[Axiom-developer] writeup for faq on sman/devpts problem

[Balbir Thomas]

Hi,
Here is the writeup you asked for . 

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Q Graphics don't work or sman fails to start ?

First try running sman as :
sman -debug -noclef -nonag -noht
Try this as root also.
If graphics still don't work or sman fails to start then
look at the error messages . Does it show something like :

ptyopen: Failed to grant access to slave device: No such file or directory
ptyopen: Failed to get name of slave device: No such file or directory
ptyopen: Failed to open slave: Bad address

If so you may need to do a few things 
1) Make sure that devpts support is enabled in you kernel 
   ( CONFIG_DEVPTS_FS=y )
2) Make sure the directory /dev/pts exists
3) Mount devpts as in :
   "mount -t devpts devpts /dev/pts"
   You may also want to add the following line to your /etc/fstab file
   devpts          /dev/pts        devpts  gid=5,mode=602          0       0
   This will ensure that next time you reboot devpts is automatically
   mounted.

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This got graphics working for me and it looks great . I will ofcourse
be playing around and testing it further and will make a post if something
comes up. I am using Debian woody (stable) distribution with kernel 2.4.19.
This may or may not be a problem due to the age of this rather old linux
distribution. Debian sarge is expected soon and hopefully this should not
be an issue. I am not sure if devpts is mounted by default on debian
testing and/or unstable.

PS:You may find the following article interesting if you have
not seen it already :
http://www.math.unm.edu/~wester/cas/book/Wester.pdf.
A comparison of various symbolic algebra systems including
axiom.

sincerely
B Thomas