Re: [udig-users] Request for hints on troubleshooting a uDig installatio

[Jody Garnett <jody.garnett@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for the detailed background Gary.

Do you have an actual stack trace? I wonder if we can arrange for a better error message (or if it occurs during the C++ startup program?).

We should be able to ask the installer to add the short cut to the "All users" entry ...

-- 
Jody Garnett

On Friday, 16 September 2011 at 3:38 AM, Gary Lucas wrote:

Thanks to helpful suggestions from Jody, I found the problem. Basically, it was a matter of the user not having write permission to the workspace folder (data directory) that the program was trying to use. When it was denied permission to write to the folder, uDig terminated. My suggestion here would be that the next uDig be modified to raise a dialog or something when it has to terminate due to a problem like that. It would have saved me a lot of time.

Anyway, the following explanation gives some more details in case any of you have the same problem.

Gary



The trouble seems to have started when uDig was installed by a system administrator rather than the user who was going to operate it. There is a note on the "Running on uDig" web page http://udig.refractions.net/confluence/display/EN/Running+uDig that says "by default the windows install creates the following short cut". It gives the command vector:

C:\Program Files\uDig\1.1\eclipse\udig.exe"
-data "%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\uDig\"
-configuration "%APPDATA%\udig\uDig1.1\"
-vm "C:\Program Files\uDig\1.1\eclipse\jre\bin\javaw.exe"


Well, the shortcut was either not created or was created on the administrator's desktop rather than the user's. In either case, it wasn't available to the user. Searching through the c:/Program Files tree, we found a file called uDig.bat and tried running from that.


The problem was that uDig.bat does not specify a path to the users home directory. Apparently uDig doesn't use an environment variable to find the users' home, but depends on a command line setting. So uDig was looking for, and perhaps trying to create, a workspace in a folder where the user didn't have permission to write.

We fixed the problem by making a copy of the uDig.bat file and modifying it to include the -data specification. With that change, uDig seems to be running fine.




Computer Programming is the Art of the Possible
Gary W. Lucas
Sonalysts, Inc.
215 Parkway North
Waterford, CT 06385
(860) 326-3682
41-22-12.35 N / 72-10-07.54 W (USNG/MGRS: 18T YL 36787 83711)


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