Remote Type 340

[Jonathan Gutierrez]

Hello, I recently built my kit about 3 days ago and am trying to run the Pidp-10 completely headless as a systemd service without the Raspberry pi OS desktop GUI.

I ran into an issue with the type 340 not initializing well without $DISPLAY being defined. I was able to work around this by wrapping the execution in xvfb-run and streaming it for remote access through x11vnc.

The type 340 is usable completely remotely now, but I was wondering if there was an official or canonical way to handle network-attached vector displays on headless setups? 

I want to post my documentation but I wanted to avoid making anything redundant.

Thanks.

[Steven Hirsch]

I've had mixed success running the Type 340 over X forwarding.  In particular, after I let it run for a day 'munch' would grind to a halt and start 
 chewing up large amounts of CPU on the PiDP-10 side.  

[Jonathan Gutierrez]

So it doesn't seem like there is a very common workaround beyond X forwarding; from what I could find it was usually done with ssh -X or ssh -Y. That's fine for most cases, but for headless automation it just won't do.

Whats worked for me is in the markdown file I attached. I wanted to place it here just for anyone in the future that wants to replicate this. The file is from my personal notes, so it may not be super clear or cover all cases, though I do hope it gives a general idea of how to run your pidp without having to have anything but a power cable attached to it. At the end I even integrated it to rpdp, so you can call the type 340 with rpdp t340, thus making it seem like a natural integration.

[Lars Brinkhoff]

There have been some experiments modifying the emulator so it sends display data over the network to a remote application.  For example, there is a JavaScript version of the vector display and the Knight TV.