Get it while it’s luke-warm! For Windows and For Other
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My name is Mark Doliner. I’m a computer software engineer living and working in North Carolina, USA. I worked in the San Francisco Bay area for 13 years before moving back East in 2019. My email address is mark@kingant.net.
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I downloaded the Windows version and installed it no problem. When I run it though, it doesn’t actually do anything. There’s a gaim process but there’s no window or anything. Does gaim work by telepathy now or am I missing something?
Because if it’s telepathic, I’m a little scared.
That’s sad. I don’t know what would cause that. Maybe it was just minimized–was the little Gaim guy in your system tray? You could also try stopping Gaim, moving your old C:\Documents and Settings\Will\Application Data\.gaim directory out of the way, then starting Gaim again.
There’s no little Gaim guy. I also don’t have a .gaim directory. All I’ve got is the gaim process…
Sad! I have no idea what’s wrong. If you REALLY REALLY wanted to you could open a command prompt and cd to the directory where Gaim is istalled and run it with “gaim -d” and see if it prints out anything useful looking. Possibly anything about uPNP. If you have a crazy software firewall then I guess it’s possible Gaim is waiting for something to timeout (and that would of course be a bug).
I get a bunch of crazy stuff (looking for paths, loading dlls) and then get this, which is where it hangs:
wgaim: tcl84.dll not found. Loading it…
I’ll try installing stable gaim and see if I can get that running.
Stable gaim (1.5) gives me the same problem, plus another one. When I run it, a dialog pops up saying “The procedure entry point gaim_gtk_conv_window_get_active_conversation could not be located in the dynamic link library gaim.dll” and the debug output says that notify.dll is unloadable, although it keeps going with the rest of the dlls until it gets to tcl84.dll and hangs.
I guess I’m just stuck with AIM. :(
If you are running dual monitor, there is an error in the GAIM Beta that can put the windows on the wrong screen.
As far as the .gaim directory, it is hidden by default. In order to see it you need to Show hidden files and folders from the folder options.
I’m not running dual monitor, so that shouldn’t be an issue. I also run into the same problem with the current stable version of Gaim, so it’s not just a beta problem.
I have hidden files and folders visible and the .gaim directory still isn’t there.
Maybe cygwin is your problem?
I had the same problem. Upon reading the FAQ I realized the problem was having cygwin/bin in my PATH. From the gaim win32 FAQ:
TCL Loader Plugin + Cygwin = WinGaim crash – Starting with 0.75, Win Gaim comes with a tcl plugin loader. The loader plugin is dependant on tcl84.dll and will use the first one found in the dll search path. If you have a cygwin installation (with tcl 8.4), and have added its bin directory to your PATH, then WinGaim will crash on startup. The solution is to remove cygwin’s bin directory from your path. Introducing cygwin dlls into the native win32 environment is a very bad idea, and is likely to cause problems with other programs.
Re: Maybe cygwin is your problem?
Yup, that was the problem (although gaim was hanging instead of crashing).
I don’t understand why it’s a bad idea, though. I like being able to use UNIX commandline stuff at a Windows prompt and I’ve never had problems with anything else.
Re: Maybe cygwin is your problem?
I deleted my bin directory in c:\program files and reinstalled gaim but i still get the same problem. Any Ideas?
Do you have any idea what the difference is between the “gaim-2.0.0beta2-debug.exe” file and the “gaim-2.0.0beta2.exe” file? If one is going to provide the dev team with useful debugging info, I’d rather use that one, but I’m not sure what the ACTUAL difference is between those two files.
Thanks,
I think the debug version will save the stacktrace to a file when Gaim crashes. It writes to the file gaim.RPT in the Gaim installation directory. I don’t think the normal version does that.
Er, and the stacktrace is useful to us developer types when trying to figure out why Gaim crashed.
Thanks. I’ll try that version. It just seemed odd that the “debug” version was a SMALLER file.
I noticed that, too. I asked some people and we think maybe the debug version does not include gtk, or does not include Gaim’s pixmaps, sounds, translations, etc. But none of us are Windows people, so we’re not really sure. Installing the non-debug version first and then installing the debug version afterward might not be a bad idea.
If you find out what the difference is exactly, lemme know :-)
The win32 packager responded and it looks like the debug version DOES include pixmaps, sounds, translations, etc. and DOES NOT include gtk.