Version 1.30 Beta Releases

• "Supported" platforms.
• Minimum system requirements.
• Everything compiles, mainmenu runs, but all/most of the program crash on startup.
• Color palette has goes technicolor when I run UNCERT.
• Color palette changes when I run UNCERT and I can't read menus.
• Everything has compiled, but buttons/test overlap one another.
• Help doesn't work, or UNCERT module complains that UNCERT_HELP_DIR is not correctly defined.

UNCERT is currently supported on most UNIX workstations running X-windows (X11R4+) and Motif (1.1+). By supported, I mean I have ported and done minor testing of the code on that platform, or others have compiled UNCERT on the platform and reported success.

Primary development platforms: IBM-RS6000, Solaris x86, Linux, and Windows (using cygwin)

Personal ports: SGI, Sun OS, Solaris (sparc), HP, Dec (alpha), Linux, Windows 2000 (using cygwin, XFree86, and LessTif)

User ports (so I've heard): Data General, Dec (Ultrix)

There are plans to convert UNCERT from C to Java, but I have no defined time frame. Java will allow users to use some components over the internet; it will also reduce many cross platform issues (e.g. running under Windows requires significant additional software).

NOTE: Not all platforms have binaries for the current release.

UNIX Workstation with:

X-Windows X11R4 (or higher) development toolkit

OSF Motif 1.1 (or higher) development toolkit

ANSI C compiler

FORTRAN 77 compiler (or f2c, a FORTRAN to C converter)

256 Color Display

40 MB available disk space

16 MB RAM

The first four items are only required if you need to compile UNCERT. For various reasons, this is required by most users.

When I wrote UNCERT, most X-Windows only supported 256 colors (8-bit color was high-tech at the time). Modern system are normally configured with 16-bit or 32-bit color allowing for millions of colors, or "true color." UNCERT unfortunately does not handle non-8-bit displays well, particularly on Linux systems. Because of my time constraints, this will not be fixed. There is an easy workaround though. Before starting UNCERT, set your graphics display depth to 8-bits (256 colors). With some X-Server software (e.g. X-Win32 under MS-Windows), you can set "PseudoColor to support a TrueColor Mode." Many X-Servers handle this problem transparently and this is a non-issue.

While the basic problem is not fixed, Version 1.30a should no longer crash. The user should get a popup message explaining the problem at startup. The colors will continue to be incorrect until the display depth it set to 8-bits.

This is related to how X-Windows handles private color maps. Under X-Windows, only 256 colors are supported in a single window (on some systems this can be worked around), and usually on the entire display. When you start the X-Windows enviroment, X assigns a default colormap; it defines each of the 256 colors. Because the default color palette cannot meet all of UNCERT's needs, several modules must overwrite many of these colors to correctly display their information. When this overwrite occurs, colors used by other applications, or by the X-Windows environment itself maybe changed. When you switch to another application (not an UNCERT module), the color palette should switch back to the default color palette. Chances are the UNCERT module colors will now look unusual.

I cannot eliminate this problem, but I have been working on reducing the severity of the problem.

See the note above. You unfortunately have a default colormap where critical colors are getting overwritten. Under Version 1.15/16, you can try the following, though this does not work for everyone. In the $UNCERT/app-defaults/ directory you will find XResource files for each of the UNCERT modules (e.g.: for block, the XResource file is named Block). Several colors are used to define the program background colors. These are "wheat," "wheat2," and "wheat3." Try changing these all to "white" or some other color, you do not believe is being overwritten.

In the soon to be released Version 1.20, I do have a patch for this. If you need this patch before I release Version 1.20, let me know. Not all the modules are complete, but I can let you try my beta/work version. Warning, these will be my work versions, and may not be the most stable versions available.