Subject: Win95 Freezing - solved?
From: [email-masked] (Joe Soroka)

14 May 1998 07:42:41 -0700
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To: [email-masked]

  "Long time listener - first time caller..."

Several weeks ago, I went to www.gimp.org and was shocked by the zeal with
which the various supporters declared it (gimp - gnu image processing tool
- photoshop clone) to be _the_ killer app for X & *nixes, and that they had
taken a monumental step towards their utter dominance over NT/95.  I'd had
success with Cygwin on many other projects so I figured I'd give it a shot
and see how far I could get...  

Well, first I had to compile gtk+, a gui toolkit lib needed to compile
gimp..  No problem!  I just opened a bash window, cd'd and ./configure'd
.... No problems.  make'd.  make install'd.  The end.  worked like a charm.
I think I probably had to fix a couple of tiny things.  Oh yeah, like the
X11 libs I got from Sergey didn't have some arcane X feature that gtk+
wanted, but I just looked at the source and it was perfectly reasonable to
comment those portions out.

Anyways, I was pretty excited.  The snobbery of some of the gimp supporters
just made me want to kick'em down a notch.  Arrogance is never necessary.
So I untar'd gimp-0.99.28 and went for it.  ./configure started to churn
and it went pretty good for a while.  I was really choked when I came back
ten minutes later and it had frozen on an rm.  So I rebooted and tried
again... and again... and again.  No go.  It just kept freezing.  Cygwin
started freezing all over the place, I began to notice.

So I checked the cygwin mailing list.  I was in the middle of finals and it
seemed that all I could do was wait for the b19.2, which supposedly was
going to fix that freezing bug.  blah blah, I've already made this story
way too long... I tried an install of NT5, but it was so buggy I went back
to OSR2 after ten minutes of beta-hell.  I would just go to NT4, but I'm in
fat32 and I can't go to NTFS for unavoidable reasons.  

Anyways, before I had tried NT5, I installed the newest dial-up networking
patch, basically the 4.00.1114 winsock.dll.  I decided that I might as well
give the USB patch a try too, since I was just about to kill it all
anyways.  I noticed during the USB patch that alot of system files were
updated, seemingly unrelated to any USB stuff.  So I gave the gimp
../configure one last try before going to NT.  Whaddya know?  It went!  I
tried a quick make, but it was a bit of a mess and didn't go very far.

So I tried NT5, gave up and went back to OSR2.  I then reinstalled cygnus
and the same b19.dll from Sergey that I had been using before.  The gimp
../configure kept freezing badly, exactly as before.  I thought, "what a
nicely controlled experiment!"  
ie. OSR2 && cygwin && gimp = freezes... 
    OSR2 && newest winsock && win95 USB patch && cygwin && gimp != freeze...
    therefore, newest winsock || win95 USB patch somehow fix the freezing
problem.

Well, now with a fresh OSR2, I installed USB patch and the new winsock and
cygwin bash works beautifully, gimp ./configure completes = thesis proven
(??).

So what I'm thinking is..  Instead of b19.2 needing to fix the problem,
maybe it was Microsoft's to begin with?  Unfortunately, I've checked the
Microsoft web site and done a little bit of searching for this article, but
I can't find the USB patch anywhere in internet land.  I'll look at the
license agreement with MSDN soon, and maybe I/someone can actually
distribute the USB patch.  (I have a feeling the new winsock has nothing to
do with it, but that would take another 2K of explanation)..

anyways, hopefully this is good news for the developers..

js.

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