Mac As Xterm

From: josh@cqs.washington.edu (Josh Hayes) Subject: Mac as Xterm: summary of responses (LONG) Date: 17 Mar 93 17:05:57 GMT A little while ago I asked for information about setting up my mac at home as an Xterminal; here is the summary I mailed out to those who mailed me asking for a summary.... Sorry I have not summarized earlier. I did not get much information >From the net - in fact, I got about ten posts asking me to keep the author posted on what I found, for every post I got from someone who already knew something! But the trickle of info has dried up completely, so I'll send you what I have, which isn't much. What follows are extracts from the mail people sent me; I'll try to provide a quick summary at the bottom of this mail, so skip to that if you just want the punchline. ---------begin included text----------- From: Samuel Herschbein <SAM@CHEVAX.CHEME.WASHINGTON.EDU> Subject: MacX over serial MacX (any X-windowing system) is a pig and will be as slow as molasses over a serial line. Running it on a LocalTalk net is supposed to be painfully slow. We run it on Ethernet only. If you want, you can come over to my office and try it over Localtalk to see if its too painfully slow. [I have not yet visited Sam, and I feel like a real ingrate, too. -JAH] ----- From: Michael Cummings <cummings@u.washington.edu> >In short, what do I need to make my mac into an X terminal? MacX runs under the MacOS, so you don't need to be running AU/X to emulate an X terminal. ----- From: Chuck Delaney <cdelaney@u.washington.edu> I can only speak from limited experience, but I'll tell you what I know. I have run MacX on a IIx and on a IIfx. The IIfx's response was much better; the IIx was slow but bearable. Both of these were Ethernet'd, communicating with the X client over a backbone. Software wise, MacX requires MacTCP, which should be included. A/UX is not required to run MacX. I don't know much about networking protocols, but assuming you can run TCP/IP over your 14.4K line, you should be in business. I've heard that this is possible, but I don't know how easy it is to set up MacTCP to talk through something other than the Ethernet port. ----- From: David Fetrow <fetrow@biostat.washington.edu> There may be better protocols than SLIP for that, but OK. For example: NCD has a proprietary scheme that is optimized for X and their PC X server has a local screen manager which MUCHO cuts down on the number of packets flying back and forth. If you can get mapping of Xfonts into the fonts available on your Mac: that's extremely helpful. It's probably standard with the serial version of MacX. Suns have mediocre serial lines by the way, they usually top out around 19,200. ----- From: Samuel Herschbein <SAM@CHEVAX.CHEME.WASHINGTON.EDU> When I first set up MacX, I monitored our network for traffic statistics. It took about 100K of packets to log in and open the main window in our MacX process simulation package. The amount of data going over t…