I've just downloaded the cygwin binary off OpenDX.org to see how installation goes. I'm doing this onto a W2K Pro Pentium III system on which I've recently installed Cygwin. Looking at the Readme, it has the data format libraries installed, so that addresses one of my concerns.
The other, though, is the install process itself. If OpenDX is to have wide use on Windows platforms, it needs to be easy and foolproof to install. I had two problems on my clean Windows/Cygwin box. First, the dx.exe and dxlocal.exe (which should be the same. when the normal make install process is run, it should check whether the csh scripts will work; if not, src/misc/dxlocal.exe should be installed as bin/dx.exe). In this case, it looks like the dx.exe thats in the binary download comes from a MSVC build - it has DXD_WIN defined and therefore looks in .../bin_intelnt, rather than .../bin_cygwin, for executables. I had a problem with dxexec that I'm confused by. The binary download doesn't come with a libpng.dll. I had one, from somewhere, in /usr/bin, but it didn't work - a symbol, png_create_read_struct wasn't found. I built v1.0.8 libpng.dll, and it worked. Cygwin seems to install cygpng2.dll, not libpng.dll. I don't know if its the same thing, but dxexec as downloaded needs to find v1.0.8 libpng.dll. I wasn't able to put this on a non-cygwinized Windows box, but certainly, without cygwin1.dll, it won't work. Can this be included in the binary? It would be way nice if this binary worked whether or not cygwin has been installed. Another problem is that the default behaviour in dx.c for the DISPLAY variable is wrong for my X server, anyway; it defaults to :0.0 and my X server needs localhost:0.0 When you install a standard Windows app, the registry (I think) is updated to set up the necessary path and environment variables. At least the path; I'm not sure about the env vars - but the installer is not burdened with having to set them up right manually. Is that possible here? It is with an InstallShield installation. I haven't been able to download the MSVC binary; looks like the server was overwhelmed. I'll try it again tomorrow before California wakes up. Greg
