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Finale



Dear Folks,

	Apparently when Executor 1.2 was released, it broke "Finale".   
We do not as yet own a copy of Finale, so even though it was reported  
by one of our beta testers, we managed to overlook this problem.   
Here's a summary of the situation, you can write to me for more  
information if you need it:

	Apparently when Finale starts up, it looks at all the volumes  
that are accessible and chooses to write temp files on the one that  
has the most amount of free space left.  Currently, although Executor  
allows you to use your UNIX filesystem, it cheats in one key respect:  
it says that all UNIX filesystems have 10Mb of disk space left on  
them, so Finale chooses to write on the first volume it sees, which  
is "/".  The Finale code doesn't check to see whether permissions  
will prevent it from doing this, in fact, on a Mac, if you have a  
read-only Appleshare volume, you'll get the same thing you get under  
Executor, a "mystery hang."

	Two possible workarounds are:

	1) Run Executor as root when you are going to run Finale.
	   As root, you'll be able to write in "/".  A few temp files
	   will be created, but they'll be deleted when you're done.

	   The major disadvantage here is the same as you get
	   whenever you do things as root; you could inadvertantly
	   stomp something that you shouldn't.

	2) Change the permissions of "/" to allow writing.  If you do
	   this, I suggest you also turn on the "sticky" bit as well.
	   (Normally if you have write access to a directory, you can
	   delete any file in the directory, whether you own the file
	   or not.  When the sticky bit is set, only the owner of a
	   file can delete the file).  To do this you need to do
	   something similar to:

		iclone% su
		Password:
		iclone# chmod a+w,+t /
		iclone# ls -ld /
		drwxrwxrwt 24 root        1024 Jul 22 15:59 /

	   The drawback here is that other users of your system can
	   leave junk in "/", which ties up disk space and can be
	   an eyesore when you're doing lists.  In general, this
	   solution is preferable to #1 above.

	I believe that on a Mac, you can hold down the option and  
clover key at the same time when Finale is launching and it won't  
have this nasty behaviour.  Apparently this doesn't work under  
Executor, although as of yet, I don't know why.

	One final note, Executor still does not support access to the  
serial ports, so you can only use Finale for notation, not music  
playing or synthesis.

	--Cliff