Why Tektronics are still the best in their field

At Root6 we sell lots of bits of video kit and for video test and measurement Tektronics are still the best. Their rasterised video test sets are superb and one of the killer features is the ability to treat the thing like a webserver for both control and logging. You hit the device with a browser which gets served a Java app that allows you full access to the instrement. Recently we've had real trouble with Tiger (Mac OS-X v.10.4) and the WVR7100 - after much fiddling I got this very complete reply from Tek's engineering group;

Thank you for contacting Tektronix technical support.

Part of the problem here is that there is no official Sun JVM for the MacOS platform, instead, Apple wrote their own version which looks much nicer and is mostly compliant... mostly. We usually recommend version 1.4.2 on Windows computers (since v1.5 is still a little buggy) but it's hard to say what version would be best for a Mac.

What I get when I try to run the WVR remote user interface depends on which browser I use. Internet Explorer simply gives me a gray screen and never does anything - that's fine, even Microsoft has given up on that browser. Safari seems to get close but at the very last second gives me a Java exception when trying to access a cookie so it looks like there's something subtly different about the way Safari handles cookies that prevents it from working with the WVR. FireFox worked perfectly, and until I can figure out why Safari choked my recommendation would be to download FireFox and try accessing the WVR with it. You should be able to get FireFox at www.mozilla.org.

If you still have trouble with FireFox then let me know and I'll work with you to resolve this issue. Also, if you still have trouble it would be helpful for me to know what errors (if any) you receive when trying to access the remote user interface, what version of Java you're running and what version of the OS you're running. If all else fails we might have better luck with a stand-alone version of the Java application which you can download from the Tektronix website.

One last thing... make sure you have cookies enabled, the WVR remote user interface needs them to function properly.

I hope you find the above information useful and please feel free to contact me with any further questions you might have.

So there you go - GET FIREFOX!