View queue faxes flashes andd disappears
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Hello, This is my first post to this forum.
I'm also new to efax-gtk. So far I haven't sent anything and all receives have failed, but I think I can make this work!
Something that looks broken is the momentry display I get when trying to view queued faxes. The behavior reminds me of something that needs to be run in from a shell.
If I use enstript and print to a file, my gs displays the file OK. If enscript prints to the faxprinter the fax queue View is a blip.
I have opensuse 11.2 and kde 4.3.1 installed off a DVD. My fax modem is a USR 2976 PCI HW modem. I build the latest efax-gtk tarball, but I built rpms from it and installed them. I've edited the efax-gtk file in /etc.
To be able to trouble shoot the fax problems, it's nice to view the queues and log file.
Is this momentary display behavior a common setup mistake? Heboland
Can you explain the problem further? Do I deduce the situation is as follows:
1. efax-gtk starts OK.
2. all its dialogs work apart from the "Queued faxes from socket" dialog. That dialog closes as soon as it is opened.
If you start efax-gtk from konsole and you try to show a "Queued faxes from socket" dialog, what error report (if any) do you get. If you try to send a fax, what error report do you get, and does it work if you try to send a postscript/PDF file on the file system rather than a print job from the socket?
Chris
Thanks for the response, Chris,
Yes efax-gtk starts OK. From the console starting efax-gtk gets: Socket running on port 7700. From the console, the view queue is persistant - what I wanted. I have been starting efax-gtk from a panel button. Maybe I need to use the "run in a shell" option.
I can take this display matter from here, but may I slip in one other question. If the answer is not NO, I'll follow up with another thread.
Can I update just the efax from the 0.9a version that came with the tarball. I'm expecting the answer iis NO. The reason I asked is that I started out with just efax and installed its latest release. I'm using the 0.8a that came with the efax-gtk.
What I was looking for was a link in an efax-gtk config file that pointed to the efax release it is using. Heboland
Posting back to myself for wrapup, the best invocation lingo I could come up with to start efax-gtk from an opensuse 11.2 panel button is /usr/bin/xterm -iconic -e /usr/bin/efax-gtk. I'm open to suggestions here.
Everything else I tried "hohup /usr/bin/efax-gtk & starts efax-gtk, but the gs display burst like a soap bubble,
I'm happy with the xterm, but always interested in better ideas.
One more thing I'll drop in here that may warrant a new thread is a behavior of this site. As a dial-up user, I can tell you which sites let me post after my dial-up link breaks and gets reestablisned.
Here my login gets lost if the link breaks while posting and have to reestablish it. It's still there this time, so I'm going to dump this! Heboland
You don't need to run efax-gtk in a shell and it should not make any difference whether you do or you do not. Possibly there is something broken in your distribution's version of GTK+, or in your window manager's interaction with GTK+, who knows. Suse is not a GTK+ based distribution.
efax-gtk comes with version 0.9a of efax, with some additional patches applied (including patches for internationalization). I do not completely understand the question you are asking, but if it is whether you can use the version of efax which comes with efax-gtk for other faxing purposes (say, with other programs which use efax), then yes you can, but the binary is installed as 'efax-0.9a' rather than 'efax'. You can do a symbolic link for applications which expect to find a 'efax' binary.
Chris
Thank you again Chris, and thank you for efax-gtk.
The efax version question I was asking is the other way around from what you concluded. I wanted to know if the efax-gtk I installed with can be made to work with a newer version of efax than the efax that came with the efax-gtk tarball.
Heboland
OK.
Is there a later version than 0.9a? I think you will find that the one in efax-gtk is the latest there is (and includes a number of bug fixes of the standard version - see efax/PATCHES in the efax-gtk tarball for more detail).
Chris
Thanks Chris,
I'm happy with the version of efax that you provided.
I do have an efax I think is newer (efax-3.0.8-1) but I don't recall now how I got it. I think I got it from an opensuse repro. Wherever, your version is fine.
If I may return to the original topic of the transient gs invocation using the efax-gtk View Queued Faxes, could GTK account for this behavior?
If there is room here, I'll list my gtk rpms for what it's worth.
frank rpm -qa | grep -i gtk
gtk2-metatheme-sonar-11.2.9-1.2.1.noarch
gtk2-engine-murrine-0.90.3-4.5.i586
gtk2-branding-openSUSE-11.2-3.5.noarch
efax-gtk-3.2.1-1.i586
qtcurve-gtk2-0.68.0-2.2.i586
python-gtk-2.16.0-2.3.i586
gtk2-devel-2.18.1-3.5.i586
gtk2-engines-2.18.4-2.5.i586
gtk2-2.18.1-3.5.i586
kcm_gtk-1.1-3.2.i586
gtk2-metatheme-gilouche-11.1.2-2.5.noarch
Do you have a suggestion for some other gtk that I should have? Heboland
I don't have any suggestions I am afraid, beyond seeing if you can get someone to reproduce the problem. It makes little sense that it only works if you start the program from a bash shell.
Chris
Thanks for the input, Chris,
For the record, I use zshell rather than bash shell, but I doubt that's significant either.
My implementation with the xterm is OK for me. I'm still waiting for my neighbor to fire up his XP fax so I can test my efax-gtk. In anticipation after the failed receive attempts, I've switched to class 1. On the web, USR modems are unpredictable fax modems.
Heboland
Replying to myself, I got fax send and receive to work using class 1.
That brought about a surprise! I can't look at the files in the faxin and faxsent directories with gs. Both directories according to "file" have tiff files in them. With efax-gtk invoked from an xterm, gs will view the queued files.
gs efax-gtk/faxin/20100514200950/20100514200950.002 gives me this: GPL Ghostscript 8.64: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1. The display in between the invocation and the error it transient.
Am I feeding the wrong file type to gs, or is this a problem with gs? Heboland
I am not sure what you are doing but received and sent faxes are stored as tiff files, and you cannot view them using gs, and you are not intended to do so. You view them from the 'received fax' and 'sent fax' list dialogs.
Chris
Thanks again for your patience,
I think I have this straight now! The files in the efax-gtk queues are tiff files. The gs man page does not mention tiff and gs will not view tiff files.
Files I manually put into the efax-gtk file queue have to be either PS files or PDF files. When they are sent they show up in the sentfax directory as tiff files.
Unless another surprise happens, I think efax-gtk is working for me. As such it does everything I need for my fax needs. Heboland