thanks for the reply. i dont think i understand how to do what you suggest, 
i'm not that experienced with this sort of thing to say the least. would it be 
possible to make a package from your installation?

i wanted to try out lyx to see what it was like. its ages since i last used 
latex and this looked interesting. unfortunately it requires xforms to run.

well... thanks anyway,

GREG

> On "Thu, 05 Apr 2001 12:51:37 +0100", Greg MATTHEWS <G.Matthews@cs.ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
> >hi...
> >
> >has anyone managed to install xforms on a sparc running 1.5? i posted 
> >something similar on netbsd-help but got no reponse so was wondering if this 
> >was sparc related.
> 
> Yes, with some hackery.  And it's not that it's sparc (hardware)
> related, it's that it's sparc-elf vs. everything else including
> sparc-a.out related.
> 
> >xforms compiles fine when i do a 'make' in the /usr/pkgsrc/x11/xforms 
> >directory but when i do a 'make install' it produces the following:
> >
> >potomac# make install
> >===> Installing for xforms-0.88nb1
> >make: don't know how to make fd2ps/fd2ps. Stop
> >*** Error code 2
> >
> >Stop.
> >*** Error code 1
> >
> >Stop.
> >*** Error code 1
> >
> >Stop.
> >*** Error code 1
> >
> >Stop.
> >
> >what is fd2ps/fd2ps? i see it appears in the ./files/Makefile here:
> 
> It's a utility for translating output from the Forms Library into
> PostScript.  It's supposed to be included as a binary in the package,
> but such is not the case on sparc-elf.
> 
> >PRaGS=          DESIGN/fdesign fd2ps/fd2ps
> >INCLUDES=       FORMS/forms.h
> >
> >MAN1=           DESIGN/fdesign.1 fd2ps/fd2ps.1
> >MAN5=           FORMS/xforms.5
> >
> >any pointers much appreciated... or if someone has a precompiled binary for 
> >1.5 that i could pkg_add...
> 
> I got around it by grabbing the sparc-aout version of xforms-0.88 and
> pulling the fd2ps binary from there.  Basically, I did a make extract
> of the (elf) package, dropped the a.out binary in the apropriate place
> in the work directories and went from there.
> 
> I tried contacting the author, but got the impression that we're
> expected to upgrade to 0.89 to fix things on this end.
> -- 
> T. M. Pederson <salvage@plethora.net>
> PGP key fingerprint = 48 94 7A 54 59 B6 C0 77  1F F6 94 55 0C 55 51 C4
> "...and so the moral of the story is: Always make backups."
> "But that was the moral last night, and the night before that too!"