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Running ferret under Digital Unix 4.x




Ferret users,

It appears that these 'unaligned access' messages are a problem with
running ferret under Digital Unix 4.x (and will actually affect anyone
running a version of Digital Unix or OSF1 later than 3.2).

As I understand it (from DEC), the problem is that ferret has been compiled
under an older version of the OS (less than 3.2).  Under newer versions of
Digital Unix, this causes problems because the code does not align itself
properly in memory, and is (possibly in addition) not compiled for 64-bit
operation.  

Running 'ferret -gui' under v4.0c produces screens of 'unaligned access'
warnings.   You can turn these off with:
	uac p noprint
before starting 'ferret -gui' and you'll get the ferret interface.  

However, as soon as you attempt to produce any graphics (either from within
the GUI or from the text interface), you will get a segmentation fault and
a core dump.  I guess those segment alignment problems catch up with you
eventually... :->

Anyhow - it seems that I'll have to wait for a version of ferret to be
compiled for Digital Unix 4.x, or buy an older version of the OS as a
temporary measure.  Another suggestion is to use some product called
'freeport', which apparently allows you to run Solaris binaries on a DEC -
but I don't anticipate this being very fast.

Can anyone from the ferret team offer a guess as to when a 4.x native
version of ferret will be available?

Thanks.
Greg.




---------------------------------------------------------------------
>Date: Thu, 14 Aug 1997 00:18:25 +1000
>To: ferret_users@ferret.wrc.noaa.gov
>From: Greg Williams <greg@wni.co.jp>
>Subject: Running ferret on a DEC Alpha
>
>	
>Hi,
>
>We've been running ferret under Solaris/openwin for quite a while now, but
have recently moved to a DEC Alpha running Digital Unix 4.0b (OSF/1) and
Open3D.
>
>However, after installing ferret (v4.45) on this machine, any attempts to
perform graphical operations result in a segmentation fault and core dump,
and running 'ferret -gui' produces a huge number of errors, like this:
>
>Unaligned access pid=[some pid#] <ferret> va=[some number] pc=[some
number] ra=[some number] inst=[some number]
>
>...with the value of 'va' increasing, while the other numbers stay the same.
>
>I'm not that familiar with DEC unix, but the above seems to be a memory
access problem (?!).  The results are the same whether I'm running under
the standard 'xdm' or the CDE window manager, so unless it's a common X11
library problem, I don't think it's X11 itself.   I have also applied the
patch (20jan97) but to no avail.
>
>Has anyone seen this problem before (or have a fix for it)?
>
>Thanks.
>Greg.
>
>
===========================================================================
Greg Williams - WNI Weathernews - 4/25 Prospect Street, Box Hill, VIC, 3128
EMAIL: greg@wni.co.jp       TEL: (613) 9899 3140       FAX: (613) 9899 3141



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