MCSTAS at PSI

[Kristian Nielsen]

> Dear Dr. Nielsen,
> 
> I was told by Dr. Bertrand Roessli, that there are some problems by using
> the command 'mcdisplay' on our machines. You wanted to know what we have as
> OS and so on.
> 
> 
> We work on DEC ALPHA machines with Digital UNIX V4.0D  operating system.
> Our wersion of PGPLOT is the 5.2.0 .
> We also try the command perl -e ' bla bla ' , it works.
> 
> Have you got now enough information to see where the problem should be ??

Unfortunately not; all I know is that running mcdisplay produces a
"segmentation fault". I thought that perhaps the Perl<->PGPLOT interface
had not been installed properly, but since the command I suggested
worked, that is apparently not the reason.

Hm. I vaguely remember that some of the drivers in PGPLOT has some
problems on 64-bit machines. Since the Alphas are 64-bit, perhaps this
could be the reason? I think there is some readme-file in the PGPLOt
distribution for the Alpha architecture that mentions this
problem. However, since my example command worked I am not sure if this
is the the problem.

Is there anything else you could tell me, eg. any output on the terminal
before the segmentation fault? The output of "perl -V" might also be
useful. And running mcdisplay in the Perl debugger:

    perl -d /usr/local/bin/mcdisplay ...

Otherwise, I will try to run mcdisplay on our local Alpha machines and
see what turns up. Also, if it is possible for you to give me a
temporary account on the machine, I could log in remotely and see if I
can solve the problem.

I will be on vacation for the next two weeks, but afterwards I will look
into the problem.

 - Kristian.