Re: some problems i have....

Hi All,

> >'ls | less'
> >just hangs, with (i think) less just waiting for the input..
>
> I think this is because currently there's nothing mounted as /dev/tty, which
> is where less would like to open() and read from when stdin is a file. I
> was hoping MADO would have covered this, but for now it's a pain. As a
> workaround, you can mount your current TTY there as an alias, which might
> satisfy less.

There's also bugs in the 1.3.1 code for less and the pipe server - Andy's
had the fixes for 1.4. If you're interested I can mail them to you (the
problems were in keyboard handling for less and messaging code for pipe).

> >5) the machine i am using now has a faulty esc key, making emacs frustrating
> >as all hell. (try scrolling back when every other esc-v => v...) is it
> >possible to map (alt) to (meta)? i am not sure how this info is dealt with
> >in unix, but it would make a great deal of sense...IMHO
>
> I think we don't want to do this in the keyboard driver, but rather in the
> windowing system. Of course, for now, you can hack it in isr.c!

I must admit that having a generic keyboard remapping facility would be nice
- it's on my list of "good ideas" but I don't have the time at the moment,
and I managed to get my hands on a US 101 key keyboard so that helped!

If it's done as a library then adding it to cons and any windowing system
will be easy.

> >7) is it possible to make /vsta be root, rather than / ? (thus i don's have
> >such a mess in my root...the boot partition is 200meg and has plenty of dos
> >stuff also..)
>
> Well, the root path is coded in a couple places. It used to be /vsta, but
> it just made it a pain to access your VSTa stuff, because it all lives in
> the vsta subdir, so everything was /vsta/vsta/bin/....

Andy, would a variation on what you mentioned a while back work?

Create a subdir called /vsta/vsta on the DOS drive and unpack everything
into that instead of /vsta, and then instead of mounting fs/root as /, mount
fs/root:vsta as / instead.

I just tried:

        mount fs/root:windows /w

and I now magically have my windows directory mounted at /w

This wouldn't remove the need for a "vsta" path, but it would clear the
remaining dos code out of the root directory. It'd be pretty simple to then
mount the whole partition as say /dos.

> >8) what is the status of VstaFS and MADO? is VstaFS reliable?
>

I'm not quite sure how far Gavin's got with MADO, but I brought up some
generic VGA display code yesterday. The code's based on the XFree86 video
drivers to make bringing up SVGA support easier. Hopefully by the end of
the week we'll have a video library, with BitBlt in the next few weeks.

> >9) is there a way for a process to tell a directory from a file...(at
> >presetn you can 'ls file.txt' and get a text dump of the file. not bad
> >unless you want to allow 'ls -l file.txt' to give info on only file.txt...)
>
> Yes, that needs fixing. "ls" just needs to check the "type=" field from the
> FS_STAT. It also needs to sort its output.
>
> Additionally, Dave ported GNU ls. But, of course, it doesn't understand the
> extended protection information.

Ah, there are two versions of GNU ls in the code I ported - one's a pretty
faithful Unix hack-alike (gls), but the other one (vls) handles all of the
VSTa subtleties as well - even does pretty formatting too :-)

> On another note, I have all of KA9Q compiling, and am hacking my way through
> the undefined symbols. My plan for distributed source access is to export a
> filesystem under VSTa, and let folks use RCS. So... the distributed aspects
> of VSTa are imminent.

Now there's a piece of code to make me want to get some PCMCIA modem code
written :-)

                Regards,
                Dave
Received on Tue Aug 23 00:05:28 1994