Subject: Re: Ghostscript - HELP!!!
To: None <ADAMGOOD@delphi.com>
From: Colin Wood <cwood@ichips.intel.com>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 09/23/1997 10:28:40
ADAMGOOD@delphi.com wrote:
> 
> OK, I wouldn't post this twice, but I've wasted DAYS on this now, and
> I just can't get it to work right.  PLEASE somebody help.
> 
> I've been trying to get Ghostscript to display ANYTHING at all under X,
> or to create a valid .pbm file that I could send to the StyleWriter
> printer driver.  All it does it print out blank screens under X, and
> blank pages on the StyleWriter.

What version of Ghostscript are you using?  Have you tried the version
that I think is still on puma?  Perhaps whatever version you are using has
a few bugs in it...

> I've tried everything I can think of.  I have a PowerBook160 with no
> FPU, so I downloaded the source and recompiled it with out FPU
> support (I think.  I set an FPU something or other variable to -1 in a
> makefile that I think did the trick there.  Ghostscript's compilation
> system is a mess compared to GNU's configure scripts.).  Even with
> GS's own FPU emulation code (which it inserts instead of using FPU
> instructions), I still got the same blank screen I got using the
> pre-compiled binaries.

This really shouldn't be necessary provided that you have the fpuless
libm.so off of puma ('030 FPE should work just fine), although I suppose
it couldn't hurt (there are still a few unimplemented FP instructions in
'030 FPE, but I thought they were only the odd transcendentals which few
people actually use).

> I can't get Ghostscript to work, and I can't print without Ghostscript.
> This is a very sad state of affairs, and it's even worse when I think
> of the 3 days or so I've totally wasted on this . . . :(.

I'm sorry you've lost so much time on it :-(

> I posted about this a few days ago, and only one person responded.  Doesn't
> anyone have any experience with anything like this?

Keep in mind that I really don't have any experience with this, myself.
The two people I know of with any real experience with this kind of thing
are Bill Studenmund and Monroe Williams.

> Please help out, I could really use it this time.

Hopefully, someone will have a clue about what's going on.  Keep in mind
that not everyone on the list actually reads it every day (although I feel
really sorry for those people who don't considering how much mail this
list generates!) and so it sometimes takes a while for people to respond,
and worse yet, sometimes messages get lost if they don't look immediately
interesting

> P.S.  The rest of my set-up is a standard 1.2.1 NetBSD distribution, with
> a custom built power-manager kernel from Takashi, built in January '97.
> None of the newer kernels will boot on my PB.  I've tried them all, right
> up to GENERIC-42.

Hopefully, this problem will be fixed before the 1.3 release.  This is
probably the same problem that a number of other people have remarked on,
namely that the intvid code that Michael Zucca developed is no longer in
the -current source tree.

Later.

-- 
Colin Wood                                 cwood@ichips.intel.com
Component Design Engineer - MD6                 Intel Corporation
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I speak only on my own behalf, not for my employer.