Using the monitor as a frame buffer without news.

[Jonathon Sivier]

In article <8659 at ubc-cs.UUCP> buchanan at cs.ubc.ca (John Buchanan) writes:
>
>In the good old days ( <= 3000 series) one could use the sgi boxes as dumb
>frame buffers.  With out getting into a discussion re. the merits of turning
>a 'workstation' into a 'dumb' frame buffer, is it possible for some process
>to draw on the screen while NeWS is not running?
>

    Along these same lines, is there any way to run a graphics program from a
remote terminal if no one is logged on to the console and thus has NeWS running?
On the older systems you could do gbegin() and then use the display whether you
were logged into the console or a remote terminal, and whether or not the
windowing system was running.  Now you get the error message "cannot assign
myself context 0" if NeWS is not running.  So someone (anyone) must be logged
into the console in order to run a graphical application.  This is regardless
of whether you use gbegin() or winopen();

    Is there a way to start NeWS from a remote terminal, with the output to
be displayed on the main console?  What program(s) get run when you login to
start NeWS?  Can these be run by hand from a remote terminal?  What system
script files are executed whene you log in?  Is the NeWS startup program called
from one of those?  Is any of this documented and if so where?

    Thanks for your assistance.

    Jonathan

-- 

Jonathan Sivier
jsivier at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu