From: danubius@halcyon.com (Joseph R. Pannon)
Subject: Re: Seyon 1.7
Organization: The 23:00 News and Mail Service
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 10:13:28 GMT

In article <1993Jan7.010930.1477@athena.mit.edu> ss@uucp writes:

>Seyon, like almost all other source distributions, untars in ./seyon.
>If you untar it in / it'll branch off you root directory, if you untar
>it in /bin it'll brach off that, and so on for the rest. A reasonable
>setup would be to untar all source distributions in /usr/src or
>/usr/local/src.

OK, Muhammad, let me start by saying that I am all for saving Bosnia. 
I also thank you for personally responding to me regarding you software.

However, you have to realize that many of us are in a different league
here in the Unix front; for many of us Linux is a tool for learning
Unix.  That means that some of us, myself included, are not very
knowledgeable about the tar utility, either.  In fact, for some reason
the tar man page is also useless in my set up (SLS 0.99), as when I
invoke it, I get a text that starts like this:

\input texinfo @c -*-texinfo-*-

@setfilename tar.info
@settitle The @code{tar} Manual: DRAFT
@ifinfo
This file documents the tape archive of the GNU system.

Copyright (C) 1988 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are
preserved on all copies.

@ignore
Permission is granted to process this file through TeX and print the
results, provided the printed document carries copying permission
notice identical to this one except for the removal of this paragraph
(this paragraph not being relevant to the printed manual).

@end ignore
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of
this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that
------------------ etc. -------------------

When I glanced into the tar man page of an HP-UX work station, the
explanation of it was enough to give me a vertigo.  So what I did, I
used the sysinstall -install <pkg.taz> method, the same that SLS
employs.  I figured if that could create the right directories, this
should do it, too.  Besides, sysinstall makes a nice record of installed
software which can be used to neatly uninstall it later.  What's wrong
with that?  Anyway, no matter what my working directory was, sysinstall
kept installing seyon in the same /seyon directory.  I have eventually
managed to place it in another place by telling sysinstall that my root
was somewhere else in the directory tree and that worked (after I
created there that install/installed dir branch, too.)

>I didn't include Configure in 1.7. I deleted all references to it in
>the docs, but the one in INSTALL evaded me. INSTALL does tell you to
>edit config.h by hand in case of trouble though, so that's what you
>should have done. Anyhow, users of linux, 386BSD, SVR4, and SVR3 need
>not touch config.h at all, since it's already setup correctly for
>their systems. 

Unfortunately, the only usable document to read BEFORE install was that
1-INSTALL file (and also the most logical to me).  Anyway, I did follow
the other install steps and everything seemed to go all right, though I
wondered about some of the directories where the 'make install' moved
things.

After the last step, I invoked startx and wanted to see if I could get
the newly installed seyon man page through the popup menu.  Well, it was
listed there among the User Commands, but when I called it up, all I got
was an empty page.  No text in the help page window!

When I typed in the 'seyon' command in the xterm window, I got a warning
as this:

>> Warning: could not execute 'seyon-emu'
>> Warning: falling to 'xterm'

In the window assigned to seyon, I got this:

>> Error: no modem device is specified
>> Error: modem init. routine failed
>> Notice: no use continuing, press a key ...
>
So it was obvious that I was supposed to have set up some modem params
for seyon, but not having any man page or other plain ASCII document I
could read even before installing seyon, I could not figure it out
where and how to set up those params.  Maybe in the Seyon resource file
in app-defaults?  I haven't checked there yet.  Something like this
could also be in the .Xdefaults file, but I could not find that file
anywhere so far.  Beats me.  So, maybe you could help me out with this.
If I was able to set up my linux for HD boot and figure out all those
video params for my Xconfig file, I should be able to tackle this
problem, too.  But I need some direction which way to go.

>Hmmm, I think a manual of 700+ lines (formatted) and a FAQ of 750+
>lines is rather on the ample side. There is not much I can do though
>if people choose not to read them. 

People will choose to read it if it's accessible and logically placed,
something like the README or README.1ST files in most DOS packages.
The problem with your docs is that they are accessible only AFTER seyon
is installed, in the form of a man page.  In my case even that didn't
work.  That's pretty frustrating, because everybody who mmanaged to get
it going is praising Seyon.  So, let me do the same, will you?

Thanks,
Joe Pannon
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux