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Date:Mon Aug 21 18:27:19 2002 
Subject:Poplog with Lesstif/Motif (Was: Re: Installing poplog on Madrake 8.2) 
From:Aaron Sloman 
Volume-ID:1020821.03 


Steve Isard <S.IsardDeleteThis@ed.ac.uk> writes:
in reply to a message from Jonathan Cunningham that I have not yet seen.

> Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 12:09:10 +0100
>
> Jonathan L Cunningham wrote:
>
> > [Question 0: how could I have found
> > out I already had Lesstif?]
>
> "rpm -q Lesstif" will tell you if there's an installed package called
> Lesstif.  "rpm -q -a" will give you a list of all installed packages, so
> if you pipe it through "grep tif" you can find out about Motif, Lesstif
> or any other variant of this overstretched pun.

Also, motif and lesstif are usually installed in
    /usr/X11R6/lib/

so look for files or symbolic links of the form
    libXm.so.*

If you have Lesstif you will probably find one that is clearly a
symbolic link to a Lesstif directory. If not it is probably
motif.

Since I discovered that motif was available free of charge I've stopped
using Lesstif. Redhat include motif on their CD. I've saved versions
from the openmotif site and also from redhat CD here:

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/openmotif/

I don't really know the differences between them.

When I tried Lesstif, about 3 or four years ago, it mostly worked but a
few widgets caused problems, e.g. the poplog file browser. The problems
went away when I installed motif instead.

However, more recent versions of Lesstif may be better. (There's a
Lesstif web site that indicates lots of active development.)

> > (1) Does it matter? Should I replace the Lesstif with Motif?
>
> I am definitely not an authority in this area.  As far as I'm aware,
> Poplog is the only program on my machine that uses Motif.  I installed
> it after Aaron posted an announcement about a free version on this list,
> and it Just Worked.

Various people have had trouble because poplog looks for something like
libXm.2.0 and a different library is available,e.g libXm.2.1. In the
past I have suggested putting in a symbolic link from the version that
exists to the file that poplog is looking for.

However as of YESTERDAY when trying to make poplog work with redhat 7.3
I discovered that an alternative is simply to run the shell script

    $usepop/pop/pop/poplink_cmnd

(possibly after editing path names to correspond to where you have
installed poplog).

That invokes the linker to create a file called newpop11, which has a
reference to the version of motif (or surrogate motif) that actually
exists on your machine.

So no new symbolic link in /usr/X11R6/lib is needed if you have a
version of motif that's different from the one against which poplog was
linked.

Then do

    cp newpop11 basepop11

    $popcom/mkstartup
    $popcom/makeimages

then (re)create whatever saved images you need yourself, e.g. birmingham
stuff.

One of our students told me she had today installed poplog from here

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/linux-cd/

on her laptop running mandrake 8.2, and everything worked first time
including the birmingham-lookalike installation scripts.

I did not ask her whether she had first installed motif.

Steve wrote:
> Since my system was working ok before I installed Lesstif, I felt fairly
> safe in removing it when it turned out to be unhelpful for Poplog.

I expect anything that uses Lesstif would continue to work if Lesstif
is replaced by motif. They are supposed to be fucntionally equivalent,
apart from bugs... ??

> You
> may be in a different position.  "rpm -e --test Lesstif" (don't really
> remove Lesstif, but print out what you would say if I asked you to
> remove it) will tell you what other packages on your machine depend on
> Lesstif

But only if they use the RPM mechanism. Other things that you install in
a more conventional way (untar, configure, then make, then make install)
will not have their dependencies liested in the RPM tables.

> If there aren't any, or they are ones you know you don't care
> about, then you might as well get rid of it and try Motif.  Otherwise,
> you have to recurse to find out how deep the dependency on Lesstif goes.

When I was unsure about this I merely renamed the links to lesstif and
kept them in a temp/ subdirectory in /usr/X11R6/lib/

Then it was easy to switch between lesstif and motif after installing
motif, as that merely put a few files and links in the same
directory.

But I never found anything that was broken as a result of the switch.
Most of the linux utilities don't use motif anyway: they use tcl/tk I
think?

[JLC]
> > [1] I already had a very old Slackware (I think) unix on an old 486,
> > but it only has 16MB of RAM, which is not enough to run X-Windows
> > and also applications at the same time.

[SI]
> Just for the record, I can run X and poplog simultaneously on my 486
> with 16MB RAM (and swap space, under muLinux). I didn't link X into the
> libc5 poplog, to keep the size down, so I don't know how Xved would
> behave.

You can probably reduce the size of Xved by relinking poplog without
motif, as explained in HELP newpop. Then you get Xved without menu
buttons (which I never use anyway) and without scrollbar (which is
not essential if you are fluent with  Ved's search commands.)

I seem to recall that propsheet will work if you don't have
motif, but all my rclib stuff works without propsheet or motif
and makes it easier to make control panels, sliders, dials etc.
do what you want because they are implemented via rc_graphic all
in pop-11.

Jonathan would approve, as he once started doing something similar.

He used LIB flavours, but I've gone for Steve Leach's objectclass
instead, as a more mature and pop11-like OOP system, and probably a lot
more efficient.

Aaron
====
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk   (ReadATas@please !)
PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/ (And free book on Philosophy of AI)
FREE TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html