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Finale
Dear Folks,
Apparently when Executor 1.2 was released, it broke "Finale".
We do not as yet own a copy of Finale, so even though it was reported
by one of our beta testers, we managed to overlook this problem.
Here's a summary of the situation, you can write to me for more
information if you need it:
Apparently when Finale starts up, it looks at all the volumes
that are accessible and chooses to write temp files on the one that
has the most amount of free space left. Currently, although Executor
allows you to use your UNIX filesystem, it cheats in one key respect:
it says that all UNIX filesystems have 10Mb of disk space left on
them, so Finale chooses to write on the first volume it sees, which
is "/". The Finale code doesn't check to see whether permissions
will prevent it from doing this, in fact, on a Mac, if you have a
read-only Appleshare volume, you'll get the same thing you get under
Executor, a "mystery hang."
Two possible workarounds are:
1) Run Executor as root when you are going to run Finale.
As root, you'll be able to write in "/". A few temp files
will be created, but they'll be deleted when you're done.
The major disadvantage here is the same as you get
whenever you do things as root; you could inadvertantly
stomp something that you shouldn't.
2) Change the permissions of "/" to allow writing. If you do
this, I suggest you also turn on the "sticky" bit as well.
(Normally if you have write access to a directory, you can
delete any file in the directory, whether you own the file
or not. When the sticky bit is set, only the owner of a
file can delete the file). To do this you need to do
something similar to:
iclone% su
Password:
iclone# chmod a+w,+t /
iclone# ls -ld /
drwxrwxrwt 24 root 1024 Jul 22 15:59 /
The drawback here is that other users of your system can
leave junk in "/", which ties up disk space and can be
an eyesore when you're doing lists. In general, this
solution is preferable to #1 above.
I believe that on a Mac, you can hold down the option and
clover key at the same time when Finale is launching and it won't
have this nasty behaviour. Apparently this doesn't work under
Executor, although as of yet, I don't know why.
One final note, Executor still does not support access to the
serial ports, so you can only use Finale for notation, not music
playing or synthesis.
--Cliff