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On 8/5/2010 11:19 AM, Dennis Lovelady wrote:
Brings up an interesting question. Has anyone on this list successfully
installed and exercised an X server on their System i?

Yep.

IBM has a tool for Java goons named "NAWT." It's supposed to allow you to write/run graphical Java applications on IBM i.

What it really does is install a copy of XFree86 (an older, open source, version of X11) in PASE. The NAWT actually outputs the Java GUI stuff using X11. IBM also includes VNC server with NAWT, and they recommend that you run the VNC server, and use a VNC client to view it. They also include the iceWM window manager so you can have a full desktop-like thing running on IBM i.

Despite all of this VNC stuff, if you have an XServer running on your PC, you can have it output the Java GUI as well as any X11 software running in PASE directly to your PC desktop. I did that extensively with FreeBSD as my desktop and IBM i using the XFree86 server.

You can even use the free Cygwin support for X11 on Windows to run AIX or Java programs running on IBM i, and display them directly on your Windows desktop. Unfortunately, I've had some issues with Cygwin-X -- in particular, issues where keyboard input doesn't seem to work in the xterm provided with IBM i. IBM never seemed to be able to figure out what the problem was, so they told everyone not to use Cygwin-X, and in fact, they say the best approach is to use VNC. (I disagree, since VNC is noticably slower, and who the heck wants a whole desktop?!) But, I digress...

The point is... IBM ships a version of X11, already set up for running on IBM i. (So it should be possible to get wkhtmltopdf to work... though I haven't used that particular tool.)

Unfortunately, IBM's documentation for this is very poor. They explain NAWT in the Information Center, but provide no information (that I can find) for how to install it.

They reference VNC as requiring LPO 5799-PTL, but the links to the web site for 5799-PTL are all broken. The links broke about the time that IBM i 7.1 was released this spring -- but even the 7.1 docs refer to the same link. And nowhere do they explain that X11 is used with NAWT (even though it clearly is, when you look at what's happening.)

It's enough to make you want to chew your own foot off.

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