[Xastir] Better and/or Easier Way to Get Xastir on Windows

[Curt, WE7U]

On Wed, 8 Nov 2006, Amateur Radio WB8NUT wrote:

> With Festival, I started it with the "festival" command in a terminal
> window. Then I start Xastir and it still says it cannot find something
> in Festival.

    festival --server &

Before starting Xastir.


> With Terraserver, I don't have a clue.

It looks like you're starting Xastir from an xterm, so you're seeing
any warning/error messages that come out.  That's good.

It's likely that either your ImageMagick doesn't have the correct
support for the image type you're downloading, or that your libcurl
or wget installation isn't working.

Xastir will prefer libcurl over wget if you have both installed.  If
you only have wget installed, you can try a manual wget line to see
if it's working.  I ran into a non-working wget once this way and
had to upgrade it.

Libcurl and wget are only used to fetch the remote file via a
supplied URL.  You can check whether Xastir is able to snag the
remote file by going to your ~/.xastir/tmp/ directory and looking
for things like "map.png", "map.gif", etc.  See if the image you are
expecting is sitting there.  If so, your libcurl or wget is working
fine for you and you can go on to possible ImageMagick problems.

ImageMagick:  If you ever see something about "decode delegate", it
means that ImageMagick can't find the right module in order to
decode that particular image format.  Sometimes it'll emit no error
messages but still not be able to handle particular types.  You can
try running "display ~/.xastir/tmp/map.png" for instance to see if
the installed ImageMagick tools can decode PNG files.

There are SO many problems and fixes for ImageMagick that we've
come across over the years, not to mention changes in the
programmer's API (some of which were not documented and/or the
version number wasn't changed at the time).  It may require more
info from you before people can suggest other problem areas to check
out or fixes.

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
"Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
"The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"