(working title)

University of Limerick Computer Society Newsletter Nov'94 - #2


Contents this issue

Miscellaneous
Editorial
.net Magazine from Future Publishing
Endzone

UNIX
Wine - Windoze Emulator for Linux
GNUStep?
TCL
Linux HOWTOs in Hypertext
Linux Publications

MS-DOS/MS-Windows
Jazz JackRabbit from Epic MegaGames
X-Servers licenced for UL

AmigaDOS
UNIX on an Amiga

Editorial

Welcome to the second issue of the Computer Society Newsletter. I have
decided to name it "SIGNAL TO NOISE", and did a quick logo with Xpaint, but
if anyone has a better idea, or indeed a better logo, please contact me !

I'm a bit more organised this time than last. Again, suggestions are really
really needed!

BTW, I would like to welcome David Airlie to the Sysadm team on Skynet, having being promoted from Ftpadmin :-).

Ivan.


Jazz JackRabbit from Epic MegaGames

"Remember the story of the Tortoise and the Hare? It's 3000 years later and they're back.
"Now it's a fight for the galaxy and the love of a beautiful princess.
"Jazz Jackrabbit brings all the speed and action of your favourite console games to your PC. "

While netsurfing recently, I came across a shareware demo of this particular game in ftp.uml.edu:/msdos/Games/Epic. The best way i can think of to describe it is something along the lines of Sonic the He dgehog meets Super Mario Kart. Its unreal. The animation is brilliant, the character fantastic and some of the little bits and bonus levels will have you in tears from laughter.

Its a platform-y type game - nothing original in that score, but well addictive, most impressive and definitely worth checking out.

All six episodes can be purchased for the very reasonable price of £29. Isn't he just the coolest character in the world ?


.net Magazine from Future Publishing

Long time computer freaks will remember the days of the Amstrad CPC 464, when a small company called Future Publishing started the only rival to the official Amstrad Computer User magazine (named, suprisingly, ACU). This magazine was called Amstrad Ac tion.

Since then, Future Publishing it seems have gone from strength to strength, with Amiga Format, MacFormat, and now a magazine dedicated to the Internet itself, aptly titled ".net".

The magazine is pretty impressive, with lovely colour reproduction, a nice card cover (unusual for a computer magazine) but weighs in at a pricey £4 almost. The articles in it are informative and captivating, although written perhaps for the more novic e Internet user. Having said that, I spent the better part of a week after buying this magazine netsurfing to all the places it mentioned. Quite ridiculous for the health, I assure you.

As to whether I'll continue buying the magazine, well I guess that depends on the quality of the next and subsequent issues. It has gotten off to a good start but it will be interesting to see if it runs out of steam.

Ah dear, why is it that "WIRED" costs nearly £5 here? *sigh*.


Wine - Windoze Emulator for Linux

The Wine project is a free software attempt at Wabi for Linux/FreeBSD etc. Basically when finished it will allow the execution of MS-Windoze 3.1 binaries in a Linux/X environment.

Development on this has been going on for some time now - with varying degrees of success. The current status seems to be that 90% of the API functions have been ported. While this is good news, it is also estimated that the remaining 10% could take up to 90% of the time :-)

New versions of Wine are released almost every week. Above is a montage (generated using ImageMagick) which shows some of the MS-Windoze shareware games from ftp.cica.?.edu which run under Wine.

Applications should, it is estimated, run as fast as they currently do under MS-Windoze. However, perhaps the nicest advantage of running them under Linux (apart from the fact that it is a far superior O/S - completely non-biased view) is that each tas k will have its own memory protection; no more of those horrible EMM exception errors. Also, being X-clients, you could run them on a Linux box and get them to display on any other X-server on your network.

Wine compiles with Xlib, no other special libraries are required.
For more information, see the Wine HTML page.


GNUStep?

Perhaps a criticism of stock distributions of Linux such as Slackware or SLS would be that the default settings for the X Window are all but awe-inspiring.

The Feeble Virtual Window Manager (FVWM) which comes with Slackware can be amazingly customized into a fabulous Motif-like system with a button-bar and lovely coloured .xpm pixmaps.

The importance of an attractive GUI cannot be under-emphasized. Performance and optimization of a system becomes less desirable if the GUI is ugly.

Part of the steps being taken to "beautify" X include the COSE Desktop based on OSF/Motif, which, although looking very attractive indeed, unfortunately is not free software and needs to be licensed. Another initiative is the GNUStep project being undertaken by volunteers for the FSF.

GNUStep is a clone of the OpenStep API published by NeXT. OpenStep is an operating system independent, object-orientated application layer. It will run under X and is as portable as the GNU Objective-C compiler, with which it is written. Currently, it supports a variety of operating systems such as SunOS 4.1, Solaris 2.3, Ultirx 4.2, HP/UX 9.x, OSF/1, FreeBSD and Linux.

Work is currently being done on the creating a DPS engine, and a free widget set with strong NeXTSTEP resemblence.

For more information, see the GNUStep home page.


TCL/Tk

Tcl, pronounced "tickle" is a script like language which has an X front end in its "tk" toolkit. Tcl is much the same as Awk or Basic in that it is interpreted. It is a programable language which allows you to build on existing functions and create new fu nctions. Tcl has a parser which is similar to other shells like "sh" and allows you to execute any tcl command and most unix commands. You'll find the it in "/usr/bin/tclsh".

The "tk" toolkit is a X11 compatible toolkit which allows you to program the X Windows System using its C/C++ libraries or through its front end "wish". Wish allows the building of X interfaces from tcl commands making it very simple to program the usu ally unweildy X and come up with applications in a short time. This simple stop watch took only 30 lines of code.

A even easier method of creating X front ends is to use the X interface builder "xf" which creates tcl code as you build. You can create amazing X-aplications in a matter of minutes. Check it out! Youll find it in "/usr/local/bin/xf". It looks somethin g like:

Tcl has been used for many application and by many large companies.

will@skynet.ul.ie


Linux HOWTOs in Hypertext!

I downloaded the Linux HOWTOs in HTML form from SunSITE, and with a bit of editing, they are now working beautifully. They are installed in the Skynet web hierarchy. There is a link to them present in the Skynet home-page.

NIX on an Amiga.

Foo

X-Servers licenced for UL.

A recent posting to SUMS by Martin Leonard (ITD) has announced the imminent availability of an X-Server for MS-Windows over the college network.

The University's Information Technology Department has site-licenced an X-Server for general use, and I believe it is the intention that this be available on all PCs.

Being a Windows executable, it will probably run ontop of the popular Winsock protocol developed to allow TCP/IP communication for many Windows applications. This is similar to an existing X-Server for Windows which has been doing the rounds of the var ious computer labs in the unlicenced demo form.

This is a very significant step in the development of distributed computing resources in the college. Along with the initial introduction of Linux into the college (- it is through the efforts of students that the ITD and ECE Departments have become aw are of this operating system), this could revolutionize the UNIX presence in U.L.

As regards the impact to Skynet of this, obviously there would be a much greater demand for X-clients through this. Already, Skynet has been shown to exhaust its 48Mb total of Virtual Memory supporting multiple window managers etc. While this may be a fault of the newer BETA kernels, it is more than likely that the introduction of this X-Server will cause a rethink of the access permitted to X-clients on Skynet. It may be necessary to restrict access to such clients to maintain a fair service to all us ers.

More details will follow I'm sure in future issues.


Linux Publications

While reading through the advert sections in a few issues of UNIX Review, I came across the following publications available for Linux. I have presented them here for information purposes.

The Linux Journal :
monthly magazine of and for the Linux Community.
$19/year U.S.
$29/foreign

SCC, P.O. Box 55549, Seattle, WA 98155.

Email sales@ssc.com for a catalog of publications for Linux, UNIX, C, Internet etc.

Linux Network Administration Guide:
Covers TCP/IP, NFS, Serial Hardware, UUCP, sendmail, Netnews, NNTP, e-mail.
400 pages, $29.95
ISBN 1-56592-087-2

O'Reilly and Associates Inc., 103A Morris Street, Sebastopol, CA 95472.

Linux - Unleashing the Workstation in Your PC:
S. Stobel and T. Uhl,
"Turn your 386/486 into a UNIX Workstation with performance characteristics comparable to a RISC workstation with this definitive, step-by-step, new users' guide to installing, understanding and using Linux"
1994, 238 pages, $29.95
ISBN 3-540-58077-8

Spring-Verlag New York Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, Dept. 5967,New York, NY 10010

Skynet People:

System Administrators: John Quinn (quinnj), Hary J. Walsh (hjw), Ivan Griffin
(ivan), Ger MacGuire (ger) , David Airlie (airlied)

FTP Administrators: David Airlie, Andrew Good (akira)

W3 Administrators: David Knowles (chopper), Keith Ahern (keith), Andrew Good

Newsletter Editor and Designer: Ivan Griffin


This document was created using the HTML interface of 'ez' from AUIS, the HTML mode of LUCID Emacs, John Bradley's 'xv' and the 'ImageMagick' suite.

Debugged and PostScripted using "NCSA Mosaic".