In brief, Tektronix was acquired by NCD since these beauties were made. The basic architecture of these devices forms the foundation of a number of the newer NCD Thin Clients available today.
When these Tek items were sold new, they were sold as a complete package, with support, monitor, and other stuff.
When I acquired these, there were no monitors, and no powersupplies or other connectable thingos, and importantly, no docs or software.
Thanks to a number of #humbug folks on irc.uq.edu.au , I was able to ascertain a few important facts about these machines.
I've also been able to nut out the power supply and a number of other details.
They take standard 72pin ram, up to 2x16 meg additional to the 4meg
already on board.
I'd recommend at least 4 meg additional if you want to run things without
complaints or errors. These units have to have enough memory to display
the bitmaps and track the windows. More windows, less memory.
These terminals work flawlessly on +5V DC only in my experience.
Don't be tempted to use 12V on the 5V pins. That fries these things irreparably, which isn't usually what you want to do.
1o 2o 3o
4o 5o 6o
7o 8o
Pins 1, 2, 3 = GND (All are internally tied together)
Pins 6, 7, 8 = +5V DC (All are internally tied together)
Pin 5 = +12V DC
Pin 4 = Not Connected
They also take standard PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse, and have a standard 15 pin VGA out.
Network-wise, they have UTP and Thinnet connections for ethernet, and autoselects the active one.
Otherwise you'll need to hook it up and then cycle blindly through the available video modes until you get a good picture.
Steps:
Wait about 20 seconds and then press space
Type the following followed by the enter key
se monset -1
and wait. This will automatically cycle through the video modes available. Let it go through a couple of times so you can see what you've got available with your hardware. Follow the directions and that will flash the new settings to the memory.
It does have some modes which work with fixed frequency sync-on-green
monitors.
No modification of the modelines appears to be possible, so you'll
need to tweak the internals of your monitor if you're not happy with the
location/size of the display.
se keynotset
This will allow you to select the keyboard type.
For most people this will be 101 key with Pause, but other types are
listed and avaiulable.
For DHCP you need a bootmonitor version 5.8 or above I think. If you don't have that version bootmonitor installed, don't worry, you can download the new one and flash it to these units once the thing is running, then reconfigure them to DHCP. Its much nicer in the end.
I'm not going to tell you about setting up the server side stuff here, but I can tell you that DHCP works flawlessly on these things and simplifies configuration and management greatly. Find out more about DCHP in http://mirror-return.cc.uq.edu.au/pub/linux/HOWTO/mini/DHCP
Initially it is good to set it up manually.
Set the boot host with
ihost x.x.x.x
Set the terminal address
iaddr x.x.x.x
Set the Network mask
imask x.x.x.x
Set the Gateway
igate x.x.x.x
Set the location of the terminal kernel on the boot host with...
bpath /exports/tekxp/boot/os.350
(This is the nfs path to the xterminal kernel on the ihost machine.)
Set Boot kernel retrieval method (Sets it to NFS with rsize=8192)
Use a smaller rsize if you want to cause less network congestion
but give a slower boot.
bmethod nfs 8192
Save all your changes to Non-volatile memory
nvsave
There are two versions of the software that support this family of terminal,
namely NCBridge and XpressWare.
NCBridge is newer and bigger. XpressWare is smaller and simpler. They
seem to be functionally equivalent. NCBridge just has a few more bells
and whistles, but is essentially the same.
You can download these both
XPressware
ftp://ftp.ncd.com/pub/nwd/XpressWare/Patches/V8.1/
and
NCBridge
ftp://ftp.ncd.com/pub/nwd/NCBridge/Patches/V3.2/
NC Bridge has the advantage of an HTML
manual available on the ncd site, and an acrobat version also...
If you can add an additional 8meg or more ram to these terminals, then I'd use NCBridge. Otherwise, use XpressWare as it is not as memory hungry.
You'll need to read the readme files in these directories before downloading in order to work out just what you need. There are versions that can be served by NT Server and other ones for unix hosts. Generally speaking, there's two files you'll need for the software. You're looking at about 30-60Meg download for the full deal.
Follow the directions in the instructions. Generally this involves untarring them into a directory.
This directory will then need to be nfs exported as read only (or rw
if you're brave) to your terminals. How to do that is subject of other
howto's unrelated to this document such as the NFS-HOWTO. Try seeing it
at http://mirror-return.cc.uq.edu.au/pub/linux/HOWTO/NFS-HOWTO
The file
os.350
is the kernel for these machines.
the bpath statement must reflect the nfs path to this file.
Then do all your favourite security things to lock down your system as best as you can.
Make sure you can see and read this directory.
Once this is all done, the next time you start the terminal, it should boot.and bring up the familiar x server display.
There is an incredible amount of configuration flexibility available
with these terminals.
Virtually everything can be managed centrally.
From memory, I can't recall if it creates a config directory, but I do know that it has a file called xp.cnf that is in the main install area. That is the server side config file that is sent to the terminal on boot. It must reside in a directory named config (eg /exports/tekxp/boot/config/xp.cnf in my example)
This xp.cnf file is extremely well commented and detailed.
It even allows for system messages to be sent to syslogd on another machine.
Way handy that one.
Change the settings in here and reboot. Its amazingly versatile. Scripting
and a whole lot more.
Combine the flexibility of this file with the options and functionality
of the dhcp server and you can do absolutely everything with these units
from your comfy chair.
The only thing that I haven't found out how to do it to set up a connection to a font server. I've ended up duplicating my fonts in the terminal directory. Also note, it requires .Z and not .gz fonts. Standard fonts supplied by xfree work. Just be sure of the conversion. I think the utility is compress is it not?
At the time of writing, the most recent version is
ftp://ftp.ncd.com/pub/nwd/NCBridge/BootMonitors/boot_mon.350_V5.11
But before installing, you'll have to have an operational and configured terminal and you simply must read...
ftp://ftp.ncd.com/pub/nwd/NCBridge/BootMonitors/README.INSTALL
This file contains important info on which terminals this version is suitable for and on how to update the bootrom. Don't install the wrong bootmonitor on the wrong terminal. That will ruin your whole day and stuff the terminal.
In order to use DHCP, on booting, press space to fall into the boot
monitor prompt.
Set your network numbers to 0.0.0.0 and with a correctly configured
dhcp server, it should work first try. The filename="blah" option
in the dhcpd.conf allows the setting of the boot file as listed
in bpath.
I am by no means an expert in DHCP, but I was able to get this running in about half an hour. With the configurability of the DHCP and xp.conf settings, you can completely manage the terminal's settings from your server.
Other things to do:
Add your xterminal to the list of xservers used by your x login manager.
Its all so simple.
In file /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers add the following for each terminal
x.x.x.x:0 foreign
where x.x.x.x is the ip address or hostname of the terminal.
Good Luck, and please share your knowledge and experiences with these.
Cheers
Andrew
ajdraper@uq.net.au