VisualWorks Ubuntu

[gargoyle60]

Is anyone using VisualWorks in Linux (Ubuntu 11.04)?

I have installed vw7.7nc but the appearance is awful, despite having changed the Look & Feel
settings using various combinations. The fonts are not appearing clearly on screen and they are
difficult to read at my monitor resolution (1024x768), even with the VW Text Size set as Large.

I also notice in the System Browser that frequently the lower method contents window/panel does not
always show the code, but switching to another window and back again makes it suddenly visible.

I'm not sure if this is a VW or Ubuntu problem.
I've run vw7.7nc on Ubuntu 11.04 before and it was never this bad but I recently reinstalled Ubuntu.

My PC is dual boot with Windows XP and VW works perfectly fine.

[m***@gmail.com]

Try installing more X11 fonts, some of the xorg-x11-fonts-* packages.
VW uses the old X11 based APIs to access fonts and many of the
installed fonts are not accessible through that on newer
distributions.

HTH,

Martin

[gargoyle60]

Thanks Martin.

I have tried installing more X11 fonts (see list at bottom), also via the
Synaptic Package Manager, including the "ttf-mscorefonts-installer".

These fonts now appear in my Preferences...Appearance...Fonts list, but
not in VW strangely (at least not under Named Fonts).

I have also checked my Ubuntu locale, which is LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, although
I doubt that has anything to do with it.

However, I am still getting this same problem in VW with some panels not
appearing properly (bits missing or not being displayed at all).
I wonder if it's a driver issue. My video card is a ATI Radeon X300 set
at 1024 x 768 at 60 Hertz refresh.

Any further suggestions, because at present VW is almost unusable?


...
List:
cm-super-x11
tv-fonts
xfstt
tkfont
xfonts-mplus
lmodern
rxvt-unicode-ml
x11-xfs-utils
libt1-5-dbg
libfontenc1
libt1-5
x11proto-xf86bigfont-dev
xprint
x11-utils

[m***@gmail.com]

Post by gargoyle60
Thanks Martin.
I have tried installing more X11 fonts (see list at bottom), also via the
Synaptic Package Manager, including the "ttf-mscorefonts-installer".
These fonts now appear in my Preferences...Appearance...Fonts list, but
not in VW strangely (at least not under Named Fonts).

Hm, the list you have below doesn't look like what I'd expect to see.
The fonts that VW can use are the classic X11 fonts. On Fedora they
are packages with prefixes like xorg-x11-fonts-*, e.g. xorg-x11-fonts-
ISO8859-2-75dpi. It's probably not as much a matter of the font
itself, it's more about the font being accessible via the old xfs,
which seems to be getting slowly obsoleted by newer facilities.

Post by gargoyle60
However, I am still getting this same problem in VW with some panels not
appearing properly (bits missing or not being displayed at all).
I wonder if it's a driver issue. My video card is a ATI Radeon X300 set
at 1024 x 768 at 60 Hertz refresh.
Any further suggestions, because at present VW is almost unusable?

OK, I misunderstood your original message. I thought the fonts were
unreadable, but this sounds more like general displaying problem. I
think I've seen something similar with an older 7.7.1 image that I use
to run my mail reader. I've started having that sort of problem with
it when I upgraded from Fedora 12 to Fedora 14 (and a newer laptop).
Frequently a text editor pane would show only part of its contents or
none at all. Making it refresh somehow usually fixes the display
glitch (although it can take a few attempts at times). I didn't get
around to trying to figure out what's going on, I suspected it could
be my specific configuration in the image (it has all kinds of things
loaded in).

I haven't observed anything like that in newer 7.8 and later images,
so maybe upgrading to 7.8 would help. I'm sorry I can't be more
helpful.

Martin