Answer Folder in Rev Linux (was Re: Linux installaton)

[Bob Warren]

Bob Warren wrote:
 >>
If you want to use CD-Rom or Floppy Diskette drives in your program, 
they have to be "mounted" and you need to discover where in the file 
system this can be done***. And what would I do in #2 of my file/picture 
chooser widgets if I wanted to access local network drives?

Jacqueline Landman Gay wrote:
 >
How about just asking the user to select the path via "answer folder"?
Then store it for future reference.

-------------------------
I was just going to bed, but I noticed that the picture on my wall was 
not hanging straight, and now I can't sleep any more (again).

Please do visit

http://www.howsoft.com/runrev/stacks.htm

where you will see pictures of the file/picture chooser widgets for 
Linux I mentioned.

You will see that the widgets are themselves substitutes for the "answer 
file" dialogue. The picture chooser, however, gives a preview of the 
pictures available when you click on their file names. This does not 
exist in Linux and therefore is uncallable by Rev. I therefore made one 
in the form of a Rev standalone. The file chooser is entirely 
unnecessary in functional terms, since we have the "answer file" 
dialogue, but I made it in order to match exactly the style of the 
picture chooser. Incidentally, the style of both choosers is in the form 
of an HD treeview as in Windows. The Linux "answer file" does not make 
use of a treeview for the folders (at least in my Ubuntu).

So the 2 crucial points to be made are as follows:

1) It wouldn't make much sense to ask the user for his help using an 
answer folder/file in order to be able to present him immediately with 
another "answer file" in a different style.

2) In my Ubuntu Linux (and possibly in other Linuxes as well), the 
answer folder/file only allows the user to choose from the local file 
system. There is no sign of network paths in these dialogues.

By the way, although treeviews for general use have been provided by 
several Rev users, as far as I know nobody has produced one for the HD. 
This is far from being a "trivial" task (even in Rev) as one user once 
implied, and I'll tell you why. If you could quickly make a map of all 
the folders and subfolders on the HD first, and then use it while the 
user was navigating the folder treeview, then it would be easy. But you 
cannot do that because it takes far too long. The only way you can do it 
is to initially present the user with root or near-root folders, and to 
expand the rest dynamically when he clicks on one of the folders in the 
tree. The reason I am mentioning this is that if anyone is in need of a 
treeview of the local file system, my widgets can be easily adapted. I 
have made the stacks available (at the page mentioned above) not only so 
that they can be adapted to other flavours of Linux, but so that they 
can also be adapted as pure HD treeviews for whatever purpose.

The reason that the widgets have been produced for Ubuntu only and not 
for all Linuxes is simply that specialFolderPath in Rev does not provide 
essential filesystem information (different to Mac and Windows). The 
widgets run on other Linuxes, but they cannot detect whether or not 
CD-Rom or Floppy Diskette readers exist in the hardware. This is 
explained better on the webpage itself. Also, when Rev standalones 
close, they clear the clipboard! Another little problem. On the said 
webpage I give the impression that perhaps it is the fault of (Ubuntu) 
Linux. Not true. It's another Rev bug.

[***Sorry, I didn't say it right. You can mount drives almost anywhere 
on your HD (e.g. in /mnt). The problem is in finding the fstab file to 
tell you whether or not the hardware exists, as I mentioned above.]

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

Regards,
Bob