19990121: Old re device driver

>From: "Frank Colby" <address@hidden>
>Organization: University of Massachusetts Lowell
>Keywords: 199901212207.PAA22546

>Steve,
>
>Thanks for the help with networking garp.
>
>Do you know if it is easy/possible to put together a device driver for
>gempak similar to the old RE driver (in gempak5.0)?  We have pcs running
>terminal software which handles regis graphics (gempak5.0 runs on our
>vax system still!), and it would be nice to be able to continue to have
>this option under the newer version.  This way we can continue to use
>these pcs for word processing and spreadsheets, as well as gempak
>graphics, albeit without some of the really nice features of garp. 
>These pcs would struggle running unix, and we would lose ms word/excel
>capability.
>
>Frank
>

Frank,

I do not have any old distributions of GEMPAK with an "re" driver, so
I do not know what you would have to do to port it to the current 
device driver configuration.

In general, some of the low level device characteristics have changed
quite a bit since gempak5.0, so it may not be a triveal matter of
porting. Most of the generic driver functionality is contained in
the gn.a library, while device specific code is contained in the
individual device libraries (xw.a, ps.a, nc.a etc).

Steve Chiswell