I recently had to remove a virus (actually hundreds) from a friend's machine by kicking his hard disc back to the stone age. As I'm not yet able to convince him of the merits of Linux, I had to re-install Windows ME and I thought it would be good to introduce him to Inkscape.
As is probably well known to everyone other than me, this is apparently not possible because of GTK+ requirements and the installation failed. However it didn't fail tidily and the first indication that something was wrong was when I tried to start the apparently installed application.
Obviously I needed to un-install the package, but couldn't do it easily because there was no entry in the Control Panel|Add or Remove Programs table. In consequence I had to clear the Inkscape components manually, including the Registry. If some versions of Windows are not supported I would have expected the Windows installer to check its environment before creating directories, Registry entries, Icons etc.?
Do I need to raise a bug, or is this issue already known?
Peter HB
On Sat, 20 May 2006, Peter Hillier-Brook wrote:
Date: Sat, 20 May 2006 17:29:35 +0100 From: Peter Hillier-Brook <phb@...659...> Reply-To: inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net To: inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Inkscape-user] Inkscape on Windows
I recently had to remove a virus (actually hundreds) from a friend's machine by kicking his hard disc back to the stone age. As I'm not yet able to convince him of the merits of Linux, I had to re-install Windows ME and I thought it would be good to introduce him to Inkscape.
Windows ME is an abomination. Windows NT is better and so is Windows 98.
I hope he is paying you by the hour.
Knoppix (best hardward detection and doesn't ask any stupid questions) or the Ubuntu Live CD ('cause I like Gnome) are good non-invasive ways to get someone to try Linux.
As is probably well known to everyone other than me, this is apparently not possible because of GTK+ requirements and the installation failed.
Since Cairo was introducted in Gtk 2.8 support for Windows 9x was dropped (although I'm sure if a developer was brave/foolish enough it woudl be possible to revive but there isn't enough interest in old versions of Windows anymore). There are some hacks which might allow you to get Inkscape running on older machines but I wouldn't recommend it, especially not on someone elses machine.
However it didn't fail tidily and the first indication that something was wrong was when I tried to start the apparently installed application.
Do I need to raise a bug, or is this issue already known?
Sourceforge bug tracker for Inkscape http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=93438&atid=604306
Sourceforge request tracker for Inkscape http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=93438&atid=604309
[ 1363049 ] No 0.43 Uninstall Option in Win32 http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1363049&gro...
Think that bug report covers it. Take a look and add your own comments.
On May 20, 2006, at 2:33 PM, Alan Horkan wrote:
As is probably well known to everyone other than me, this is apparently not possible because of GTK+ requirements and the installation failed.
Since Cairo was introducted in Gtk 2.8 support for Windows 9x was dropped (although I'm sure if a developer was brave/foolish enough it woudl be possible to revive but there isn't enough interest in old versions of Windows anymore). There are some hacks which might allow you to get Inkscape running on older machines but I wouldn't recommend it, especially not on someone elses machine.
More precisely it wasn't quite "dropped".
It's more that Win9x specific bugs came in and no developers have had time to go chase them down. "Dropped" might imply more of "oh, we've switched to the FooW() api, so you can't build for 9x anymore". This is actually more of "Yeah, there are some crashes happening in 9x now, feel free to track it down and send us fixes so we can include them."
Alan Horkan wrote:
[cut]
Windows ME is an abomination. Windows NT is better and so is Windows 98.
I couldn't agree more!
I hope he is paying you by the hour.
Fat chance. By the bottle is my best hope:-)
Knoppix (best hardward detection and doesn't ask any stupid questions) or the Ubuntu Live CD ('cause I like Gnome) are good non-invasive ways to get someone to try Linux.
His hardware is so poor (a corner shop home brew with rubbish components) that Knoppix (and Kanotix and Ubuntu) won't run. I did get INSERT 1.3.6 running, but parted made a hash of the partitioning and I had to stick his disk in one of my machines to partition and format it.
[cut]
Thanks a lot for your input, Alan.
Peter HB
On May 20, 2006, at 3:11 PM, Peter Hillier-Brook wrote:
I hope he is paying you by the hour.
Fat chance. By the bottle is my best hope:-)
[SNIP]
His hardware is so poor (a corner shop home brew with rubbish components) that Knoppix (and Kanotix and Ubuntu) won't run. I did get INSERT 1.3.6 running, but parted made a hash of the partitioning and I had to stick his disk in one of my machines to partition and format it.
[cut]
Thanks a lot for your input, Alan.
Anyway...
If you or anyone you know has time to hunt down the crash causes, then that would be helpful. We (or at least many of us including myself) would like Inkscape to be happy on as many platforms as possible. At the moment, though, my Win32 testing is all on a QEMU image being emulated on a Mac, so it's a bit slow for me to do anything. The good news is that I've at least talked to some of the GTK+ developers in person about this, and they'll be happy for any good solution to the problem.
Jon A. Cruz wrote: [cut]
Anyway...
If you or anyone you know has time to hunt down the crash causes, then that would be helpful. We (or at least many of us including myself) would like Inkscape to be happy on as many platforms as possible. At the moment, though, my Win32 testing is all on a QEMU image being emulated on a Mac, so it's a bit slow for me to do anything. The good news is that I've at least talked to some of the GTK+ developers in person about this, and they'll be happy for any good solution to the problem.
I would like to take this on, but I have no access to anything less than NT. My friend's machine goes back in a few hours and I don't really want to see it ever again!
If it's any help at all, I tried to install the GIMP first and the first part of that was to install GTK+ 2.8.9. This failed cleanly by reporting that ME was not supported. I then tried Inkscape and it went all the way through installation with no error messages, but clearly it hadn't installed cleanly.
Unfortunately I didn't log the assertion errors that were reported, but more to the point, I wonder why the GTK+ component in the Inkscape package didn't check its OS environment before trying to complete installation? That should be easy to track down I would think.
Oh, before I forget, the graphics environment is very primitive with only VGA and 4 bit colour. I would guess that that is very relevant, but again it's the apparent absence of defensive coding that concerns me.
When I return the machine I will locate the necessary driver to obtain better graphics resolution and try to install Inkscape again, at least to obtain some diagnostics.
Regards
Peter HB
From bugtracker
[ 1395505 ] 0.43 crash at startup on Win98se
Copy the files
libgdkmm-2.4-1.dll libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll libgtkmm-2.4-1.dll libgtk-win32-2.0-0.dll
to 0.43 directory.
Does also work for WinMe (at least until Inkscape 0.43+devel, built May 2 2006)
participants (4)
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Jon A. Cruz -
Peter Hillier-Brook