Zion 0.9beta

About Zion

Zion is a replacement for zwgc, the zephyr windowgram client for Athena's zephyr messaging system. It is essentially zwgc with the .zwgc.desc language replaced by perl5. As of September 30th, it is a public beta release.

Beta users are encouraged to add themselves to the zion-testers mailing list, as below, and read on.

Adding yourself to zion-testers:

 blanche zion-testers -a $USER

This will be a relatively low traffic list for announcements and the like.

Platforms

Zion 0.9 currently runs on Solaris, Linux(a.out), NetBSD, IRIX and Ultrix.

Running Zion

To run zion do:

add zion
zion

Additionally, you probably want to kill zwgc first. If you want to run zion by default, you need the following in your .environment file:

set skip_x_startup

And then, in your .startup.X:

/afs/sipb/project/zion/bin/zion from -t -n (olc who &) >& /dev/null

(assuming you want those things to happen as they normally would)

You have to do the same thing, but set skip_tty_startup to make it work for tty logins (and make the changes in .startup.tty)

Using Zion

If you have a .zion.desc.pl in your homedir, it will use that. Otherwise, it will use a default, /afs/sipb/project/zion/share/zion.desc.pl.

There are two main approaches to your .zion.desc.pl file. First, is to use the new feature based system. This is recommended. Read about the system.

Or, you can just write your own .zion.desc.pl from scratch. This is not recommended, but basic documentation is available.

Reporting bugs

If you find bugs, email them to me (I'll create a bug-zion list soon), put a copy of your zionlog file and the coredump (if there is one) in /afs/sipb/project/zion/coredumps/ with an intelligent name. I suggest:

core.username.platform.date.brief-bug-description
zionlog.username.platform.date.brief-bug-description

Feel free to debug more thoroughly, if you feel like it. :-)

Known Bugs

If you get a zephyr with @large() text in it, it will spit out "Large stuff here..." to stderr (old debugging output) [Fixed on: Linux & IRIX]
Dynamic loading of modules doesn't work

Fixed Bugs

Extraneous premature invocation of initprogs. FIXED
-f doesn't work at all. FIXED
-ttymode doesn't work right at all. FIXED
It will be very confused if you don't have a ~/.zion.desc.pl (but the run-zion script kludges this by creating one for you) FIXED
It doesn't find it's default font resources file the right way (but the run-zion script kludges this for now) FIXED
zctl wg_read only works once. It crashes after that. It works find on SGIs. FIXED
On linux, messages get truncated to the length of the zsig. FIXED