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.