xmosaic-1.2

I took a few hours, downloaded xmosaic-1.2 and got it working on Max OS X as part of an article I was writing - the code is here in case you want to experience what the web was like in 1993 :)

Demonstration

Here is a YouTube Video demonstrating the application.

Building xmosaic

The xmosaic-1.2 package can be built on a growing number of platforms, but each has its own pre-requisites and dependencies. On all platforms, you will need a C compiler such as gcc.

Pre-requisites by platform

Ubuntu Linux

Install the required dependencies before building:

$ apt-get install build-essential libxmu-dev libxmu-headers libxpm-dev libmotif-dev imagemagick

Mac OS X (10.6+)

On 10.8 and later, download and install XQuartz:

http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/

On all versions, download and install OpenMotif:

http://www.ist-inc.com/motif/download/index.html

OpenMotif installs into /usr/OpenMotif

Solaris 9 (32-bit)

The following Solaris packages need to be installed:

SUNWxwice (X Window System Inter-Client Exchange (ICE) Components)
SUNWxwplt (X Window System platform software)
SUNWxwrtl (X Window System & Graphics Runtime Library Links in /usr/lib)

Compiling the code

A top-level Makefile with platform targets is provided and recommended for all builds:

$ make linux     # Build for Linux
$ make osx       # Build for Mac OS X
$ make solaris9  # Build for Solaris 9

The original NCSA README and the subsidiary Makefiles provide more details.

To start xmosaic:

$ cd src
$ ./xmosaic &

Pre-built binaries

Here is a compiled Binary Macintosh Distribution that should work on Max OS X 10.6 or later (with the pre-requisites installed).

I am not an expert in Mac OS X application distribution so I don't have any kind of one-click installer simply because I don't have the skills to make such an installer.

Changes from original NCSA release

I have made very few changes to let it browse a bit more of the web reasonably:

• It uses HTTP/1.1 instead of HTTP 1.0 so it can see virtual hosted sites

• It uses sips for OS X to convert all images to gif to give best chance of seeing them. Under Linux it uses imagemagick.

• It ignores ampersand hex values as those were not invented yet

• It hides content between script and style tags as those were not invented yet

It also is pretty chatty in the console while it is running - I am still working on the code and want to see if it breaks.