Configuring RISCiX

[iainfm]

Hi,

Thought a thread on common things to configure on the unix side of things might be useful (ulterior motive: I can't figure some of them out )

Firstly: Machine config

Can be one of either STANDALONE or FULLNETWORK (with or without NIS, aka Yellow Pages).

If you have a network card you might end up in an endless loop of 'NIS server not found' (or something similar) unless you edit /etc/rc.config accordingly.

At the top, change NIS=TRUE to NIS=FALSE, or set STANDALONE=TRUE to turn off all networking daemons etc.

Note: setting STANDALONE=TRUE will automatically set FULLNETWORK=FALSE and NIS=FALSE

While you're in there, setting DISPLAYCONSOLELOG=TRUE can be useful to troubleshoot things.

Tip: If using vi (the best editor ever ), the arrow keys will mess up your file. Use H, J, K and L to navigate. If you really screw things up, Esc :q! out of dodge.


Things I'd like to know / am trying to figure out:

How to get 'standard' cursor-key behaviour (as opposed to BBC micro-style split cursor)

How to get tab-completion of filenames in csh (I've tried the usual set filec in .cshrc)

How to change the resolution of the display in Xwindow
Solved: Set the monitor type in Arculator and riscos to high res mono.

[wiggy]

How to get tab-completion of filenames in csh (I've tried the usual set filec in .cshrc)

That's a "modern" shell feature - I'm fairly sure RISCiX predates its introduction. On a good day you can get close using suitable wildcards...

[iainfm]

That's a "modern" shell feature - I'm fairly sure RISCiX predates its introduction. On a good day you can get close using suitable wildcards...

I'm 100% sure (or very close to it) that the Suns I used around 1996 (which were a good few years old back then) had filename completion in csh.

I think they were Sun 3/80s. There were certainly prior to SparcStations (which we had some of as well), but I can't remember the version of SunOS they ran. It was definitely prior to Solaris though, so I'd guess SunOS 4.0 or 4.1. 4.0.1 seems to be etched in my visual cortex

But now I come to think about it, the completion key might have been escape.

[iainfm]

But now I come to think about it, the completion key might have been escape.

Ah, there we go. If we enter csh with /usr/bin/csh (and not just 'csh'), escape acts as autocomplete.

I remember being told/trained BITD that root's shell shouldn't ever be csh because csh lives in a non-root partition, so if that partition can't be mounted for whatever reason you get no shell and are royally screwed if you have to try to recover the system.

Edit: To get this to work I've also added

SET filec
SET autolist

to /.cshrc (for the root user)

[wiggy]

It was definitely prior to Solaris though, so I'd guess SunOS 4.0 or 4.1. 4.0.1 seems to be etched in my visual cortex

4.1 was "officially" Solaris, although it wasn't very obvious. We had a mix of that (probably 4.1.4) and Solaris 2 on a mix of SPARC machines at Uni - 97 onwards. That was confusing as 4.1 is BSD-biased and 2.x was when they went SYSV-biased... a good introduction to "portable" programming (and having to come up with cshrc files that setup PATH differently depending on which machine type happened to be free in the lab that day...).

We must have had the same problem BITD, though, as I thought I remembered that only the machines that had been "upgraded" to tcsh having completion (and hence cursing wildcards on the others). My memory could be letting me down...

Trying to fix a machine with a broken root shell is ... interesting. There's a lot to be said for having a statically linked shell somewhere in the root partition, even if it's a retarded one. Sadly, trying to statically link vi was a dead loss as most versions are floored by not being able to find /usr/share/terminfo. And, yes, it is still the best

[jp6741]

I remember being told/trained BITD that root's shell shouldn't ever be csh because csh lives in a non-root partition, so if that partition can't be mounted for whatever reason you get no shell and are royally screwed if you have to try to recover the system.

Or do like I once did and set the shell to something that wasn’t installed, then have to go to the Uni IT department and ask them to fix it.

I was newly discovering cool things, in this case zsh, but such things were obviously cool enough for Linux but not for SunOS, and logons don’t work without without a valid shell, and changing your own doesn’t validate your choice lol.

[sweh]

4.1 was "officially" Solaris, although it wasn't very obvious.

Solaris 1 was the Desktop Operating Environment of SunOS 4.1 plus OpenWindows 2. The OS was still SunOS.

I still have my install CDs and manuals

In theory, Solaris 2 is also a Desktop Operating Environment with the SunOS 5 OS, but it was never marketed as SunOS 5. Solaris 11 still identifies as SunOS 5.11. Yay marketing!

[iainfm]

Loving those solaris boxes. Your shelf is definitely feeling the weight though!

DNS... I've got it working either via resolv.conf or named.boot, pointing either at my router's IP.

Network utilities such as ping, ftp or telnet don't/can't resolve hostnames by dns though. I suspect I need to configure the RISCiX equivalent of sunos's nsswitch.conf though, but I don't know if this system has such a thing. I've trawled a few man pages but not found anything.

It's weird though, because the man paget for gethostbyname says:

"If the local name server is not running (it is) these routines do a lookup in /etc/hosts"

but if I put the internet address of an ftp server in hosts I can ftp to it by name.

Is it too late to file a bug report?

Edit: There is a caveat in that man page which suggests libc may have been built to only use the hosts file.

[awilliams]

The paper manual says the BREAK key will bring up the virtual terminal selection screen and the PRINT key will bring up the Terminal setup screen.

It says the behaviour of the 'copy' key can be changed with the latter.
Mine is buried too deep under other gear at the moment to be easy to power up and check exactly this.
COPY mode is a option.

[iainfm]

The paper manual says the BREAK key will bring up the virtual terminal selection screen and the PRINT key will bring up the Terminal setup screen.

It says the behaviour of the 'copy' key can be changed with the latter.
Mine is buried too deep under other gear at the moment to be easy to power up and check exactly this.
COPY mode is a option.

Thanks for that! I'll give it a go once I figure out how to map/find these keys. Might need to hook up an old PC keyboard of some kind!

[iainfm]

Simply pressing F3 opens up the terminal setup screen (Ops Guide p39). You can set the arrow keys in there to be non-Acorny, but then they just display control codes when pressed, so I guess something else needs to be set in the terminal settings or something...

[Sophira]

Using the arrow keys for line editing in the way you're expecting is a relatively new thing and requires support from the shell you're using (which RISC iX's sh doesn't provide). Specifically, the most common library used to do this is GNU Readline. You can get a similar result to how RISC iX's shell behaves on today's Linux machines if you run bash --noediting to disable bash's use of readline (which also removes tab completion).

In other words, the 'control codes' output is standard arrow key behaviour.

[sweh]

If you have ksh88 as your shell then "set -o emacs" and define these aliases...

Code: Select all

# Emacs mode cursor key aliases.  These should be ignored in vi mode
# Cursor UP is __A which should be ^P (020)
alias -x __A=^P
# Cursor Down is __B which should be ^N (016)
alias -x __B=^N
alias -x __E=^O
#^O to turn off alternative graphics mode on a VT terminal that ^N puts on
# Cursor Right is __C which should be ^F (006)
alias -x __C=^F
# Cursor Left is __D which should be ^B (002)
alias -x __D=^B

Those ^ sequences are the literal control character (so control-p, control-n, control-f, control-b); these just look like ^key when I view the file with "less"
At least they're what I worked out in 1992 with ksh88 compiled from source on SunOS 4.