silbar@mpx2.lampf.lanl.gov (SILBAR, RICHARD R.) (08/23/90)
I wonder why I haven't heard this complaint on the Net? I.e., I must
be doing/did something wrong.
Somewhat belatedly, I downloaded the issue of NeXT On Campus for summer
from nova.cc.purdue.edu, i.e., the file OnCAmpus.ps.Z. It is about
2.4 MB long. To print it out, I first tried uncompress and -- after a
longish time -- was informed I hadn't enough space on my disk to accept
the uncompressed file. (My 330 MB hard disk is normally 86% full.)
OK, somewhat later, I moved the .Z file to a nearly empty optical disk
and tried the uncompress there. This eventually worked, but took, again,
a surprisingly long time. In fact, there was a pop-up warning window that
said I'd run out of space on my HARD disk and suggested that I destroy
my deleted files. I did so, and it finally completed.
The reason for the long time was that 2.4 MB expanded into over 50 MB!
That is one wow of a compression scheme, I must say.
OK, now try to print it out. "lpr OnCampus.ps" did work, but it took about
an hour print out the 21 pages (!). (I'm not quite sure, 'cause I left to go
to yet another group meeting dealing with ES&H issues.) Pleasant issue,
NeXT On Campus, glad to have it.
However, whatever I did still left me with my hard disk 100% full. And,
I was unable to do anything more. Based on people's complaints about
Mathematica and such, I surmised that my swap space had been grown to the
max. So, I did a reboot, and this did indeed return my disk back to 86%
usage (which is liveable). I checked this on logging in as root.
Surprise! As I logged back in as myself, rather than root, I no longer
came in with my dock of applications as usual. Only the Workspace
Manager. Not much work to recover a dock, so I did that. However, on
launching Communicae (one of my favorite utilities), that App could not
find the default.cae file -- apparently also munged somewhere along the
line. OK, no big deal, I can copy that out of another directory, and I did
so. So now things SEEM to be working normally; I simply don't know if
anything else in my directories (or on the disk) was zapped by this whole
affair.
It is hard to imagine that everything is quite right with OnCampus.ps.Z.
I have had no such troubles downloading, uncompressing, and printing the
Buzzings.ps.Z files. Anybody know what's going on here?
Dick Silbar