Re: A thought on Windows Experience

[David Kastrup]

Richard Shann <address@hidden> writes:

> I thought I would test out the binary that is on denemo.org and
> downloaded it in a virtual machine running a vanilla Debian stable O/S,
> the result: it will not even start. The executables ~/usr/bin/denemo and
> ~/usr/bin/lilypond are present and have the right permissions but
> attempting to execute them from the bash prompt results in a baffling
> "No such file or directory" message:
>
>  ls -l denemo
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 rshanngub rshanngub 1479840 Nov 25 23:00 denemo
> address@hidden:~/denemo/usr/bin$ ./denemo
> bash: ./denemo: No such file or directory
> address@hidden:~/denemo/usr/bin$ 
>
> and then the same thing for lilypond:
>
> ls -l lilypond
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 rshanngub rshanngub 4377128 Nov 25 23:00 lilypond
> address@hidden:~/denemo/usr/bin$ ./lilypond
> bash: ./lilypond: No such file or directory

That's typical if
a) the file is an executable script
b) it has a #! comment in its first characters
c) the named executable in the #! comment does not exist

>> Do you have any users actually having success with the binary package
>> on Ubuntu?  If not, telling people that the "ancient" versions
>> delivered with the system itself are not to be used is creating a
>> rather large barrier of entry.
>
> As I say, I am told that it is a Ubuntu system that it gets tested on,
> but if would help if we got more feedback from users. I occasionally
> get visits from people with apple macs and the mac versions have
> worked on their machines and I test windows versions on two or three
> machines with various flavors of their o/ses. A GNU/Linux binary you
> would have thought would be easier than either of those to get working
> ...  (As I wrote this I recalled that I have a small partition with
> Ubuntu 12.04 installed, I rebooted and went through the same process
> as with Debian Stable and got the same, bizarre result). I think we
> need to warn people that they may well need to built it :(

It may also help to put the binary directory into PATH proper, like with
export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/denemo/usr/bin"
(don't use ~/denomo/... since that does not work reliably.)

-- 
David Kastrup