Machines and Systems

I use a monochrome monitor. How can I run NCSA Mosaic in monochrome mode?

 Just use the '-mono' command-line flag. (Note that there is no way to set this as an X resource, for technical reasons.) You can also compile NCSA Mosaic to come up in mono mode by default; see the Makefile in the source distribution (the '-color' command-line flag can then be used to throw NCSA Mosaic into color mode).

Why aren't binaries for {HP Snake, Linux, VMS, your platform here} being distributed?

Because we don't have a machine on which to compile. If you want us to regularly distribute binaries for a particular machine, donate us a development system. Else, there's not much we can do.

We will, subject to resource/time constraints, merge user-supplied patches for various platforms into the Mosaic source; we will also distribute user-contributed binaries for other systems. Contact mosaic-x@ncsa.uiuc.edu to contribute either.

User-contributed versions are listed here.

Why doesn't Mosaic support VMS?

Although several people have volunteered patches for VMS support, We haven't used them or otherwise added VMS support to Mosaic because we feel that a full VMS port will require a great deal of work to maintain as the program rapidly evolves, and we don't currently have the funding nor the manpower to do so.

User-contributed versions are available here.

How come I can't compile Mosaic under X11R5/Motif 1.2?

We don't know, as we haven't yet tried it. If you send us details on your problems we can take a look and try to figure out what's going wrong.

Why does Mosaic compiled with Motif 1.2 act strangely?

Bugs in some versions of Motif 1.2 cause some features to behave poorly. A common problem is that you won't be able to type into the Search Keyword field; this has been reported by people using certain versions of HP/UX and self-compiled Motif 1.2 libraries.

If possible, upgrade to a more recent version of Motif 1.2 (or HP/UX) -- in particular, Motif 1.2.2 apparently has a lot of fixes. Using Motif 1.1.4 and X11R4 instead should also solve the problems -- the compiled binary will still run fine on an X11R5 server.

(Rumor has it that some systems will allow you to cut-n-paste into the Search Keyword text field, and subsequently be able to type into the text field as expected.)

Under OpenWindows, how come pressing 'Back' then causes a subsequent anchor press to look like 'Back' has just been pressed again?

This is an OpenWindows bug, and we don't know of any way to work around it.

What happened to the Solaris binary?

We were distributing a Solaris binary of Mosaic 2.0, but received so many bug reports within the first few days after its release, that we were forced to pull it from the ftp server. The problems were with Motif 1.2, not Mosaic, so we will hopefully be able to support a Solaris binary again, soon. Meanwhile, the source distribution tar file includes a top level Solaris Makefile.

Why does Mosaic 2.0 die on my IBM, while 1.2 worked perfectly?

This is a common problem. It is a symtom of a shared library incompatibility between AIX 3.2.4 and older versions of AIX 3.2; and often looks like this:

Could not load program Mosaic-ibm Symbol XtStrings in ksh is undefined Error was: Exec format error You should be able to compile the source yourself with no problem since AIX ships with both X11 and Motif. The source is available at ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in the /Mosaic/Mosaic-source directory and comes with a top level IBM Makefile that should not require too much editing.

To what systems has Mosaic been ported?

This is an incomplete list of links to unsupported versions of Mosaic.