On Jan 18, 2005, at 5:43 PM, Eric Lecht wrote:
OK, Alexander, YOU are the man today. It worked. I owe you lunch. A BIG one.
Seriously, today I wanted to be floored, and I in fact am floored.
THANKS for taking the trouble to intuit where I was in the process, and likely what had gone awry.
I was missing the Binary-Update description part of the process. Somewhere on the Fink "update" page, elaborating on the Dist-upgrade process, either i MISSED the "Update descriptions" line or something, but if one simply does 'Dist-upgrade packages' you get all SORTS of errors. Once I did the 'Update descriptions'' part, the Dist-upgrade packages part just sort of worked. Figured i'd share that.
Also: w/ as old a version as mine, a weird anomaly manifested itself toward the end, where FinkCommander's dialogue queries the user as to mirror site preferences, getting more granular about it as it proceeds. The interaction window didn't come up; the program *appeared* to hang. it hadn't, it was waiting for input. I started poking around, FOUND the 'Tools-interact with Fink' selection and I was OK. I had to do that like a dozen times. it was a "gotcha" that would likely hang a more panicky user. I'll file that away for when I upgrade my son's Powebook when I visit him late Jan.
Yeah, that's a little annoyance with Fink Commander: some requests for interaction don't seem to get popped forward for attention immediately.
Last, impressions of the new XDarwin, and how at least Gimp now runs:
It takes about 24 seconds to load rootless X on my iBook 1.33Ghz/32MB video/768MB ram laptop. The older X11 on the Powerbook G4/1Ghz/64MB video/768 ram loaded a LOT faster. I'm not grousing, merely sharing my experience.
This is 4.3.99, right? I think 4.4 (which isn't in the binary distribution as of yet) is a bit faster.
X loaded, and came up with 3 terminal windows, 1 big one to the left, and 2 smaller (one above the other) to the right.
I chose the larger, switched to /sw, cd bin, ./gimp....
Here's where things get a bit odd; Gimp loads. Gimp splash appears. Nothing else appears till I *click on the term window* i'm loading Gimp from (I experimented...after waiting and waiting).
I do a File-open. Again, nothing appears till I *click on the term window*. Open dialogue appears. I browse and choose a file, click OK. You guess it --you have to click on the term window for the image to appear in a Gimp window.
Not sure what's up with that. Figured i'd pass it on. Haven't done anything else yet. Hey --it WORKS. FinkCommander is now at v. hmmmm......0.5.2 Wasn't that the same version as earlier? Again, no complaints here. But i wanted to at least share w/ the Fink Beginners my experience, while it was fresh in my head, hope it may help others....
That's it --again, many, many thanks. What a powerful program. What a colossal amount of work must've gone into this. Considering the myriad possibilities of configurations and versions, it's fairly elegant as well. A little intimidating for newbies out there (and we are all newbies somewhere); such is life.
regards,
Eric Lecht
These last issues sound like they may be specific to the built in XFree86 window manager (twm). You can install a different window manager --quite a few are available via Fink.
-- Alexander Hansen Fink Documentarian [Day Job] Levitated Dipole Experiment http://www.psfc.mit.edu/LDX
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