NCSA Mosaic FAQ: Machines and Systems

# 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 src/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 available 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 you haven't moved to the new WWW library yet?

We are working on it right now.

### 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.

### To what systems has Mosaic been ported?

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

- Available from NCSA's ftp server:
  - HP700-series binary
  - NeXT binary
  - VMS binary
  - VMS diffs
- Linux binary available at sunsite.unc.edu in /pub/Linux/system/Network/info-systems/
- 386bsd source and binary available at gil.physik.rwth-aachen.de in /pub/xmosaic/