rmeyers@tle.dec.com (Randy Meyers 381-2743 ZKO2-3/N30) (10/16/87)
decwrl!ucbvax!husc6!bbn!cosell.bbn.com!cosell (/Bernie\) writes: >I suspect that my problem with getting the Trashcan to work has >somethig to do with brokenness in the Trashcan "info" file, You are correct. The .info file for the trashcan is broken on the disks that come with an Amiga 2000. I just traded my Amiga 1000 in on a 2000, and noticed that the trashcans are broken. (I think that the trashcan on the Extras disk is broken as well as the one on the Workbench disk.) The problem is that the trashcan icon is the wrong type. A .info file identifies what type of object it is associated with. For a list of all the types of icons, run IconEd and look at the list it displays when it starts. There are two types of icons that can be associated with a directory. There is a drawer-type icon or a garbage-type icon. (Lest people become confused let me state I am not talking about how the icons look when I differentiate drawer and garbage icons. The difference is based on a type field stored in the .info file.) The workbench determines if a directory is a trashcan by looking its .info file to see if the icon is a garbage icon. If you select an icon that is of type garbage, the Workbench enables the empty trashcan menu item. If you select the trashcan that comes on the Workbench disk and then select the Info menu item you will see that the icon is of type drawer instead of garbage. Evidently when someone at Commodore was making up the special Workbench disks that go with the Amiga 2000 (and the 500?), they screwed up the type of the icon. If you could change the type of the icon, you could use the Trashcan to delete files. There are tools to do this in the public domain, but unfortunately none of them come on the disks from Commodore. There is a simple three step workaround. The following procedure will work on a one or two drive system. Using the CLI, delete the trashcan icon from your workbench disk using the command: DELETE "Workbench 1.2:Trashcan.info" (If Workbench 1.2 isn't the name of your workbench disk, then substitute then name of your Workbench disk for the text Workbench 1.2.) Take a blank disk. Initialize it using the Workbench menu. Then use the CLI to copy the trashcan icon from the newly initialized disk to your workbench disk: Copy Empty:Trashcan.info "Workbench 1.2:Trashcan.info" (If Workbench 1.2 isn't the name of your workbench disk, then substitute then name of your Workbench disk for the text Workbench 1.2.) Note that the trashcan icon produced by the above procedure isn't as pretty as the broken trashcan that came on your original workbench disk, but at least it works! (It is the Trashcan icon that Amiga 1000 owners got with their 1.2 Workbench update.) The delete in the above process is necessary to keep the Workbench initialize operation from trying to duplicate the broken trashcan from the Workbench disk. If you don't delete the original broken trashcan icon, the initialized disk will have a cropped image of the trashcan and its lid doesn't raise up when you click on it. Although this new trashcan is a garbage type icon, it looks even uglier than the Amiga 1000 trashcan you get if you do the delete. I'll bet that this blunder from Commodore will cause lots of problems for new users. Sigh. On a different topic, Bernie asked for the best book on AmigaDOS for programmers and where to find out about icons. The book any serious AmigaDOS programmer should have is the official AmigaDOS manual from Commodore manual published by Bantam. Make sure to get the 1.2 updated version. The cover state that it is the 1.2 version if it is. The programmer's interface to the workbench and icons is documented in the ROM kernel manual "Libraries and Devices" in some chapter near the back. ---------------------------------------- Randy Meyers, not representing Digital Equipment Corporation USENET: {decwrl|decvax|decuac}!tle.dec.com!rmeyers ARPA: rmeyers%tle.dec.com@decwrl.dec.com