Text-mode issues

[Benjamin Riefenstahl <Benjamin dot Riefenstahl at epost dot de>]

Hi all,


After reading the list for some time, there has been so much talk
about the wonderfull new features.

So I now switched from my aged eXceed setup to Cygwin/XFree.  So far
it has been a good experience.  I am still in the process of adapting
my environment, of course, but it's almost all been for the better
(more modern font support, real mouse wheel support).

And as somebody else today already expressed it similarily, I strongly
prefer a stable and free-as-in-speech solution to a fast and
proprietory one.


There is one issue for me and that is the seeming "disbelief" of XFree
in text mode.  I see three obvious items on that list currently:

1) The fonts directory must be on a binary mount.  This is documented
   and in the FAQs.  Given that the fonts directory is there only for
   XFree, this bug is minor.

2) The /tmp directory must be on a binary mount, otherwise
   international keyboards don't work.  I fought with that some time
   because I had forgotten about this, but than I found it again in
   the archives.  As the /tmp directory is a common resource, I don't
   like that at all.  Related to this bug is that the error doesn't
   seem to show in the log, at least I couldn't find any hint, the
   keyboard just isn't set correctly.

3) The binary files in CVS are not marked as such (cvs admin -kb).
   This is not only in the hw/xwin directory, but in the whole XFree
   CVS.  In theory this is not only an issue on Windows but on Unix
   also.  In practice, a regular CVS checkout is just broken on
   Windows, unless you only use Cygwin's CVS tools with binary mounts.

I'd like to help fixing those issues.  I have downloaded the CVS
(although I will have to do it again with a binary mount) and after
that I am going to start compiling, than doing the necessary code
review and debugging.  If any of you have any input, I'd like to hear
about it.

The first thing for development is item 3), the CVS setup.  Has this
ever been discussed?  Or is it just that nobody is aware of the
problem yet?  I guess I'll need to post to devel@Xfree86.org about it,
I just subscribed to that list.


so long, benny