From: judd@nosc.mil (Randy Judd)
Subject: Problems with 3.0 and FrameMaker
Reply-To: judd@nosc.mil
Organization: NCCOSC, NRaD Division
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 14:31:29 GMT


I have had 3.0 installed for about 3 weeks and I have noticed a couple of 
problems I would like some comment on.  I have an upgraded Cube with a 600 meg
Maxtor disk, 28 Meg of RAM, a PLI Floppy, and the NeXT CDrom drive.  I also
have a NeXT printer.

(1)
FrameMaker does not seem to be as robust as it was under 2.1, and has crashed
on me 5 or 6 times out of about 4 hours of use.  Three or four of these crashes
have come with the following error scrolling contiuously on the console

Oct  5 20:59:38 localhost WindowServer[125]: Event discarded: window 160: 
5 @ (2.017613e+19,4.709765e-307), 0.

Generally frame freezes when I save it, and the cursor turns into a disk and refuses
to come back.  I have been trying to make sure to let events go to completion
in FrameMaker before doing the next event, since usually the lockup occurs after
a save, and then clicking on another window, or trying to close the window I am in.

(2)
Another problem I have noticed is that when I kill a process in the process window
of the workspace the process says dying but never vanishes from the process window.
It does appear to die in the workspace, and if restarted will replace the process
in the process window.  This isn't just FrameMaker, as I have had to kill a couple 
of processes and noticed this behaviour on all of them.  Is this a bug or some sort
of feature?

(3)
I have had some problems with the device drivers for my PLI supper floppy. I changed
the device driver (in this case sd0h) to read, write for everybody (chmod ugo+rw), 
and this allowed me to un-tar disks with data from my Sun at work without becoming
root, however yesterday I needed to move some data from my NeXT at home to my Sun
at work I got a message which said I couldn't tar because I did not own the device
so I had to chown of /dev/sd0h to my user name in order to use it to tar without
becoming root. Am I doing something wrong here?  I don't remember having to do this
under 2.1, and it does not seem right to me. 

As long as I am on this subject I want to bitch about this a little.  
(begin bitch)  
The transfer of data using tar between UNIX computers is very important.  NeXT seems
to have made this very difficult for the standard user to be able to use.  I don't understand why they have gone to all the trouble to make PC disks ( and I guss now MAC disks) mount in the file system, and they have completely ignored standard UNIX file transfers. There is no particular reason when you insert a disk that is not PC or MAC or some standard that the workspace couldn't put up some sort of ICON with a Question Mark in it and the device driver as the file name in the work space.  If you click o




n the disk the system could bring up a message block saying the disk is unreadable and must be handled from a terminal, maybe with some options to format the disk.  You could then eject the disk using the standard eject command, instead of trying to figure out what driver you need to use to eject it, which is different from the one you need to read and write to it, and then figure out what permisions to put on the driver (in this
case s) so that you can use it without becoming root.  A pop up help as to how to get the proper permisions on the device drivers would be helpful to.
(end bitch)

Any ideas to make FrameMaker more stable would be greatly appreciatied. Thanks
for your time.

                                                 Randy Judd
                                                 judd@nosc.mil



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