aostatus Observer's Display

There is a display in the control room that looks nice and is designed for the use of observers. It is available for observers and runs on the linux or sunos. Here is a quick lesson.

The aostatus display is an X application and can be run from most any sun or linux box at the ao. The destination X server needs to have TrueType fonts installed. Solaris boxes need to set the fontpath as below. Linux displays need to configure themselves for TrueType fonts.

• Linux - The version of Red Hat linux that we use here at AO does not come with the truetype fonts installed. The font that is used when connecting to a linux X11 server is:

  
  Linux Font:    "-monotype-arial narrow-*-r-*-*-22-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"
  
  

  Here are directions for sys admins to add the fonts to a particular machine running XFree86. Add the following lines the XFree86 configuration file that you are using. Now on my machine its, /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 or XF86Config.

  Section "Files"
    FontPath    "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType"
  

  and

  Section "Module"
    Load  "freetype"         # TrueType font handler
  

  Type:

  cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts
  mkdir TrueType
  cd TrueType
  

  Expand the tar file with

  tar xfvz true.tar.gz 
  

  Restart the X server - by logging out and logging back in. Then start the display for linux:

  /home/aoui/display/aostatus/aostatus
  

• Sun - To make aostatus work on the sun, follow these directions. The sun fonts come already installed. The font that is used is:

  Sun fonts:    "-monotype-arial-regular-r-narrow-*-22-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"
  

  Login to the sun and start the openwindows if it didnt start already. All that is needed is the following xset command:

               xset fp+ /usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType
  

  Then to run aostatus on the openindows display:

      /home/aoui/display/solaris/aostatus
  

The aostatus program will see if it can find one or the other of these fonts on the xserver that it connects to. Otherwise it does the best that it can (which means the info is there but its ugly). It doesnt matter where you run the executable.

Here is a screenshot of aostatus. When I get to it I will enumerate the features here.