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- 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
-
-