Chip 1996 November/Chip 11-96.iso/workshop/howto/mgr

Text File | 1996-05-25 | 21.4 KB | 470 lines

             The MGR Window System HOWTO
              Draft 17 Feb 1994
            Copyright Vincent Broman 1994
          Permission granted to make and distribute
         verbatim (unaltered) copies for any purpose.

.0 This HOWTO

    .01 Table of Contents

    This HOWTO            .0
    What is the MGR window system?    .1
    Installing MGR            .2
    Running MGR            .3
    Programming for MGR        .4
    More Documentation        .5
    Credit for MGR            .6

    .02 Archiving

    This HOWTO is temporarily archived for anonymous FTP on
    bugs.nosc.mil in pub/Mgr/MGR-HOWTO, and more permanently
    on sunsite.unc.edu in pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO .

    .03 Credit for the HOWTO

    While Vincent Broman first put together this HOWTO,
    much of the information and text was obtained from FAQs,
    READMEs, etc. written by Stephen Uhler, Michael Haardt,
    and other public-spirited net-persons.
    Email corrections and suggested changes to [e-mail] .

    Uhler was the main architect of MGR -- see the Credit section below.

.1 What is the MGR window system?

    .11 Function

    MGR (ManaGeR) is a graphical window system.  The MGR server
    provides a builtin window manager and windowed graphics terminal
    emulation on color and monochrome bitmap displays.  MGR is
    controlled by mousing pop-up menus, by keyboard interaction, and by
    escape sequences written on pseudo-terminals by client software.

    MGR provides each client window with: termcap-style terminal
    control functions, graphics primitives such as line and circle
    drawing; facilities for manipulating bitmaps, fonts, icons, and
    pop-up menus; commands to reshape and position windows; and a
    message passing facility enabling client programs to rendezvous
    and exchange messages.  Client programs may ask to be informed
    when a change in the window system occurs, such as a reshaped
    window, a pushed mouse button, or a message sent from another
    client program.  These changes are called events.  MGR notifies a
    client program of an event by sending it an ASCII character string
    in a format specified by the client program.  Existing
    applications can be integrated into the windowing environment
    without modification by having MGR imitate keystrokes in response
    to user defined menu selections or other events.

    .12 Requirements

    MGR currently runs on Linux, Sun 3/4 workstations with SunOS, and
    Coherent.  Various older versions of MGR run on the Macintosh,
    Atari ST MiNT, Xenix, 386-Minix, DEC 3100, and the 3b1 Unix-pc.
    The programming interface is implemented in C and in ELisp,
    although supporting clients written in other languages is quite
    easy.

    Running MGR requires much less in resources than X, or even gcc.
    It does not have the user-base, software repertory, or high-level
    libraries of X or MS-Windows, say, but it is quite elegant
    and approachable.

    It has been said that MGR is to X as Unix was to Multics.

    .13 How do MGR, X11 and 8.5 compare?

        MGR consists of a server with builtin window manager and terminal
    emulator, and clients which run in this terminal emulator and use it
    to communicate with the server.  No resource multiplexing is done.

    X11 consists of a server and clients, which usually connect to the
    server using a socket.  All user visible things like terminal
    emulators, window managers etc are done using clients.  No resource
    multiplexing is done.

    8.5, the Plan 9 window system, is a resource multiplexer, as each
    process running in a window can access /dev/bitblt, /dev/mouse and
    /dev/kbd in its own namespace.  These are multiplexed to the
    /dev/bitblit, /dev/mouse and /dev/kbd in the namespace of 8.5.
    This approach allows one to run 8.5 in an 8.5 window,
    a very clean design.  8.5 further has an integrated window manager
    and terminal emulator.

.2 Installing MGR

    The latest version can be FTPed from bugs.nosc.mil:pub/Mgr/62 .
    You can get older MGR sources from ftp.thp.uni-koeln.de[134.95.64.1]
    in pub/linux/mgr, or on [134.95.80.1] in pub/thp/linux/mgr, if you
    can't reach the first site.  Even older versions of this distribution
    from Haardt can be found on tsx-11.mit.edu and elsewhere.  Pre-Linux
    versions of MGR from Uhler and others (prior to Haardt) can be
    found at bellcore.com:pub/mgr, although no one seems to maintain
    things there.  MGR has been through a lot of versions and releases,
    but the current *Linux* version number is 0.62.  This version number
    ought to arrive at 1.0 when 256-color VGA code for Linux appears.

    Required tools to build this distribution of MGR are m4 (GNU, or
    perhaps another supporting the -D option), make (GNU, or perhaps
    another supporting include) and *roff for the docs.  Also sh,
    awk, and POSIX install.  Binary distributions have not been assembled
    yet, so you need an ANSI C compiler environment, e.g. gcc + gas.

    A Linux installation requires Linux 0.99.10 or better, an HGC,
    EGA, VGA, or SVGA graphics card, and a mouse.  Mouses supported
    are: serial Microsoft mouse, serial MouseSystems 3 and 5 byte
    mouse, serial MMSeries mouse, serial Logitech mouse, PS/2 mouse,
    or a bus mouse.  The VGA 640x480 monochrome graphics mode is
    supported out of the box, as is 640x350 and 640x200.  To run
    800x600, or other modes that your BIOS can initialize and which
    do not require bank-switching, you need to run a small program
    (supplied as src/vgamisc/regs.exe) under DOS to read the VGA registers
    while that mode is set and write a header file which you place in the
    directory src/libbitblit/linux.  Some VGA cards can use 128k
    windows, and these can run higher resolutions.  The Linux code
    does not yet support more than two colors.

    Suns with SunOS 4.1.2 and bwtwo, cgthree, or cgsix frame buffers
    are supported.  Coherent installations should refer to the
    README.Coh file in the source distribution.  Porting the
    latest-and-greatest MGR to another POSIX-like system which
    provides select() and pty's and direct access to a bitmapped
    frame-buffer ought to be straightforward, just implementing the
    libbitblit library based on the sunmono or colorport code, say.

    If you want to install everything, you need 4.8 MB disk space for
    binaries, fonts, manual pages etc.  The sources are about 2 MB,
    plus object files during compilation.

    Normally, /usr/mgr should be either the directory or a link to the
    directory where you install MGR stuff for runtime use.  Typing
    "chdir /usr/mgr; gunzip < whereveryouputit/mgrusr.tgz | tar xvf -"
    and optionally
    "chdir /usr/mgr; gunzip < wherever/morefonts.tgz | tar xvf -"
    will unpack these.  The source can be put anywhere, e.g. typing
    "chdir /usr/src/local/mgr; gunzip < wherever/mgrsrc.tgz | tar xvf -"
    to unpack the sources from bugs.nosc.mil.

    The source tree can be compiled from one top-level Makefile which
    invokes lower-level Makefiles, all of which "include" a "Configfile"
    at the top level.  The Configfile is created by an interactive sh
    script named Configure, which runs m4 on a Configfile.m4,
    so you do something like this:

    chdir /usr/src/local/mgr
    sh ./Configure
    make first
    make depend
    make install
    make clean

    It might be wise, before running make, to eyeball the Configfile
    generated by the Configure script, checking that it looks reasonable.
    (At least one m4 poops out, creating a very short Configfile.
    If this happens, try editing a copy of Configfile.sun or Configfile.lx)
    Several flags in MGRFLAGS can be added/omitted to change some
    optional features in the server, viz:
    -DWHO:        muck utmp file so "who" works
    -DVI        code for clicking the mouse in vi moving the cursor
    -DDEBUG        enable debugging output selectable with -d options.
    -DFASTMOUSE    XOR the mouse track
    -DBUCKEY    for hot-key server commands without mousing
    -DPRIORITY    for priority window scheduling instead of
            round-robin; the active window gets higher priority
    -DCUT        for cut/paste between windows and a global snarf buffer
    -DALIGN        forces window alignment for fast scrolling (monochr)
    -DKILL        kills windows upon tty i/o errors
    -DSHRINK    use only some of the screen ($MGRSIZE in environment)
    -DNOSTACK    don't permit event stacking
    -DBELL        really ring the bell
    -DKBD        read mgr input from the sun kbd, instead of stdin.
            This permits redirection of console msgs to a window.
    -DFRACCHAR    fractional character movement for proportional fonts
    -DXMENU        extended menu stuff (experimental)
    -DMOVIE        movie making extension which logs all operations to a
            file for later replay -- not quite working under Linux
        -DEMUMIDMSBUT    Emulate a missing middle mouse button by chording

    Not all combinations of these options work on all systems.

    If a make complains about the lack of a default_font.h or an
    icon_server.h in the directory src/mgr, then just do a
    "make default_font.h icon_server.h" in that directory.
    C code for the static variables containing icons and fonts
    is generated by a translator from icon and font files.

    Not all the clients are compiled and installed by the Makefiles.
    Clients found under src/clients having capitalized names or
    not compiled by the supplied Makefiles may have problems compiling
    and/or running, but they may be interesting to hack on.
    Several screen drivers found under the libbitblit directory are
    of mainly archeological interest. Grave robbing can be profitable.

    At some point check that your /etc/termcap and/or terminfo file
    contain entries for MGR terminals such as found in the misc
    directory.  If all your software checks $TERMCAP in the environment,
    this is not needed, as long as you run set_termcap in each window.

    MGR works better if run setuid root, because it wants to chown
    ptys and write in the utmp file.  This helps the ify iconifier
    client work better and the event passing mechanism be more secure.
    On Linux, root permissions are required in order to do in/out on the
    screen device.  Otherwise, you decide whether to trust it.

    In versions around 0.62 there are troubles on the Sun with using
    the csh as the default shell.  Programs seem to run in a different
    process group than the foreground process group of the window's pty.
    There is no trouble with bash, sh, or rc.  Ideas why?

.3 Running MGR

    The only file =required= in an MGR installation is the server
    itself.  That would give you terminal emulator windows with shells
    running in them, but no nice clocks, extra fonts, fancy graphics,
    etc.  Depending on options, the server needs about 200K of RAM
    plus dynamic space for windows, bitmaps, etc.

    If /usr/mgr/bin is in your PATH, then just type "mgr" to start up.
    When the hatched background and mouse pointer appear, hold down
    the left mouse button, highlight the "new window" menu item, and
    release the button.  Then drag the mouse from corner to corner
    where you want a window to appear.  The window will have your
    default shell running in it.  Hold down the left mouse button over
    an existing window to see another menu for doing things to that
    window.  The menu you saw that pops-up over the empty background
    includes the quit command.  For people with a two button mouse:
    press both buttons together to emulate the missing middle button.

    ** When trying to run MGR, if you get:

    - can't find the screen
      make sure you have a /dev entry for your display device, e.g. on
      a Sun /dev/bwtwo0.  If not, as root cd to /dev, and type
      "MAKEDEV bwtwo0".  Otherwise, you might need the -S/dev/bwtwo0
      or (on Linux) the -S640x480 command line option when starting mgr.

    - Can't find the mouse
      make sure /dev/mouse exists, usually as a symbolic link to the
      real device name for your mouse.  If you haven't permission to
      write in /dev, then something like a -m/dev/cua0 option can be
      given when starting mgr.  Also, make sure you've supplied the
      right mouse protocol choice when you configured mgr.  The mouse
      may speak Microsoft, even if that is not the brand name.

    - can't get a pty
      make sure all of /dev/[tp]ty[pq]? are owned by root, mode 666
      and all programs referenced with the "shell" option in your
      .mgrc startup file (if any) exist and are executable.

    - none but the default font, make sure MGR is looking in the right
      place for its fonts.  Check the Configfile in the source or
      see whether a -f/usr/mgr/font option to mgr fixes the problem.

    - completely hung (not even the mouse track moves)
      login to your machine from another terminal (or rlogin) and kill the
      mgr process.  A buckey-Q key will quit MGR if the keyboard still works.
      Sometimes you can switch to another virtual terminal with an alt-F key
      and kill mgr from there.

    .31 Applications not aware of MGR

    Any tty-oriented application can be run in an MGR window
    without further ado.  Screen-oriented applications using
    termcap or curses can get the correct number of lines and
    columns by your using shape(1) to reshape the window or using
    set_termcap(1) or set_emacs(1) to obtain the correct termcap.

    .32 MGR Applications (clients) distributed with the server

    bounce, grav, grid, hilbert, mgreyes, stringart, walk - graphics demos
    browse - an icon browser
    bury - bury this window
    clock - digital display of time of day
    clock2 - analog display of time of day
    close - close this window, iconify
    cmenu - vi menus from C compiler errors
    color - set the foreground and background color for text in this window
    cursor - change appearance of the character cursor
    cut - cut text from this window into the cut buffer
    cycle - display a sequence of icons
    dmgr - crude ditroff previewer
    fade - fade a home movie script from one scene to another
    font - change to a new font in this window
    hpmgr - hp 2621 terminal emulator
    ico - animate an icosahedron or other polyhedron
    iconmail - notification of mail arrival
    iconmsgs - message arrival notification
    ify - iconify and deiconify windows
    loadfont - load a font from the file system
    maze -  a maze game
    mclock - micky mouse clock
    menu - create or select a pop-up menu
    mgr - bellcore window manager and server
    mgrbd - boulder-dash game
    mgrbiff - watch mailbox for mail and notify
    mgrload - graph of system load average
    mgrlock - lock the console
    mgrlogin - graphical login controller
    mgrmag - magnify a part of the screen, optionally dump to file
    mgrmail - notification of mail arrival
    mgrmode - set or clear window modes
    mgrmsgs - message arrival notification
    mgrplot - Unix "plot" graphics filter
    mgrsclock - sandclock
    mgrshowfont - browse through mgr fonts
    mgrsketch - a sketching/drawing program
    mgrview - view mgr bitmap images
    mless - start up less/more in separate window, menu added for less
    mvi - start up vi in a separate window, mouse pointing
    oclose - (old) close a window
    omgrmail - (old) notification of mail arrival
    pbmrawtomgr - convert pbm raw bitmap to mgr bitmap format
    pbmstream - split out a stream of bitmaps
    pbmtoprt - printer output from PBM
    pilot - a bitmap browser
    resetwin - cleanup window state after client crashes messily
    rotate - rotate a bitmap 90 degrees.
    screendump - write graphics screen dump to a bitmap file
    set_console - redirect console messages to this window
    set_termcap, set_emacs - output an appropriate TERMCAP value
    setname - name a window, for messages and iconifying
    shape - reshape this window
    square - square this window
    squeeze - compress mgr bitmap using run-length encoding
    startup - produce a skeleton startup file for current window layout
    texmgr - tex dvi file previewer
    text2font, font2text - convert between mgr font format and text dump
    unsqueeze - uncompress mgr bitmap using run length encoding
    window_print - print an image of a window
    zoom - an icon editor

    .33 MGR-aware clients distributed separately, see "SUPPORT" file

    chess - frontend to /usr/games/chess
    gnu emacs - editor with lisp/term/mgr.el mouse & menu support
    gnuplot - universal scientific data plotting
    metafont - font design and creation
    origami - folding editor
    pbmplus - portable bitmap format conversions, manipulations
    pgs - ghostscript patch and front end
    plplot - slick scientific data plotting
    ? - a groff PBM driver using Hershey fonts

.4 Programming for MGR

    The MGR programmers manual, the C language applications interface,
    is found in the doc directory in troff/nroff form.  It covers
    general concepts, the function/macro calls controlling the server,
    a sample application, with an index and glossary.

    Porting client code used with older versions of MGR sometimes
    requires the substitution of
    #include <mgr/mgr.h>
    for
    #include <term.h>
    and substituting or redefining BIT_XOR, BIT_AND, et al
    for B_XOR, B_AND, et al in the bitblt operations.

    Compiling client code generally requires compiler options like
    -I/usr/mgr/include   -L/usr/mgr/lib -lmgr
    as well as an occasional -DOLDMGR or -DOLDLIBMGR for some dusty decks.

    One can get some interactive feel for the MGR server functions by
    reading and experimenting with the mgr.el terminal driver for GNU
    Emacs which implements the MGR interface library in ELisp.

    The usual method of inquiring state from the server has the
    potential of stumbling on a race condition if the client also
    expects a large volume of event notifications.  The problem arises
    if an (asynchronous) event notification arrives when a
    (synchronous) inquiry response was expected.  If this arises in
    practice (unusual) then the MGR state inquiry functions would have
    to be integrated with your event handling loop.

    The only major drawing function missing from the MGR protocol, it
    seems, is an area fill for areas other than upright rectangles.
    At present, the color palette itself is manipulated by
    programs external to MGR, but version 0.62 has experimental code
    for clients to get MGR to manipulate the color palette.

    If you are thinking of hacking on the server, you can find the mouse
    driver in mouse.* and mouse_get.*, the grotty parts of the keyboard
    interface in kbd.c, and the interface to the display in the
    src/libbitblit/linux directory.  The main procedure, much
    initialization, and the top level input loop are in mgr.c, and the
    interpretation of escape sequences is in put_window.c .

.5 More documentation

    The programmer's manual is essential for concepts.

    Nearly all the clients supplied come with a man page which is installed
    into /usr/mgr/man/man1 or man6.
    Other useful man pages are bitblit.3, font.5, and bitmap.5 .
    There is some ambiguity in the docs in distinguishing the
    internal bitmap format found in your frame-buffer and the external
    bitmap format found in files, e.g. icons.

    The mgr.1 man page covers command line options, commands in the
    ~/.mgrc startup file, mouse and menu interaction with the server,
    and hot-key shortcuts available on systems with such hot-keys.

    Many of the fonts in /usr/mgr/font/* are described to some
    extent in /usr/mgr/font/*.txt, e.g. /usr/mgr/font/FONTDIR.txt
    gives X-style font descriptions for the fonts obtained
    in .bdf format.  Font names end in WxH, where W and H are the
    decimal width and height in pixels of each character box.

.6 Credit for MGR

    Stephen Uhler, with others working at Bellcore, was the original
    designer and implementer of MGR, so Bellcore has copyrighted much
    of the code and documentation for MGR under the following conditions.

    * Permission is granted to copy or use this program, EXCEPT that it
    * may not be sold for profit, the copyright notice must be reproduced
    * on copies, and credit should be given to Bellcore where it is due.

    One required showing of the copyright notice is the startup title screen.

    Other credits to:

    Stephen Hawley for his wonderful icons.
    Tommy Frandsen for the VGA linux library.
    Tom Heller for his Gasblit library.
    Andrew Haylett for the Mouse driver code.
    Dan McCrackin for his gasblit->linux patches.
    Dave Gymer, [e-mail], for the Startrek effect fix.
    Alex Liu for first releasing a working Linux version of MGR.
    Lars Aronsson ([e-mail]) for text2font and
    an ISO8859-1 8-bit font.
    Harry Pulley ([e-mail],
    [e-mail]) for the Coherent port.
    Vance Petree & Grant Edwards & Udo Munk for their work on Hercules.
    Udo Munk for his work on serial mouse initialization & select.
    Norman Bartek & Hal Snyder at Mark Williams Co.  for their help
    with some bugs & with Coherent device drivers.
    Extra thanks to Zeyd Ben Halim for lots of helpful patches,
    especially the adaptation of selection.
    Bradley Bosch <[e-mail]> for lots of patches from his 3b1
    port, which fix bugs and implement new and desirable features.
    Andrew Morton <[e-mail]> who first wrote the
    cut-word code.
    Kapil Paranjape <[e-mail]> for the EGA
    support.
    Michael Haardt for MOVIE support fixes, bug fixes, separation of the
    libbitblit code into output drivers, origami folding of the code.
    Yossi Gil for many fonts.
    Vincent Broman for middle mouse-button emulation, linting, Sun cgsix
    support, VGA colormap acess, and integration of the sunport code
    into Haardt's layering scheme.

    All bitmap fonts from any source are strictly public domain in the
    USA.  The 450 fixed-width fonts supplied with MGR were obtained
    from Uhler, the X distribution, Yossi Gil, and elsewhere.
    The Hershey vector fonts and the code for rendering them
    are probably freely redistributable.