[Info-vax] VMS on remote desktops

[Craig A. Berry]

FredK wrote:
>  I'm interested in VMS
> systems that are generally headless talking to Linux/Thin clients/Mac's, etc 
> that are sitting on your desktop...  and how you interact with the VMS 
> systems.  Do you use the native xterm/emulator to command line into VMS, run 
> DECterm out to the desktop, other graphical applications.   Keymapping 
> issues.  UTF vs MCS/Latin-1.  Motif/Locale issues.  Font issues.  Do you 
> primarily work in the environment on your desktop and run occasional VMS 
> stuff remotely, or is the desktop primarily used to get to VMS.  Stuff like 
> that.

 From Mac OS X 10.5 I connect to OpenVMS Alpha v8.3 and OpenVMS I64
v8.3-1H1 by typing "ssh -X <host>". I don't recall doing anything
special to get this working other than setting up SSH keys.

I've never run the entire desktop with the Mac as the X server (if
that's even possible), just any application that looks for the X display
and knows where to find it.

I don't actually use a lot of DECWindows applications day in and day out
(though I'm typing this in SWB 1.1-10). For terminal work I use GLTerm,
which provides TPU-friendly keypad capabilities out of the box. I have
tried to dabble with using a DECterm, but almost anything involving the
keypad gives me "Unknown escape sequence" or "Syntax error in escape
sequence." No doubt with a day or three of hard slogging I could set up
some key mappings or something and get past that.

I do find it very handy in some circumstances to have a separate window
for the debugger if I'm debugging terminal-based apps. (Other times it's
more slowness and annoyance than it's worth and I just define
DBG$PROCESS to NONE). When I start the DECWindows debugger, I always get:

X Toolkit Warning: Cannot convert string 
"-*-Menu-Medium-R-Normal--*-120-*-*-P-*-ISO8859-1" to type FontStruct

which has never bothered me enough to try to track it down.

What does bother me is that editing debugger commands is very difficult,
again due to key mappings. The only way I've found to delete anything
I've typed is to back arrow over it and then use the backspace key,
which deletes forward! This is not a problem in SWB, nor in a DECterm
for that matter.

Overall things seem to work but would probably require lots of digging
in the documentation to work well enough for everyday use. For me it's
never been urgent enough to do that.

That's all at home. At the office we have Windows desktops with an old
version of Reflection that does not have X Server capability. We are
interested in using Netbeans for development, parts of which (I'm told)
don't work without X on the client. Not sure how that will pan out, but
you may want to communicate with the Netbeans folks or review their
requirements as part of your research into what people are using remote
desktops for.