[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] Date Index Thread Index Search archive:
Date:Mon Feb 21 23:42:03 2000 
Subject:Re: Poplog (pop11) on Linux 
From:Aaron Sloman See text for reply address 
Volume-ID:1000221.02 

[To reply replace "Aaron.Sloman.XX" with "A.Sloman"]

Ben Nolan <ug41bbn@cs.bham.ac.uk> writes:

> Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 12:42:05 +0000
>
> Hi, I've just installed poplog for Linux on my home system, so that I can
> work on my second year team project from home. The installation was easy
> on to my Slakware 4.0 system, but I have a small problem.
>
> I have encountered this problem before when running the university version
> of pop11 throught the NT machines.

In this case, are you talking about running eXceed on an NT machine
and remotely accessing Unix machines running poplog? You may be able
to fix the problem by converting exceed to operate in 8 bit colour
mode when you wish to use rc_array and related libraries.

> When I use the rclib library functions, primarily rc_array to display a
> sun raster file for example, I get a color map allocation error.

The rc_array procedure and some of the other things in the popvision
library assume that you are using an 8-bit colour display, for which
color maps are needed.

If you are using a 16 bit or 24 bit colour display (Truecolour?)
those libraries will not work until somebody has time to convert
them to work without colour maps.

> Is there anyway I can modify my system to fix this.

When running linux start up X in 8 bit mode. I.e. instead of
just "startx", type

    startx -- -bpp 8

You will then find that popvision works.

In order to get the right behaviour of moving objects using RCLIB
(see the issues discussed in HELP RCLIB_PROBLEMS) you may need the
latest version of the rclib package, which is in:

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/rclib.tar.gz

or simply fetch the latest version of LIB rc_setup_linefunction
which is available from

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/rclib/auto/rc_setup_linefunction.p

(modified on 25th December 1999) and install it in
    $poplocal/local/rclib/auto

Another useful recent library extending RCLIB is

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/rclib/auto/rc_get_coords.p

It defines a method:

define :method rc_get_coords(win:rc_window_object, pdr, button);
        ;;; Warp mouse to the window win, and wait.
        ;;; When mouse button is pressed call pdr on the current
        ;;;     x,y coordinates, then return

So by using conspair for pdr, and 1 for button you can use that to
get a pair containing the coordinates of a point selected with mouse
button 1 on the specified window (produced by rc_new_window_object
or rc_control_panel, etc.)

This can be used for interactive games, etc.

I have been making some additional improvements (well changes) to
event handling and colour handling in RCLIB and will shortly install
the new version. This slightly changes the behaviour of DEFER
actions associated with buttons, making them more logical, I think.

Currently the distinction between POPNOW, POP11 and DEFER is
somewhat confused.

Aaron
===
-- 
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk   (NB: Anti Spam address)
TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html