Peaceful co-Xistence : XWIN and TS on the same machine

since I still have an incentive to keep the XWINNMR chugging along (since I am still busy putting together the XWIN -> TS transition plan) but on the other hand I do despiiiise the unpatched RHL8.2 (!!) sucking up resources with runaway processes, I wanted to experiment with running XWINNMR on the shiny RHEL 5.4.

I have been making progress, so far. Here is a useful summary of what matters, for future reference :

• Since XWINNMR and the associated installation suite is matched evenly with the the RedHat 8.2 in antiquity,  there are non-existent locations in RHEL5 such as /usr/lib/X11 that need to be made up.   Refer to my post on how Xwinplot , which also belongs to the same generation as the Xwinnmr itself, was made to work in a RHEL5.4 platform to get a feel for what I am talking about.
• The Xwinnmr suite has the installation script called startme and this looks for xterm in /usr/X11/bin.  If it is non-existent, it quits. So do this :
• ln -sf /usr/bin/xterm /usr/X11/bin/xterm
• If need be, create the directory tree X11/bin under /usr,before creating the link as above.
• Since running the startme script from CDROM leads to file permission issues (I don't know why), I copied the startme script and two other directories that were on the CDROM to /tmp.    It took a while for me to copy all the contents of the CDROM to /tmp and so there is an additional overhead. But once this was done, the SWIM install interface launched without issues.   When run from CDROM, somehow X complains about   DISPLAY.
  
• OS type:  For some reason if the script compalins about non-compatibility of the OS, you can silence the same by doing so:
• sh ./startme --no-os-check
• There are several other switches that may be useful on special occassions.  To list them all, do this :
• sh startme --help-work-around
• If you have problem bringing up the swim gui, do this :
• sh startme -d localhost:0.0

The installation proceeded smoothly after this.  Since I already have installed Topspin on this host, I moved the original /usr/diskless to /usr/diskless.TS to avoid the conflict.  Similarly I moved the /usr/local/flexlm tree to a different name to avoid any clashes.

The installation part proceeded quite easily. The problem I am tackling at this point is to make the 24 and 8 bit overlay mode work fine with X11 so that Xwinnmr can render the colors correctly.  I will post  an update on this topic once that issue is sorted out.