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Date:Mon Aug 20 19:06:16 2002 
Subject:Installing poplog on Madrake 8.2 
From:Jonathan L Cunningham 
Volume-ID:1020820.02 

These are some notes on how I managed to install poplog, for the
benefit of anyone else who wants to try it. It was fairly easy,
but I have some questions which I hope the experts can answer.

About three years later than I originally planned, I finally got
around to installing Linux on my home machine[1], and Poplog devotees
will be pleased to hear that it has taken only another three days
before I installed Poplog.

Why so long? Well, despite Mandrake 8.2 (the one I had installation
CDs for) being intended to be idiot proof, it failed to notice I
had an ethernet card, and also concluded that my graphics card
was not capable of more than 800x600 at 16bits. Something I
discovered after much pain by doing

  $ startx -- -depth16

which was the only way to get X-Windows to work at first.

So I had to spend some time persuading it that, yes, I really do
have a NE2000 compatible ethernet card, and also downloading and
installing a new driver for the graphics card[2]. And, of course,
once I had a full screen 1024x768 display, I had to see whether the
games were any good or not -- that took a few hours :-).

And yesterday I spent some time trying to persuade it to print
only on the paper, rather than mostly on the paper, when I print
stuff. Still working on that one ...

Anyway, today I was able to download linuxmotif poplog and also
linux poplog from the Birmingham site and put them on a CD. (I'm not
going to attempt to download 23 MB through my modem at home.)

I also, reading the Install file on that site, downloaded Motif
just in case. (The file says you need Lesstif or Motif, to run
the bells-n-whistles version of Poplog.)

Ok. That was the first problem. I tried installing Motif and
got some errors because it didn't want to overwrite Lesstif.

It seems Mandrake 8.2 installs (a version of) Lesstif if you do
the default installation. [Question 0: how could I have found
out I already had Lesstif?]

However, since rpm didn't want to overwrite anything, I'm assuming
and hoping that the Lesstif is undamaged.

But my first question is:
(1) Does it matter? Should I replace the Lesstif with Motif?

Anyway, I installed the linuxmotif version, using the step by
step instructions, and it starts ok, but whether I run pop11 or
xved, I get the following warning:

;;; Warning: can't open shared object /usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.so
(Inappropriate
;;;     ioctl for device)

Question 2:
(2) What does it mean?

The xved seems to work. I next installed the non-motif version
of poplog (in a different directory) and it starts and runs
without the warning.

The two xveds are different. The motif version has a menu bar,
with various things on it: File, Edit, View, Compile and Help.
The menus seem to work ok, *except* that for the "Help" menu at the
extreme right, the last couple of menu items open up a new window
(e.g. "About Poplog").

These new windows do not close when I click on the close box. They
do go blank, and can still be minimised etc. but they won't go
away. A forced garbage collection doesn't get rid of them either.

Question 3:
(3) Is this a known bug, or something wrong with my configuration?
See also question 2. My hunch is that these are unconnected, but
my other hunch is that they may be related.

As additional data, there is no problem closing normal xved windows,
I get a dialog with three options: save, [something] or continue.

As additional, additional data, on exiting poplog, the following
message is repeated n times, where I haven't been able to determine
beforehand what the value of n will be. It may be related to how
may xved windows I've opened. It occurs even if I don't open
the Unremovable Windows of Help.

;;; WARNING - xtw: X TOOLKIT WARNING (xtRemoveGrab: grabError --
XtRemoveGrab asked to remove a widget not on the list)

The pop11 comment markers suggest to me that there is a problem in
poplog. But what is causing it?

Final question:
(5) (Yes, that's right. Question 4 is in the previous paragraph.)
Since I'm used to interfaces where you select a window, and then
move the irritating mouse pointer out of the way, I thought at
first the keyboard wasn't working in xved. It took me a while to
figure out that the focus was following the mouse *for this one
window only*, i.e. in order to type in an xved window, I have to
select it (over the other windows) and also the mouse has to be
in the edit area, if I move it into the menu bar area the window
no longer gets keystrokes. What's the magic incantation to tell
xved to behave the way I'm used to? FWIW, I chose KDE as the
window environment (instead of Gnome), but I assume that the behaviour
of xved is independent of the window manager?

Thanx for any help,
  Jonathan

[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.

[2] The graphics card is actually quite new (maybe newer than
Mandrake 8.2?) because the original one -- this is an oldish PC --
blew up last month.

-- 
Jonathan Cunningham (catching up with backlog)