Installing STonX

Contents of this document:

Required Software

 In order to compile STonX, you need the following software:

Configuring STonX

Running configure

STonX comes with a configure script, which is generated from the file configure.in using the Autoconf package. For most systems, 
   ./configure
will suffice to configure STonX. This will create a Makefile from Makefile.in and create a link named config.h to one of the header files in the config/ subdirectory.

For some systems, there are specific header files in the config/ directory, for others, generic.h will be chosen, which should work on all systems. If a specific header file was chosen for your system, but it doesn't work, you can always try to use the generic configuration file by making a link manually.

More options

The file options.h contains a few constants which can be changed in order to customize STonX for your needs. At the moment, only 3 of them are important for non-developers:
SMALL
If this is set to 1, STonX will use less memory and emulate an ST with only 4MB RAM. This is not only useful for systems with less memory than 16-24MB, but necessary for some linkers which cannot handle 16MB BSS-Segments (like some versions of the GNU Linker for Linux).

XBUFFER
This is a switch for the manual buffering of the X function calls. If this is set to 0 (default = 1), the VDI window will not be restored during expose events, e.g. when you move an overlapping window. This should only be changed if the buffering doesn't work properly (I've only added this a few days ago).

BLITTER
Switch the blitter emulation on and off. This shouldn't need to be changed, since the blitter code seems very stable.

Compiling STonX

 To compile STonX, simply type "make" after configuring. This will first compile the stonx binary, then it will try to extract the system fonts from the tos.img file (which you must copy to the STonX directory) and create fonts in .pcf format usable for the X server. This is done by the makefonts.sh script in the data/ subdirectory. This script will also try to install the fonts in-place, which might fail if you use an X-Terminal. (See The VDI driver for X for more information).

When the compilation is finished, you can run STonX from the build directory.

Problems

 This section contains suggestions for some problems that might occur (or are known to occur and not yet fixed) during the installation of STonX.

"make" complains about "if syntax"
Solution: use GNU Make.

Linking fails with an obscure error message
Solution: try setting SMALL to 1 in options.h. Do not use the GNU Linker (if possible).

I get a strange error message just after the fonts were generated
You can't install fonts in-place. Read the section on the VDI driver to find out how to fix this.

When I use the VDI driver, the background is black and the foreground is white or red
This is a known problem, and it's because of my bad X programming. If you can fix it, you're welcome to do it and I'd really appreciate it!

Irix 5.X stops during compilation with some obscure error message
Try using -O2 instead of -O3 (Makefile variable OPT), apparently gcc passes this option on to the assembler, which gets confused.

Marinos "nino" Yannikos, nino@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at