[16795] in Athena Bugs
Re: sun4 8.2.9: mathematica (Case 137801)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Abby Fox)
Wed Apr 7 11:22:00 1999
To: Jacob Morzinski <jmorzins@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU, chrisk@MIT.EDU, linux-help@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Message from Jacob Morzinski <jmorzins@MIT.EDU>
received 03 Apr 1999 00:46:00 -0500
Date: Wed, 07 Apr 1999 11:21:50 EDT
From: Abby Fox <ajfox@MIT.EDU>
Just to follow up on the Mathematica Error Type 199 launch failure
when the user's homedir is not in AFS: aside from manually juggling
symlinks, users have two vendor-supplied methods of changing the
location of the prefs dir (a command-line switch and an X resource).
There seems to be an environmenat variable for this in the Windows
version, but I couldn't find one documented for Unix.
At this point, we've decided to provide the relevant information in
/mit/math/README.athena (text appended) but not to modify the launch
setup to deal with this case. If anyone wants to discuss further,
please write to 3partysw@mit.edu.
--Abby
4/6/99 Note for users with non-standard Athena configuration:
The Mathematica launch scripts assume a standard Athena environment, and in
particular that a user's home directory is in AFS. If this is not the case,
you will probably see a cryptic error message like:
"startup error type 199"
Workarounds:
1. Users can tell Mathematica to use a different preferences directory
at startup. Both a command-line switch and an X resource can be used for
this, by doing something like:
athena% mathematica -preferencesDirectory /path/to/dir
or by setting the X resource:
! Mathematica preferences dir (for ver. 3.0, the default
! setting is ~/.Mathematica/3.0).
!
*preferencesDirectory /path/to/dir
2. Users can make local symlinks to make ~/.Mathematica resolve to where our
launch script puts the "real" version- for Linux, which is likely to be the
main platform where this issue comes up, our script creates a directory
~/.Mathematica.i386_linux2, so a user could manually make a link
~/.Mathematica -> ~/.Mathematica.i386_linux2 and then things should work,
after initially attempting to launch Mathematica and having it fail with
an error as above.
[more generally, the name component after the period is the $ATHENA_SYS value
for the platform you are using. It is permissible to symlink from newer to
older values, i.e. if you have a "real" ~/.Mathematica.i386_linux2 directory,
you can make the link ~/.Mathematica.i386_linux3 -> ~/.Mathematica.i386_linux2
and things should still work]
The reason for all this is an unfortunate platform dependence in Mathematica
configuration files, that requires a separate configuration file directory
for each architecture.
