Re: [ePiX-users] Compilation failing after install

[Ben Tillman]

On 02/12/2007, Jay Belanger <address@hidden> wrote:

"Ben Tillman" <address@hidden> writes:

> Hello everyone,

Hi.  I was just about to write about what may be the same problem.

> The machine I do most of my latex work on runs windows xp,

Windows xp?  It sounds custom made for ePiX.

> $ epix -v sphere.xp
> epix: Processing sphere.xp:
> epix: /usr/bin/g++ epix-3232/sphere- tmp.cc -w -o epix-3232/sphere -I/usr/local
> /include -L/usr/local/lib/epix -lm -lepix
> epix: WARNING: Compilation of sphere.xp failed

I don't know much about Windows xp.  What file system does it use?

I just started keeping all my work on a usb flash drive, to make it easy
to take between home and office.  Plus I'm a firm believer in the maxim:
keep all your eggs in one basket.
Anyhow, the usb flash drive has the vfat file system, and apparently ePiX
won't work on that filesystem.  ePiX creates symbolic links, and vfat
won't allow that.  I've taken to creating the pictures on my hard drive
(ext3), and then copying them to my work directory.
Is there a way to do the work in place on the usb drive?

> I'm really at a loss here. I can't find any mention of this happening on the
> net, and the error message doesn't seem to give me any indication of what I
> should be looking to fix, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Are there symbolic links in windows?  My wild guess is that the file
system doesn't allow symbolic links, and so not only won't ePiX work,
but if Windows doesn't know about symbolic links, it can't tell you
what's wrong.  But it's only a wild guess; I know little about windows.

Jay


_______________________________________________
ePiX-users mailing list
address@hidden
http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/epix-users

I believe the cygwin program is supposed to emulate a linux environment under windows. So far it seems to work well - emacs works fine, compilation of epix went fine, all within cygwin.

I think you're probably right about this being a windows problem (or more specifically, a problem of me trying to run epix in an environment it wasn't designed for), but I'm not so sure it's a symbolic link problem. As far as I know windows does not use them, as you suggested, but it seems strange that cygwin would choke on something so fundamental, while at the same time managing to compile epix, a 'startx' and running emacs - none of which are possible under windows either (without cygwin). If it was the problem, I would at least expect cygwin to know it was a symbolic link problem.

As for your problem, if it's not possible create symbolic links on a vfat system, then maybe it would be worthwhile writing a quick and dirty script to copy your code to a location on your ext3 drive, compile, move the completed pic back to your vfat drive and then clean up any mess left behind?

Thanks for the reply.
Ben.