20010316: problems running Fkey menu under eXceed 7.0

>From: Edward Hindman <address@hidden>
>Organization: CCNY
>Keywords: 200103161646.f2GGkcL03926 McIDAS 7.7x Windows eXceed7.0

Ward,

>Our student systems administrator Eddy Aristilde has successfully 
>installed McIDAS-X V7.700 on our "souped up" (max RAM) Gateway 2000 PC.  
>Further, he has connected McIDAS, which is running on Cirrus, to 5 of the 
>seven PC's through Exceed V6.0  One simply clicks on a McIDAS-X/Exceed 
>icon on the desktop and up pops the three McIDAS windows.

Eddy and I talked a little about the goings on at CCNY some time back.
I am sorry to say that I have been remiss in not following up with him
about the setup back there.  In particular, you (CCNY) may benefit from
moving the hosting of data for the McIDAS sessions to a disk that
is local to your "souped up" Gateway PC (although, I was under the
impression that this is only a 300 Mhz machine).  halo seems to be
a pretty slow machine these days.

>The other two 
>PC's have Exceed V7.0 and will not connect completely to McIDAS as I will 
>describe.  

Unfortunately, I have no experience with eXceed 7.0.  I will check to
see if Ben is running it on his Windows machine so I can try and
recreate your problem here.

>I was asked by Eddy's supervisor, Dr. Kahn to do some preliminary work 
>with you folks to assist Eddy's attempt to complete the Exceed V7.0 
>connections on Monday 19 Mar.  I need the two additional machines running 
>McIDAS on Tuesday 20 March because I have seven students in my class.

OK.  Sorry I couldn't get to this at the end of last week, but I was
involved in the User Committee meeting that was held on Thursday and
Friday.

>Here are the symptoms of the McIDAS load problem on the two recalcitrant 
>PC's.  When I click on the McIDAS/Exceed icon the three windows pop up 
>but the F-key window is blank.  Then I click on the F-key window and it 
>disappears and the follow diagnostic appears on the command window:
>
>X Error of failed request:  BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
>  Major opcode of failed request: 62 (X-CopyArea)
>  Serial number of failed request: 43
>  Current serial number in output stream: 44

Right at this point, what happens when you try to start the Fkey menu
from the McIDAS command line:

MCMENU UNIDATA.MNU

If there really is a problem with the Fkey menu code and eXceed 7, then
I would expect the exact same behavior as when you first bring it up.
If you don't see the same problem, then the problem would most likely
be some sort of timing one.

>I know that you have discouraged us from connecting to McIDAS-X through 
>Exceed.  Actually, the 5 PC's appear to work fine with McIDAS (so far) no 
>doubt due to the "souped-up" Cirrus and a faster building network.  

The only problem with running through Xwindow facilities on Windows is
that there are so many packages out there that can provide Xwindow
services that it is literally impossible to be able to check McIDAS
functionality with them all.

>Consequently, we would appreciate any insight you might have from the 
>above diagnostic that may help Eddy complete the installation.

It could be that the Fkey menu is not finding a visual with the display
depth that it needs.  What is the "depth" of the display: 8-bit;
16-bit; 24-bit; 32-bit; etc.  It could be the case that changing the
Xwindow setup to either 8-bit or 24-bit will make things work
correctly.  There are a couple of ways of determining the depth of the
visual(s) provided by X.  On most Unixes, there is a routine called
xdpyinfo.  Running this will give you a lot of information about the X
window setup.  The other way is to start McIDAS from an xterm and then
look at the informational messages it emits.

As a follow-up to this problem, can you tell me if you can display
images correctly in the McIDAS image window on those workstations where
the Fkey menu doesn't work:

DATALOC ADD RTIMAGES halo.sci.ccny.cuny.edu
IMGDISP RTIMAGES/GE-IR STA=KJFK EU=IMAGE REFRESH='EG;MAP H'

Tom