Forum OpenACS Q&A: Images rendered strangely on AOLServer 4.0 beta 10 on Win2k

12: Images rendered strangely on AOLServer 4.0 beta 10 on Win2k (response to 11)

Posted by Frank Bergmann on 10/30/04 08:30 PM

Hi Jamie,

more then a month has gone since our last attempts with OpenACS and Project/Open under Windows. We have used this time to port nearly all Project/Open functionality to PostgreSQL and to internationalize the code. This part of our project is finishing slowly (we're testing and writing a "QC-script" now, very challenging job ... ), so attention gets back to the Windows stuff.

So we've got an error here: AOLServer 4.0 beta 10 does strange things with GIF images. Please check this screenshot: http://www.project-open.com/aol4error.gif

Did you see something like this before? Is there a bug tracker for your distro where we could post errors in the future?

Apart from this bug we are going to work on porting the P/O filestorage module to windows, because it currently relies on "mv /tmp/file dir/file", "find dir -type f" and similar stuff...

Bests,
Frank

mailto:frank_bergmann_at_project_dash_open_dot_com
http://www.project-open.com/

13: Re: Images rendered strangely on AOLServer 4.0 beta 10 on Win2k (response to 12)

Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 10/31/04 04:39 PM

Frank, AOLserver 4.0 beta 10 ?? Why are you running such an old version? 4.0.8 is current, and Dossy should be releasing 4.0.9 sometime soon with some additional bugfixes. Are you running Jamie's old binary distribution of AOLserver on Windows? It's just that, old. There have been lots of little bug fixes since then.

Unfortunately the current build situation for AOLserver on Windows is a little confused, and definitely incomplete. Dossy's Tcl script does build the core just fine for Windows. I also hacked it up in order to build nsopenssl on Windows, but last I heard no one else has built any of the other modules that way. Dossy also was undecided whether to stick with a Tcl-based make script or just write nmake files for Windows.

If I ever find the time and motivation, I would like to try using one of the several Tcl-based make replacements for building AOLserve and all its modules on Windows - and maybe on Unix too. So far, having used none of them, I'm leaning towards bras, as it seems the most powerful and complete. (It even mentions "Recursive Make Considered Harmful" on its homepage, which is a good sign.)

14: mv and find in Tcl (response to 12)

Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 10/31/04 04:47 PM

Any code exec'ing "mv" should be easily replaced with Tcl's file rename command. Replacing "find" seems a bit harder, but in fact there's an implementation of find in Tcl on the Tcl'ers wiki, and it's also in Tcllib as ::fileutil::find.

15: Re: Images rendered strangely on AOLServer 4.0 beta 10 on Win2k (response to 13)

Posted by Frank Bergmann on 11/01/04 12:13 PM

Hi Andrew,

thank a lot for the hint with "mv" and "find" in TCL. This probably saves me _a_lot_ of time.

> Jamie's old binary distribution

Yes in dead. I don't have all the M$ stuff running on my machine (http://panoptic.com/wiki/aolserver/1332) and my last M$ programming experiences is >8 years ago (Borland Pascal 7.0...), so it would probably take me _a_lot_ of time getting started again.

What's funny is that Vlassis also used Jamie's binary distribution. It seem that Vlassis with his "graphical installer" hasn't managed to compile all these modules necessary neither, because he's also using Jamie's stuff...

So you've got everything running at home? Would it be possible to post a ZIP of your binaries somewhere?

Bests, and thanks a lot for your replies,
Frank

16: Compiling AOLServer 4.0.7 under Win2k (response to 13)

Posted by Frank Bergmann on 11/01/04 05:19 PM

Hi Andrew,

I've finally managed to building AOLServer under Windows as described in http://panoptic.com/wiki/aolserver/1332 .
It actually has worked out relatively easily with only a few issues quickly resolved (HEAD didn't compile, so I had to copy the built.tcl from HEAD into version 4.0.7 which I happened to have in both source and binary distribution. Also, I had to tweak build.tcl by removing limits.obj and pools.obj from the make list).

However, my cool new AOLServer doesn't load the OpenACS modules when starting. How did you go ahead with this in your installation? Also, all of these libraries that Jamie describes in http://empoweringminds.mle.ie/openacs/aolserver_modules are missing.

I've checked around a bit but I'm not very familiar with AOLServer so it's a bit tricky for me to diagnose the issue(s)...

Bests,
Frank

17: Re: Compiling AOLServer 4.0.7 under Win2k (response to 16)

Posted by Jamie Rasmussen on 11/01/04 05:53 PM

Hi Frank, sorry for the slow response. I don't know what is causing your broken gif problem. If using a newer version doesn't fix it, you may want to check out that the proper headers are coming through via Mozilla's livehttpheaders or Ethereal or similar. Does this happen only to some gif files or all, and does it happen all the time?

Vlassis is using a binary distribution from me, but he isn't using 4.0b10, he's using a nightly build of 4.1a from a couple of months ago. I've put another nightly build of 4.1a up at
http://jamierasmussen.com/download/ if you want to try that. There's no online bugtracker for my build. I'm afraid that this is an untested build from HEAD with some Win32 and other patches (and I haven't looked at the recent changes by Jim that it includes). But it does include all of the modules that OpenACS uses and many that OpenACS doesn't.

When I last checked, Dossy's script didn't build any non-core modules.

18: Error: tDOM wasn't compiled for multithreading (response to 17)

Posted by Frank Bergmann on 11/02/04 12:22 AM

Hi Jamie,

I've downloaded your nsd410a-bin-rel-20041101.zip binary distribution and more or less successfully installed it. However, when running it instead in Vlassis configuration instead of his 4.0 beta 10 version (not your 4.1 stuff...), I get the error:

"0-acs-init.tcl: error loading tdom: too many recursions".

I've tweaked a bit the tDom's pkgIndex by comparing it to the original and was able to make it working using:

package ifneeded tdom 0.7.8 "load [file join $dir libtdom078[info sharedlibextension]] tdom; source [file join $dir tdom.tcl]"

Using this command the infinite loop seems to disappear, but I'm now getting the error: "0-acs-init.tcl: error loading tdom: tDOM wasn't compiled for multithreading". Any idea?

Bests,
Frank

19: Re: Error: tDOM wasn't compiled for multithreading (response to 18)

Posted by Jamie Rasmussen on 11/02/04 08:30 AM

Oh, Vlassis may have ended up using the 4.0b10 stuff after all, I remember now that he had some problems with getting 4.1 to shutdown cleanly. I unfortunately never had time to look at his installer closely.

There should be tDOM 0.8.0 binaries in the zip you downloaded from me. If you copied the files from my zip over an older installation of AOLserver you may be mixing files from two different version of tDOM? I'm not sure why you're getting the multithreading message. My zip just includes the pre-built win32 dlls from tdom.org - I think that download used to be a multithreaded build...

I'm afraid that's the only thing that comes to mind, if you don't figure it out, you might ask on the AOLserver mailing list and Zoran or someone else could know what's happening.

Is the nsxml compatibility layer still working?

20: Re: Error: tDOM wasn't compiled for multithreading (response to 19)

Posted by Frank Bergmann on 11/04/04 11:42 AM

Hi Jamie,

thanks a lot.

> I don't have OpenACS installed at the moment

There is a very, very quick option for this. Just download the "Vlassis" installer and you'll have OpenACS running (on Cygwin PostgreSQL 7.3) within 3 minutes. Impressive really.

In order to test your distro, you would only have to replace Vlassis' "nsd4" subdirectory by your distro, and there you go. I imagine that testing in a final system is going to be much quicker and will produce less errors then with a partial configuration...

Btw., I've got OpenACS and Project/Open running with PostgreSQL 8.0 beta 3 on my Win2k box, and I haven't had a single problem, not with the install nor with the operations (there were some problems with beta-1 and beta-2 though). Jeff actually made some changes to HEAD during 5.1.1 for PG 8.0, so these changes should be in 5.1.2 now. So you actually might start to go ahead.

Bests,
Frank

21: Reverting back to AOLServer 4.0.beta10 (response to 20)

Posted by Frank Bergmann on 11/07/04 03:58 PM

Hi Jamie,

thanks for sending me the threaded tdom-0.8.0. I've installed it and AOLServer 4.1.0a loads correctly. Also, the load time for OpenACS has gone down remarkebly. Is there some whichcraft going on???

However, I'm now getting problems with some Project/Open transactions. For example I'm getting a timeout when I try to create a new company. The log file doesn't say anything in this case, it's as if I would never have selected the page. It does work fine with AOLServer 4.0.beta10, I've renamed the directory and it works fine now again.

So I think I'll have to do the same as Vlassis and revert to 4.0.beta10 again because I'm running out of time. However, I can provide you with my test setu-up here if you want. It consists of Vlassis' install results, replacing his C:\OpenACS\nsd4 by your 4.1.0a distro and by adding some P/O packages. I can send you the P/O packages as a ZIP if you want.

Cheers,
Frank

22: Re: Reverting back to AOLServer 4.0.beta10 (response to 21)

Posted by Henry Ma on 08/11/05 03:14 AM

Hi Frank,

Do you still have the threaded tDOM-0.8.0 dlls? I was trying to install openacs into my aolserver on Windows XP yesterday. When I checked the server log, I got the same error you had - "tDOM wasn't compiled for multithreading." If you still have the files, can you email it to me at hema6833@mail.usyd.edu.au? Also, did you just put all the dlls into lib directory under aolserver root directory?