Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

[email protected] (Bill Lavender) · Wed, 1 Apr 1998 10:33:26 -0600 (CST)

On Tue, 31 Mar 1998, John Sinclair wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 31 Mar 1998, Dan Yocum wrote:
> 
> > 
> > John,
> > 
> > How did the build go under RH5.0?  Did you get the extensions built as well?  
> > Do you have any notes that might be useful?  
> > 
> > For some reason, I can't get the extensions built on my RH4.2 system and am 
> > going to try to build the whole thing on a 5.0 to see if I have any luck.  
> > 
> 
> The build of base went fine. I have not yet tried to build extensions.
> I need to install motif first.
> 

One thing you should be aware of before you buy Motif is that the newest
releases of Metrolink Motif for Linux include an unsupported, but free
copy of the Xrt packages like XrtGraph.  This means you only have to spend
about $200 to get XrtGraph on Linux rather than the several thousands of
dollars you have to spend to get it on other platforms.

I have built Medm version 2.3.3 for EPICS 3.13.0 beta 11 under Debian
Linux 1.3.1 and had very little problem getting it to work.  There was
only one line in the Medm source that I had to patch, namely:

*** src/medm/medm/medmComposite.c.orig  Thu Nov  6 12:58:08 1997
--- src/medm/medm/medmComposite.c       Fri Jan  9 18:34:16 1998
***************
*** 193,201 ****
--- 193,208 ----
      clearResourcePaletteEntries();
      unhighlightSelectedElements();
      clearDlDisplayList(cdi->selectedDlElementList);
+ #if defined(linux)
+     /* WML */
+     if (!(elementPtr = createDlElement(0,NULL,NULL))) {
+       return 0;
+     }
+ #else
      if (!(elementPtr = createDlElement(NULL,NULL,NULL))) {
        return 0;
      }
+ #endif
      elementPtr->structure.element = dlElement;
      appendDlElement(cdi->selectedDlElementList,elementPtr);
      highlightSelectedElements();

The first parameter for createDlElement() is an enum type and GCC
under Linux gets upset if you pass a NULL to it.  However, if you
pass it a zero, GCC is happy.

MRCAT at the Advanced Photon Source has been using Medm under Linux
for about two months now and almost everything we've tested seems to 
work correctly.  The only minor anomaly I've seen is that if you click
on the right mouse button to pop up the little menu that says "Print",
"Close", etc., the Medm display that you clicked on jumps to the top
of the stack of windows and hides the popup menu.  This is only a 
minor nuisance as long as you remember to move your mouse to the far
right hand side of the Medm display before clicking the right mouse
button.  Then, most of the popup menu is outside the boundary of the
main Medm window and isn't hidden anymore.  This behavior happens under
both the FVWM window manager and the FVWM95 window manager.

One final comment is that you should be sure to use the newest version
of the Medm source, namely, version 2.3.3.  If you run older versions
of Medm under the FVWM or FVWM95 window managers, they die with an
error message like:

X Error of failed request:  BadAccess (attempt to access private resource denied)
  Major opcode of failed request:  28 (X_GrabButton)
  Serial number of failed request:  1336
  Current serial number in output stream:  1338

But Medm 2.3.3 runs under the FVWM family of window managers just fine.

Bill Lavender
Illinois Institute of Technology/IMCA-CAT/MRCAT
[email protected]
Phone: +1-630-252-0523,  Fax: +1-630-252-0521

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System