The MI/X FAQ

• BIG-REQUESTS
• MIT-SUNDRY-NONSTANDARD
• Multi-Buffering
• SHAPE
• SYNC
• XC-MISC
• XFree86-BigFont

The Shared Memory extension is also available, but only useful for local clients (for obvious technical reasons, the client and server have to be on the same machine to share memory).

The RENDER extension considered, but turns out to be incompatible with the way we render to the screen. Still, we might find a way to make it work in some future version. Most programs which are written correctly should be able to live without this extension. It's main use is to give you anti-aliased text and nice translucent drop shadows. A well written program should cope with the lack of the RENDER extension by simply disabling those features rather than just giving up and refusing to run.

You may also need to tell your browser or FTP client to use a "passive" FTP connection. In Internet Explorer, this is done by checking a box on the "Advanced" tab of the Internet Options dialog.

Make sure you are logged into an account with administrator privileges when you do this.

When you purchase a floating license, MicroImages will send you an email with an attached file named license.dat. Copy this file to the installation directory. If you purchased the floating license online, the license.dat file is already setup with the correct machine name. If you ordered by phone, you may need to edit the license.dat file with a simple text editor (notepad will do). There are comments in the file that tell what to change.

To start the license server open the Control Panel and open the Services applet. Highlight the "MIX License Server" entry and press start. If it is already running press stop and then press start.

Check the MI/X install director for the files lmutil.exe, lmgrd.exe, lmtools.exe, flexlm.cpl, lmdmcrimgs.exe, and installs.exe. These files need to be on the machine that will be running the license server.

Make sure you are logged into an account with administrator privileges.

Open a command prompt, cd into the MI/X installation directory and type:

You may also need to tell your browser or FTP client to use a "passive" FTP connection. In Internet Explorer, this is done by checking a box on the "Advanced" tab of the Internet Options dialog.

 installs -n "MIX License Manager" -c "%s\license.dat" -l "%s\mix.log" -e "%s\lmgrd.exe"

where %s is the install directory. You will need the double quotes. (Note that that should all be one line, your browser may have broken it up into multiple lines to make it fit the page).

Move flexlm.cpl into the \winnt\system32 directory. Open the control panel to see the "FlexLM License Manager" icon. Open it and go to the "Setup" panel. Check and make sure that all the entries are correct.

Go to the "Control" panel and press start.

• You had already tried MI/X on this machine and the trial period really has expired.
• You messed around with the multi-user license configuration option, totally ignoring the nice warning dialog that tells you not to do that unless you know what you're doing. It's easy enough to fix. Just go into the directory where MI/X is installed and delete the license.dat file.

The Host ID is not your machine's host name or IP address.

When you run the installer, it self-extracts itself into your Windows temp directory (usually \Windows\temp or \winnt\temp, depending on your OS) and runs the setup.exe that it extracted. If there was already a setup.exe hanging around that couldn't be overwritten, it will end up running that setup.exe instead of MI/X's.

If nothing happens it's because the other setup program fails to run. Usually this is because it managed to delete all the temporary files it would need to do the install but not the setup.exe itself. Windows actually makes it hard to delete a program that's running (for obvious reasons), so many installers just register themselves as a file to delete the next time the computer is rebooted. In that case, rebooting will remove the old setup and the MI/X installer will run fine. If not, you can always go to your temp directory and delete anything there.

   Activation with 'xmodmap .xmodmaprc'.

   ! Key Mapping for MicroImages X-Server (MI/X)
   ! 
   !22.07.1998
   !
   ! Oliver Breuninger
   ! ob@seicom.NET
   !
   !Jim Fulton's xev (X Event Tester) was very helpful.
   keycode 65=at     at     at     at     at     at
   keycode 92=bracketleft bracketleft bracketleft bracketleft bracketleft bracketleft
   keycode 93=backslash backslash backslash backslash backslash backslash
   keycode 94=bracketright bracketright bracketright bracketright bracketright bracketright
   keycode 124=braceleft  braceleft  braceleft  braceleft  braceleft  braceleft
   keycode 125=bar  bar  bar  bar  bar  bar  
   keycode 126=braceright  braceright  braceright  braceright  braceright  braceright
   keycode 36 = numbersign numbersign numbersign numbersign numbersign numbersign
   keycode 127=asciitilde  asciitilde  asciitilde  asciitilde  asciitilde  asciitilde  
   keycode 179=twosuperior  twosuperior  twosuperior  twosuperior  twosuperior  twosuperior
   keycode 180=threesuperior threesuperior threesuperior threesuperior threesuperior threesuperior
   keycode 182= mu  mu  mu  mu  mu  mu  

   clear mod5

   add mod5=Super_L

If you want to use the paste/insert text function in X which is by default mapped to the middle button which is unavailable on the PC, then there may be a workaround: You can use the xmodmap program to modify how the mouse events from the server (MI/X) are interpreted by the X client (i.e. xterm). For instance you can swap the middle and right mouse button with this command:

   xmodmap -display mix.machine.name:0.0 -e "pointer = 1 3 2"

That will make the right mouse button act like the "middle" button of a three-button mouse, thereby allowing selecting and copying text with the left button, and pasting/inserting with the right button. Note that on a two-button mouse you will still be missing a button (the button that was the right button, or button 3): you just switched around what button does what using the xmodmap program. So if you need true three-button functionality, the best solution is still to get a three button mouse.

If you have a three-button mouse and can't get the buttons to work properly, make sure that you have drivers properly installed and configured for the three-button mouse so that Windows can handle three buttons instead of the default two. Specifically, you will need to tell the driver that the middle button of the mouse is to be mapped to a "Middle Button" function, and not to some other nifty (and tempting) Windows shortcut. Note that if you do this, the "Middle Button" function will not used under Windows itself, but will be accessible to MI/X and clients running in it. Logitech provides three-button mice and drivers that work and have been tested with MI/X. Also, the Intellipoint mouse sold by Microsoft offers a rolling wheel that acts as a scroller controller on the mouse when turned while in Windows applications, and when clicked, it can be set to function as a "middle" mouse button which works in MI/X.

   MIX

This will start the server and its window manager manually.

   xterm -fg white -bg black

   xterm 

When the xterm comes up you can close the telnet session. The commands may differ on various flavors of UNIX.

You will also want to tell MI/X to only listen on the 127.0.0.1 address. This may not seem logical, since that would prevent any remote clients from connecting. However, SSH acts as a proxy, making it look like all the clients are local.

The most common is that MI/X is not listening on the IP address that you're trying to connect to. To check this, go to the Network tab on the preferences and select that IP address. Make sure that the "Listen on this IP address" toggle is checked. It not, check it and restart MI/X. This occurs mostly for people who are trying to use MI/X over a dial-up service or where your IP address is assigned on boot up via DHCP. Your address changes and MI/X is still listening at the old address. As of MI/X 3.0.5, there is an option to "Listen on all IP addresses".

The other possibility is that you have a firewall on one end or the other (or both) and it's blocking all X traffic. The first thing to try is to use telnet or a secure shell to connect to the remote host and from there, ping yourself.

   ping your.ip.address.here

If that works, try

   telnet your.ip.address.here 6000

If you get a "Connected" message, MI/X is listening. If either of these fail, chances are you are being blocked by a firewall. You should contact your system administrator to correct the problem.

   7x13b.bdf       -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-1
   ascii.bdf       -mi-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-c-160-ascii-1
   olcursor.bdf    -sun-open look cursor-----12-120-75-75-p-160-sunolcursor-1
   olgl10.bdf      -sun-open look glyph-----10-100-75-75-p-101-sunolglyph-1
   cursor.bdf      cursor
   deccurs.bdf     decw$cursor
   decsess.bdf     decw$session

The last part of the font is the language encoding. Chances are that if it isn't "iso8859-1", then you don't need it if all you want is Latin-based language support (English, Spanish, French, German, etc.). Exceptions are the other files above. "cursor.bdf" is especially important as it contains the cursors used by the X Windows System.

   STARTFONT 2.1
   FONT -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--10-100-75-75-C-60-ISO8859-1
   SIZE 10 75 75

Copy the line that appears after FONT. Next, open the fonts.dir file with a text editor. It will look like this:

   87
   gb16.pcf       -cclib-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-150-78-78-c-160-gb2312.1980-0
   ascii.bdf       -mi-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-c-160-ascii-1
   7x13b.bdf       -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-1

Note that there is a number at the top of the file. This has to match the number of fonts in the file. (I've only included the first three in this example. The actual file would have 84 more entries.) Once the fonts.dir is open, go to the bottom of the file and add the name of the font you are adding and paste in the information you copied from the font. Then change the number at the top of the file to reflect the new number of fonts in the file. In my example, I would change 87 to 88.

Here's a possible solution. Edit the file c:\Program Files\MicroImages\MIX_3_0\bdf\misc\fonts.dir with your favorite text editor (Actual file location may be different, depending on where you installed MI/X). The first line will be a numbeer -- Increment it. Now search for the line for the 8x13 font and duplicate it (copy and paste) so that you have two identical lines. Now change the 80 at the end of one of the lines to a 120.

A better solution would be to add an alias to fonts.ali, but nobody who's tried that route has gotten it to work.

We have been unable to reproduce this problem on RedHat 7.3 (which we upgraded to just before 8.0 came out.)

You can also check the .xsession-errors file in your home directory. If something refused to start, this file will usually tell you why. It's usually as simple as a lock file hanging around.

There is at least one window manager which will fail to start because MI/X does not support an extension it thinks it can't live without.

The first is failure to get an authorization code. After you've submitted your credit card information, you get a page with the receipt information. There's a button at the top of this page that you must press. Pressing this button is what actually generates your code for you. We can tell from the logs if somebody fails to get a code and will try to contact you if we notice.

The other problem is that the address you enter must match the address on your credit card. If it doesn't, the transaction will be rejected. This shouldn't be a problem but it is. Authorize.net, in an attempt to protect people from accidentally submitting a purchase twice, won't let you hit the back button, and hit "submit" again. It doesn't seem to matter that the first transaction failed and you have backed up and changed the address, they still see it as a duplicate transaction and won't let you do it. We have contacted Authorize.net about this. The solution seems to be to wait a while before trying again. It's also possible that closing your browser and starting again will help.

The main problem here is that the first time MI/X is run, it defaults to listening on all IP addresses assigned to the machine at that time. If your IP address gets reassigned the next time you reboot or connect to the internet, it won't default to listening on that address.

New information (3-Oct-2001): A toggle to "Listen on all IP addresses" was added to the Network tab of the Preferences dialog in version 3.0.5.

   X Error of failed request:  BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)
     Major opcode of failed request:  45 (X_OpenFont)

This is usually due to an error in either fonts.dir or fonts.ali. There was a known problem with the fonts.dir provided with MI/X which was fixed in 3.0.9.

The fix was to bring up the preferences and, on the Screen tab, set the width a few pixels less than the actual resolution. We have no idea why this would help or what caused the problem. It may be related to the display drivers for the video card being used. The person who reported it said that he had several identical computers and it only happened on a couple of them.