Windows. Can't live with it. Can't shoot it.

[Paul E. Johnson]

I have a laptop with  RedHat Linux that dual boots into WIndows ME 
because sometimes people have projectors that only work with Windows.  I 
think Linux is the best and I am sorry to have to waste time going into 
Windows just to suit technological limitations, but that is the cross I 
bear.  

I have installed Cygwin and downloaded a Swarm-2.2 pretest, and have 
some trouble installing it.  I'm following along with the instructions I 
have in the FAQ that I cobbled together from User comments 
(http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/SwarmFaq/SwarmOnlineFaq.html#3.1) 
When I try

mount 'd:\\Swarm-2.2' /Swarm-2.2

I get a warning that Swarm-2.2 does not exist, and then I'm not able to 
get any response from commands like

ls /Swarm-2.2

In fact, after I make that mount, I can't get any response from tab 
completion to finish the directory name.

There's obviously something wrong with my system, the new cygwin, or the 
install instructions.

So If I unmount Swarm-2.2, and just create a sym link to put Swarm in 
its place, then things seem to be OK:

ln -sf d://Swarm-2.2/  /Swarm-2.2

ANyway, I was able to set SWARMHOME=/Swarm-2.2 and compile one 
application and run it after that.

However, I run into weird problems.  I get quit-time crashes with some 
programs that don't crash in Linux.

For example, here is an application showing variations on the Social 
Impact model (B. Latane, A. Nowak), a pretty well known piece of social 
psychology. This piece of code has lots of generalizations built into 
it, some of which are documented :)

http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm/MySwarmCode/SocialImpact/SocialImpact-20020530.tar.gz

In Linux it compiles and runs fine with the new Swarm, but with windows 
I get crashes when I hit the quite button. The popup says it caused an 
error in libObjC.

I was thinking that this SocialImpact model might be a good one to 
distribute as a teaching exercise, possibly in the Swarm tutorial, but 
obviously that's a non-starter if people who use WIndows see all kinds 
of bozosity.  I don't think the market model in the tutorial package 
does much good for us and would like to put something in its place, so I 
have some incentive to try to work this out.

Would somebody who has a working windows Swarm-2.2 system care to try 
that file and see if it compiles and runs?

In the past I have run into portability problems from Linux to Windows 
because I failed to enable destroy notification on graphs and that 
caused a tcl/tk crash, but this program is not making that mistake, I 
don't think....

--
Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (785) 864-5700



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