From: rosenkra@convex.com (William Rosenkranz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Trouble with MiNT 0.94 and GEM.PRG
Date: 27 Jul 1992 21:55:38 GMT
Organization: CONVEX Computer Corporation, Richardson, Tx., USA
X-Disclaimer: This message was written by a user at CONVEX Computer
              Corp. The opinions expressed are those of the user and
              not necessarily those of CONVEX.


spengos@germinal.ibp.fr sez:
>before GEM.PRG started acting weird. Anyway, I normally start on tcsh (but I
>have the same problem with the MiNT vanilla shell). In fact I'm quite happy
>with not using GEM at all (although if I ever see a MiNT aware Gemini, I'm
>gonna use it like hell :-), but once in a while I do need to start it in 
>the middle of a session. So, I'm not starting GEM twice as it was sugested in
>another posting. I cleaned up both the /auto and *.acc files, but it's still
>no good.

if all u want to do is start the occasional GEM program under tcsh, i posted
a program to atari.archive to do this. as i recall it is a file called
rg10.zoo (rg = "run gem"). it is basically like the "gem" command in gulam
and other shells. note that gem must already be running (actually started,
not "running"). it is in ~ftp/atari/new (you can't do an "ls" but u can
get the file with "get rg10.zoo") on a.a. i am told tcsh must be a prg not
a ttp because the desktop loader starts the 2 differently. on entry, rg will:
1) hide cursor, 2) show mouse, Pexec the program. on exit, the process is
reversed. rg is a (minimal) gem application itself. get the file in binary
mode via FTP. tested daily (by me) with uniterm. i work at home most of the
time.

the way i boot up is to start mint as the last thing in my auto dir and go
to the desktop. it opens right to the path of tcsh.prg, so i then just dclick
on it and never see the desktop again. if i need to run uniterm, i have an
alias: alias trm 'pushd $unipath;rg uniterm.prg;popd'. rg is in your path,
of course. i don't keep uniterm in my path (and i think rg currently needs
a path since it does not search for the file) hence the pushd/popd. uniterm
has a resource, too. then i just do "trm" and uniterm starts up. i do this
for the half dozen GEM programs i run. i posted source with it so u can
beef it up (add code to make gray "desktop" background, find file in path,
etc).

of course typing 3 chars+ret is not anywhere near as convenient as mousing
into 20 different directories under the desktop to get to uniterm and it
takes me almost 1 second to type this so it may not be as fast as a mouse.
unfortunately, i can issue "trm" from any directory i happen to be in as
well. another weakness of the CLI approach is that i can alias to "t" instead
of "trm" if i wanted to, thus saving 2 keystrokes (but still having to type
2 keys). and i have to remember a single char rather than the path where i
keep uniterm. with only 62 upper/lower case letters plus numbers from which
to choose, i quickly run out of 1 char aliases and i then have to be saddled
with the huge inconvenience of actually typing one of the possible 3844 two
char combinations. it is so bad a situation that i use exactly the same
aliases "on the job" so my productivity is far too high and i have way too
few environments to try and remember. too bad i use POSIX/ANSI compilers/tcsh
at work and at home, too. tsk, tsk. woe is me and others like me... :-)

-bill
rosenkra@convex.com
-- 
Bill Rosenkranz            |UUCP: {uunet,texsun}!convex!rosenkra
Convex Computer Corp.      |ARPA: rosenkra@convex.com