[bug] Installation Problems

[David Starks-Browning <starksb at ebi dot ac dot uk>]

On Thursday 7 Sep 00, Keith Fielding writes:
> Tom Hutto  writes:
> 
> > Problem summary from an ignoramus' viewpoint:
> > 1. $HOME is wrong -- embedded blanks and no quotes
> > 2. $USER is wrong -- embedded blanks and no quotes
> > 3. /home/$USER was not created
> > 4. The utility called info does not work as documented
> > ... etc.
> 
> 1, 2, 3: I hit the same problem. Cygwin created $USER from the W95 user
> name (which contained embedded spaces) but cygwin clearly does not
> support a user name which contains spaces. This can be a pain on W95 and
> W98 systems which may well be configured to not prompt for a user name
> on start-up. The way I got round this was:
> 
> a) From the "shutdown" tab of the start menu I selected "4. Close all
> programs and log on as a different user". When prompted I entered a
> different user name (without spaces).
> 
> b) I created the correct $HOME directory (using the new user name) by
> hand.

Alternatively, one could edit /etc/profile and set USER=... directly,
preferable to something without spaces.  Of course, this won't be
obvious to a beginner.

> I suspect that many W95 users may use their full name (including spaces)
> as their Windows user name. Since this causes problems for cygwin it
> would be nice if this could be automatically translated with white space
> being replaced by underscores.

/usr/bin/tr could be used for this, but it would require that the
textutils package be installed.

> 4: Have you run "install-info"? Before info will work you need to do the
> following:
> 
> cd /usr/info
> for f in *.info ; do install-info $f dir ; done
> 
> This produces a couple of error messages relating to "gzip" and "time"
> which must added to the dir file by hand. See the faq.
> 
> Again a note of this in the installation instructions would be helpful.

Actually, it might not be too hard to add this to setup.exe.

> A further problem experienced by me (and several other installers to
> judge by other posts) is that things (e.g. gcc) seem to be broken
> because other required packages have not been installed. A dependency
> list as part of the installation instructions would been nice.

I think it would be quite difficult to get this right, because it
depends on what you want to do.  IMO, the best advice is to install
everything.  (And this is stated in the FAQ, under "What packages
should I download?")

Cheers,
David


--
Want to unsubscribe from this list?
Send a message to cygwin-unsubscribe@sourceware.cygnus.com