At first I thought it was something similar to IXI's XDesktop, but it seems I was wrong. It does feel inspired by XDesktop (and by OS/2's desktop system), it's more of a way to manage multiple connections and applications across multiple hosts. There are some bad points, but for the most part it is pretty useful.

It seems that everything is stored inside a database (which feels very similar to NetInfo), with XVision Desktop providing links to XVision components that use this database and command-line arguments to spawn the right module (e.g. VT320) or connect to the relevant system via telnet, or rlogin, or whatnot. It saves one the effort of using XDMCP, logging into a host, then using telnet/rlogin/rexec manually.

There are some caveats to this, but we'll reach those later on.

This is probably your most important group, as it lists all hosts that have been defined for use and allows you to configure their transport, remote execution, and login options. It would generally be best if each host with which you interact had its own host as this saves you time in the long run.

To see how to add a host, check out my post on Visionware XVision's VT320 emulator.

XVision Desktop is capable of replacing Program Manager, so it sets up some common-used Windows applications in this group for you. There doesn't seem to be any way to import groups from Program Manager, but there is a way to export to Program Manager. This is useful if you only use the desktop app to configure remote sessions, as doing this is pretty hard with Program Manager–although there is a tool that you can use for this.

This is an interesting one, and shows one of the features that I think was inspired by either IXI XDesktop or OS/2 or both. This group allows you to start the X server, access the file transfer, print manger, fonts, etc.

The XVision Server icon has unique menu that allows you to access the relevant section in the X server control panel.

I feel the urge to set up XEmacs in my OSF/1 group. Let's do it.

First, let's right-click somewhere in the group to get the context menu and select New Item and then X Application,,,

Then we fill out the host and the command. In this case, korolev is the name of my OSF/1 host, and XEmacs is available at /usr/local/bin/xemacs.

Now we can spend hours struggling to find an icon worthy of Emacs.

I never really did find one. Perhaps I need my own icon library. However, there should now be a perfectly-usable link to XEmacs in the group that we can execute.

Double-clicking on it yields

Naturally I am now creating this blog post in XEmacs running on Digital UNIX 4.0. But you already guessed that the second you saw me mention Emacs, right?

Icons of this type allow you to run text applications via the inbuilt VT320 emulator, i.e. vi, ksh, and so on.

Setting one up is pretty simple. First, right-click for that context menu, then select New Item and then VT320 Application…

Then, fill out the host and the command you wish to execute.

And then you should be able to launch your text app!

You can also use this to set up a telnet connection to a remote host as documented in Visionware XVision's VT320 emulator.

This isn't what I thought it was. When I saw this, I assumed it would allow me to configure an X server instance for a particualar host. "Aha," I thought, "multiple X sessions!" Multiple window locally managed X server for day-to-day use, and an X server running an XDMCP direct query to a remote host. Kinda like how one could use Xephyr or Xnest.

No, I was wrong. This is simply a link to a global X server. Creating an X server for a host (single-window, XDMCP) will result in XVision's settings being set to whatever you set. I find this a crying shame, especially given that XVision Eclipse solves this by allowing multiple X server profiles.

This allows you to add a group item linking to a local document. It does not seem to support remote documents without the aid of, say, PATHWORKS, VisionFS, PC-NFS, Samba etc.

This allows you to add a non-TCP/IP connection to a remote host. If you utilise Visionware's PC-Connect, or NCD's XRemote, you can set up connections here.

As I have neither of those (yet), I have no idea how they work or how they're set up. I do know that XRemote requires a second license if installed with XVision.

Now this is a complete mystery to me. This appears to be something provided by UnixWare 2 (both USL and SCO).

I did have a poke around various UnixWare 2 media (including UnixWare 2.1 Application Server, which I think was the target for this feature), and I found the paths it refers to (/usr/X/lib/app-defaults/.exportApps), but it was an unexpected thing.

At first, I assumed that it might be something akin to NFS exportfs (i.e. /etd/dfs/sharetab, /etc/exports et al) in that you could specify an app and its local path, but upon inspection of the directory layout in UnixWare 2, it's full of binaries.

Technically speaking I could probably run these binaries on UnixWare 7, but it probably requires a more complicated setup than just plonking some files in a directory and hoping for the best.

I would like to set up UnixWare 2 either on a real machine or in a virtualised environment at some point, so I will ensure that should that happen then this feature gets tested.