Greetings! Anyone see this when trying to run the graphics demos from the hyperdoc utility?:

  (1) -> uncompress: 
  "/fix/t1/camm/debian/axiom/axiom-20050205/mnt/linux/doc/viewports/
    OneVariableGraphicsPage1.VIEW/image.xpm.Z".gz:
  No such file or directory

(from William Sitt, email of Monday, February 21, 2005 2:51 AM)

I would like to report that compiling Feb 2005 release on Fedora FC2 was successful. However, when running Hyperdoc and selecting Topic, graphics, 2d-graphics, Parametric Curves, draw(...) I got the error:

sh: line1: uncompress: command not found.

To solve the problem, I put in the following symbolic links:

  su
  cd /bin
  ln -s gzip compress
  ln -s gunzip uncompress

and that solves the problem.

Perhaps Axiom should change its use of these obsolete commands?

The command uncompress appears only in line 114 of src/lib/pixmap.c.pamphlet and should be replaced by gunzip there.

Status: open => fix proposed

Status: fix proposed => pending (next release)

gunzip properly handles .Z compress files. I checked with FC4 and uncompress is missing. Since you need gzip to build Axiom you likely have gunzip.

Status: pending (next release) => closed

Status: closed => fix proposed

On February 6, 2007 11:01 AM Waldek Hebisch wrote:

Bill Page wrote:

 > While testing Hyperdoc in the current version wh-sandbox on OpenSuSE 10.2 I
 > encountered the following problem while run some example graphics:
 > 
 > Hyperdoc processed crashed (window disappeared) and the following message
 > appeared in the Axiom console session:
 > 
 > (2) -> XIO:  fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0"
 >       after 40603 requests (40235 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
 > read_pixmap_file: unable to open
 > 
 /home/wspage/axiom-sandbox/target/i686-suse-linux/share/viewports/AssortedGraphicsExamplePage6.VIEW/image.xpm
 > uncompress: No such file or directory
 > 
 > -------
 > 
 > My understanding is that 'uncompress' is an obselete name for 'gzip -d'. Is that
 > correct?

Not exactly, uncompress the program to decompress .Z (LZW compressed) files. Later gzip was created and to large degree reduced need to use compress and uncompress. And yes, gzip -d can do the job of uncompress (and more).

I have met similar (or maybe exactly this) problem. uncompress program is uses by Xpm library - to see any images at all you must have uncompress program (shell script passing work to gzip -d may serve as a replacement). But on some machines there are problems even if uncompress is present. In fact on dual core Pentums running Debian prerelease most of the time I get error trying to see images (but sometimes images work). I have traced my problem to Xpm library - it looked that uncompress was nicely decompressing images, but for unknown reasons Xpm library decided that uncompress was not working and returned error indication. I am not sure where the real error is: it may be bug in this version of Xpm library, it may be that Hyperdoc is messing with process control in ways which confilct with Xpm. All machines where I was able to reproduce the problem run the same version of Debian on the same hardware, so it looked likely that this is a bug in Debian provided Xpm library.

There is a workaroud: in wh-sandbox Hyperdoc will uncompressed files if they are present (or gzip compressed ones, but AFAIK gzip -d has the same problem as uncompress). At least in my case reading uncompressed images never failed. So you can try uncomressing all .xpm.Z files (wastefull on space, but should work ...).

In the future we want to replace Xpm library by a different (portable) image library, so the problem should automatically go away. If the problem affects more poeple I will probably look again at it to find quicker solutuion.