Re: MGR, plus related fun

[Matthew Stapleton <staple12@MARSHALL.EDU> writes:]

>I recently installed VSTa on a fat-16 hdd and I also unpacked the mgr.tz,
>which I understand to be the GUI for VSTa. When I tried running the program
>/mgr/bin/mgr the screen froze with various strips of colors running down the
>screen. Of course, I had to reset and then I tried compiling, and it
>complained about some errors and did not complete. How do I configure VSTa
>to run MGR? Do I need to set the mouse up before trying MGR? What am I
>doing wrong?

You definitely need to have a mouse running before you start MGR. If you
want to recompile, start only with the part in /vsta/mgr/src/mgr; some of
the other parts of the source tree don't compile cleanly. And I'd say MGR
is more *a* GUI rather than *the* GUI. But it works.

Related news:

With two patches to bochs (an x86 emulator: http://www.bochs.com) I can now
boot VSTa multi-user, run a mouse server, and start MGR. It's a real kick
to have a full, normal VSTa environment virtualized under a FreeBSD X
window! I've submitted the patches back to bochs.com, but haven't heard
back on whether/when they'll release them. One of the fixes is definitely
generic, having to do with insb/insw instruction emulation versus page
faults.

For now, interested parties can pick up a working copy of Bochs in:

    http://www.vsta.org/Software/bochs/bochs.tar.gz

I've put the bootable hard disk image (300 megs, sorry) in:

    http://www.vsta.org/Software/bochs/322M.gz

(The entire VSTa source tree is also within this virtual disk.)

A bootable floppy disk image is in:

    http://www.vsta.org/Software/bochs/vsta.flp.gz

And my startup invocation shell script in:

    http://www.vsta.org/Software/bochs/vsta.sh

You can probably omit the floppy disk, since the hard disk is bootable.
Once you're running I've seen some oddities with the keyboard after entering
kernel debugger, and also the clock ticks *way* too fast--probably a problem
with the clock divisor emulation. But still, this is a really great way to
work with VSTa without having to boot down to cold iron (silicon).

Regards,
Andy Valencia
Received on Mon Oct 4 07:46:23 1999