party, I'm another old DEC system manager, cut my teeth on a PDP-11/45 running RSTS/E V06A-02, and actually have a GT42 (PDP-11/10 with a vector graphics subsystem).

On the subject of xdm/twm. Over on docs.slackware.com, there is a VNC how-to. Just this week I added a new section. The new section documents how you can securely create virtual X terminals on-demand over your SSH tunnel, and the example given uses xdm/twm. Open article howtos:window_managers:vnc and look for the last section, titled "Starting 'Xvnc' on-demand".