Helpful Hints and Suggestions for Flaunch

# Helpful Hints
and
Suggestions for Flaunch

If you are connected to the network in some way, AND are using Netscape to view this HELP page, than you can follow this link for the most up-to-date information on Flaunch.

Flaunch is meant to be a complete data analysis environment, allowing a user to customize many of its features for their particular taste and the way in which they operate. Unfortunately, sometimes problems occur. This document is meant to help with some of the more common questions that have cropped up during the development of this tool. In many cases more detailed discussions are presented on various pages, but usually people do not want to spend their time trying to find things, so this page was created.

The majority of problems occur due to a lack of information, which may cause a conflict to arise when the tool attempts to operate in their particular environment. Older versions of the Linux operating system have many problems with permissions - which MUST be correct for Flaunch to function. Specifically within the /dev directory, the world as well as group MUST have priveleges to write to null (i.e., /dev/null), also the world needs priveleges to write to all tty*'s and ptty*'s. There are also problems with several libraries, but you will know if you have that problem because you would not be able to get Tcl installed. Some of these problems only crop up under certain circumstances, but if you get a message from Flaunch it is invariably due to either a conflict in the users environment, or a problem with the operating system's installation. (Note this only occurred in Slackware 3.0 to my knowledge but I no longer use the Slackware distribution.)

## The problem with Mouse Buttons

Tcl, in which Flaunch is written, allows the programmer to bind any keystroke to any action desired. This is most commonly used to create a "short-cut" so the user does not have to use the mouse to select a button or a menu-option. Flaunch uses binding throughout. Usually there is no problem with these binding which are only active in specific regions defined by the programmer, however, sometimes the user has bound a specific mouse buttons defined to some action by their window manager. This can cause a problem when used with Flaunch. The most common problem occurs with the usage of Button-3 (or the right most mouse button). If this causes a problem, the user can use Shift-Button-3, or Control-Button-3 and Flaunch will understand those as well. Thus if there is a conflict with any mouse button, the user should try holding down the "Shift" or "Control" key when pressing a mouse button.

Last modified: Mon Jul 28 14:47:11 EDT