Re Win32 (was VT switching)

["Suhaib M. Siddiqi" <ssiddiqi at ipass dot net>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-devel@XFree86.Org [mailto:owner-devel@XFree86.Org]On Behalf
> Of Keith Packard
> Sent: Friday, November 19, 1999 12:55 PM
> To: devel@XFree86.Org
> Subject: Re: Handling of VT switching?

> > Cool. I think the Win32 developers could probably use some expert
> > advice on how to get the Win32 event stuff set up. I don't think they
> > fully understand events on Win32 or X enough at the moment (I know
> > Win32, but not X well enough). Also doesn't the X11R6.4 sources
> > already have Win32 event code in it??

Kendall, Thanks for discussing these issues here.  I assume that
you were refering to Mike, John and me as Win32 developers?

Would you please mind cc'ing messages to cygwin-xfree list too,
at least for the remaining part of November and December 1999
because I would be out of country on vacations? I willl not
have net access during vacations.

>
> Mouse events are easy (as usual), translating Windows messages into X
> events and queuing them.  Keyboard events are harder (as always); the best
> technique (used by Hummingbird) is to actually build keymaps containing
> X keysyms for each supported keyboard and then do a trivial scancode to
> X keycode translation within the server.  Trying to make this automatic
> is fraught with peril.
>

The Exceed (Hummingbird) keymaps give problems if an application
is compiled with GCC under Cygwin.  It dumps millions of Xt warnings
relating to keymaps. The only work around is to set XKeysymDb and XErrorDB
in Windows ENV, and point it to XKeysymDB abd XErrorDB files which
comes with XFree86 or X11R6.4, i.e

set XKeysymDB=c:\usr\X11R6\lib\X11\XKeysymDB
set XErrorDB=c:\usr\X11R6\lib\X11\XErrorDB


> And no, X11R6.4 doesn't have Win32 event code in it (at least not
> that I've
> seen).  It does have some (broken) winsock code -- the various hacks
> to support winsock's lame select don't work right as the various winsock
> fd_set macros aren't functionally equivalent to the regular BSD macros.

True, if X11R6.4 is compiled using MSVC the socket support sucks.
That was one of the reasons I decided to choose Cygwin, because it allowed
me to
work around Win32 native lame winsock.  Now Cygwin supports AF_UNIX
under Win32, which make life easier.


>
> > BTW, I recall there is a free (albiet not very good) Win32 server
> > around somewhere. Does anyone know the URL of this server?
>
> But no source code, making this rather useless.  I don't recall the name
> of it, but it ran so few X applications correctly when I tried it that
> I quickly discarded it.
>

That is Mi/X from Microimage and it is no more free.  It costs $25.00.  On
top of
that Microimage compares it against Exceed, netmanage, and NCD because it is
ceaper.
It is still only X11R5 compliant and it can operate only in single Windows
mode
with stdin/stdout crap.  Most of the modern X cleints would not work under
MI/X 2.0.


Suhaib



>