gdm3 on s390

[Alexander Riedel]

Hi,
does anybody have succesfully running gdm3 on a s390 ?
On my old system i used it to get over vnc a login-mask for gnome.

But in debian 6 i am not able to start gdm3. It is restarting the whole
time, because
it is not finding a /dev/tty0 . I have only /dev/console (z/VM) and
/dev/ttysclp0 (HMC-Ascii-console)

Some hints would be nice.

Kind regards,

Alexander

[Stephen Powell]

does anybody have succesfully running gdm3 on a s390?
On my old system i used it to get over vnc a login-mask for gnome.
But in debian 6 i am not able to start gdm3. It is restarting the whole
time, because
it is not finding a /dev/tty0 . I have only /dev/console (z/VM) and
/dev/ttysclp0 (HMC-Ascii-console)

You can't run an X server on s390 because s390 has no graphical console
to display things on, as you noted above.
It is possible to run graphics applications on s390 (i.e. an X client)
but they must be connected over the network to a remote server
(i.e. a PC running the X server). I know this is possible. But I don't
recommend it. As much as I like the mainframe, it really wasn't designed
for this type of application. The mainframe is much better suited for
back-end servers, such as SQL databases, web servers, ftp servers, etc.
Just think about it. All the user interface devices (keyboard, mouse,
graphical display) are on a remote PC and all those screen updates and
mouse mickeys (yes, that is what they are called) have to go across a
high-bandwidth network connection to keep decent response time. It chews
up a lot of network bandwidth and (very expensive) mainframe CPU cycles.

It's possible to do, but in my humble opinion it just isn't the right
platform for this type of application. You're better off doing something
like a browser-based application, with the browser running on somebody's
PC and the web server and its server-side programming running in a virtual
machine under z/VM.
--
.''`. Stephen Powell
: :' :
`. `'`
`-

[Philipp Kern]

Hi,

Post by Alexander Riedel
does anybody have succesfully running gdm3 on a s390 ?
On my old system i used it to get over vnc a login-mask for gnome.
But in debian 6 i am not able to start gdm3. It is restarting the whole
time, because
it is not finding a /dev/tty0 . I have only /dev/console (z/VM) and
/dev/ttysclp0 (HMC-Ascii-console)

please file a proper bug report against the package. You should still be able
to get an X server through vncserver. Normally gdm/kdm are used with XDMCP to
provide remote desktops, so the combination with vnc seems strange to me.
If that isn't possible anymore, I'd say it's a bug. If you just want a
graphical environment, use vncserver. (Also vncviewer's -via option is pretty
helpful to connect via SSH.)

Kind regards,
Philipp Kern