SORRY re. bash problems with gvim and tightVNC??

[Shing-Fat (Fred) Ma]

I need to apologize for submitting the following posting
TEN TIMES yesterday.  I was cross posting to mailing lists
and newsgroups, and kept getting a netscape error message
telling to try again later.  It wasn't until someone emailed
me today that I realized that, for one of the forums, all
ten attempts succeeded, even though my newserver wasn't
updating my listing properly so that I could see it.

The underlying problem is attached below.  I've made a
separate build attempt of tightVNC in my friend's (actually
my advisor's) account, but he still gets the error:

 vncserver: "~/.vnc: No such file or directory"

So I know it isn't an issue with ownership or accessbility.
I really am stumped about what to even start being
suspicious about.  Especially since the gvim and tightVNC
errors seem to occur from within the binary executables.
The code and the build process for those seem extremely
complex.

Thanks if anyone can suggest possible troubleshooting
strategies.

Fred
=============================================================
From: fma@doe.carleton.ca (f)
Newsgroups: comp.editors,gnu.bash.bug,comp.unix.questions
Subject: bash problems with gvim and tightVNC??
NNTP-Posting-Host: 134.117.9.4
Message-ID: <c625d2ec.0112092009.6c4259ad@posting.google.com>

I'm not sure if this detail is relevant to the following
problem or not, but I didn't mention that our solaris 8
machines (which runs the server, or should if it wasn't for
this problem) are set up to run bash as the default.  The
reason why I suspect this as a possible cause is that even
my gvim startup script gets improperly interpretted when I
invoke the executable from a different account from which it
was built (gvim gets choked by starting a continued line
with "\ ", which is suppose to be how lines are made to
continue on.

The "make" for both gvim and tightvnc was done after i
explicitly switched to tcsh via "exec tcsh".  However, the
problem manifest itself when I invoke the executable (gvim
or vncserver) from another account, regardless of whether I
"exec tcsh" or stay in bash.  I even went so far as to put a
tcsh script wrapper around the executable, then tried a bash
wrapper.  The problem still persists.

One odd clue from the bash wrapper(which is the only one I
spent time trouble-shooting) is that the path from ".bashrc"
gets lost, even though the .bashrc is invoked (I confirmed
it by printing out a diagnostic message within .bashrc).
Weird, huh?  To get around this, I put "source ~/.bashrc"
into the wrapper.  But it does indicate there is some funny
business going on that I'm not understanding.  I added a
print command to the invoked perl script that starts
tightVNC and confirmed that the PATH was in fact being
properly retained.  Also, the text of the vnc error message
doesn't appear within the perl script, so it must be issued
by the Xvnc binary that it invokes.  So the baffling thing
is that it passes the sanity checks in the "vncserver" perl
script, including test for proper creation of .vnc, but then
can't find it from the invoked binary.

Thanks for any tidbits of wisdom....

P.S.  I am currently unable to send to mailing lists and
newsgroups at the same time, and I've also separately mailed
to:

 vnc-tight-list@lists.sourceforge.net,vnc-list@uk.research.att.com

Please copy any responses to those groups so that the information
in the thread can be consistent across all those forums.  Thanks!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fred Ma
Department of Electronics
Carleton University, Mackenzie Building
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada     K1S 5B6
fma@doe.carleton.ca
==========================================================================

"Shing-Fat (Fred) Ma" wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I just installed tightVNC and got it working.  It's awesome.
>
> I tried to show somebody else how awesome it was.
> I tried to run vncserver from his account (the installation
> was made in my personal account space, and all files/directories
> are publically accessible; all files in the bin directory are
> publicly executable).  So from the account of PersonB,
> I was in the directory /home/PersonB, I issued:
>
>      /home/PersonA/INSTROOT/bin/vncserver -nolisten local
>
> I get the error
>
>      vncserver: "~/.vnc: No such file or directory"
>
> I create the directory ~/.vnc in his home directory, but this
> message still persists.
>
> Is there anything special I have to do to make my installation
> executable by others?  It would be such a waste if only I
> could use it....
>
> Thanks.
>
> Fred
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Fred Ma
> Department of Electronics
> Carleton University, Mackenzie Building
> 1125 Colonel By Drive
> Ottawa, Ontario
> Canada     K1S 5B6
> fma@doe.carleton.ca
> ==========================================================================