[13056] in Athena Bugs
rsaix [7.7F]: X server
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (yandros@MIT.EDU)
Thu Dec 29 05:27:26 1994
From: yandros@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 29 Dec 1994 05:27:20 +0500
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
System name: oliver
Type and version: RS6000/320 7.7F
Display type: colorgda
What were you trying to do?
Log in to oliver, an RS/6000 model 320 in the SIPB office:
; /bin/athena/machtype -a
rsaix
7.7
7.7F
7.7F
POWER
colorgda
fd0 unk 3.5inch
24576 K
That involves setting some variables, changing the root cursor,
setting some X resources, and starting a single xterm - no more.
What went wrong?
My xterm was `fried'. (that's a technical term). I can't describe
how it lost, but I got a window dump in the file:
~yandros/tmp/rs6k-xterm-lossage.xwd.
It'll stay there for one week; please get a copy if you want it
(it's 5444 bytes gzip'd - you should have space. :-)
The bright blue spots are the cursor (not pointer) color. The `h'
you see at the end indicates how it was letting me type; each
character would be covered by that blue block as soon as I typed the
next character. My login shell on that machine is `/bin/sh'; the
stuff I typed that you can't read was `bin/btcsh'. My prompt is:
%U%m%u:%!\n; "
As you can see, the spacing was screwed up after I got into
betatcsh. The blue blocks at that point indicate where the cursor
was. I have no idea why it suddenly started getting the spacing
right after a while. You can see which xterm was first in my path,
and that I tried the other one; the other one had similar results.
What should have happened?
Not that.
Anything else you'd like to add?
All the relevant dotfiles are world readable. It looks very much
like the X server got the spacing of the font wrong, perhaps
thinking that it was a proportional-width font (xterm is known to
behave this way with non-fixed-width fonts). The font is:
-*-lucidatypewriter-medium-*-*-*-10-*-*-*-m-*-*-*
and is known to do Bad Things to the Athena RS/6000 320 X server
(the 220 handles it fine). I could change it, but I believe that it
was first reported as a bug about 3 years ago (which is about 3 X
servers ago), and I figure I should leave some bugs around to be
fixed in these releases we keep having. :-) If the bug is the same
as before, you can have some fun watching the X server slowly
degrade by trying to look at this font in `xfontsel'; the screen
becomes more and more corrupted as you flip through the font
specifications. (``hours of fun for the whole family'')
