ThinkingRock Forum

Hi,

I am new to this forum so would like to start by saying what a great tool TR is. I have been using it for managing GTD for about 6 months now and I am very impressed. Thank you.

Having used successfully on PC and Mac, I have just installed onto Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon) but I am having 2 problems:

1. Even though I installed it as my normal user account (and I am therefore the owner of the directory and files) , It only runs properly with root privileges. If I am not root, I get the menu items but the screen is blank in the middle. I am sure that this is a privileges issue but do not know where to look. It is running with Sun Java 6, which I installed via Synaptic package manager (but had to set JAVA_HOME and PATH manually).

2. When I do get the GUI (via root), the calendar control comes up blank when selecting a date for a scheduled or delegated action).

I would be grateful if someone may be able to help. I have spent a lot of time trying to solve but have hit a dead end.

thanks
Simon.

Not sure why these problems are happening. Can you look at the log and see if any error messages happen when you start up and when the calendar is presented.

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ThinkingRock Developer

I'm running under Ubuntu (Gutsy) using Sun Java 6. I have it installed under my own documents directory, and I'm having no problems with privileges.

I sometimes have the calendar control coming up blank, and the same when I try to add new thoughts. It's an intermittent problem, and when I close the window and try again directly I'm usually fine.

Hi guys,

I'm having the same trouble when I start TR without root privileges.

I extracted the Zip file to /usr/lib/thinkingrock and created a menu item which points to usr/lib/thinkingrock/bin/thinkingrock.

TR initializes but I always get the screen blank. When I try to create a new file, the TR shows the error message "Could not create the file".

The Java Version is 6 and the Ubuntu is Gutsy Gibbon.

Thanks in advance,
Fabio

Hello,

I think that the calender control issue might be a Java problem rather than one with TR. I am getting the same problem with blank dialogue boxes on another Java application running under Ubuntu. When I get a minute, I will try a different JVM and report back.

With regard to inspecting the log, does anyone know where I might find this or are we talking about the standard output when starting from a terminal?

Regards,
Simon.

OK, I have done some tests and the problem with the blank dialogue box could be related to the Visual Effects setting in Ubuntu. I have found that if you disable this and restart TR, the blank calendar dialogue box issue seems to go away (but the interface does not look as good).

Simon

I ran from console using my username. These are the initial messages:

I've just discovered the solution for my problem. It's quite simple:

I had no permission to write on ".thinkingrock" (dot thinkingrock) hidden folder on my userdir (/home/fabio). So I changed the owner of this folder.

It was:



I ran the command:



TR works fine now!

Hi Fabio,

Fantastic. I have changed the ownership of the .thinkingrock directory structure (I didn't even know that this was there) and it is working fine without root privs now.

Many thanks for your help.

That just leaves the blank dialogue box problem that it seems a few people are experiencing.

regards,
Simon

All,

Just to complete this thread, the blank dialogue problem looks to be an issue with Compiz Fusion when called from a Java application. I have upgraded to 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and I have not had the problem since. Checking the package versions, it looks like Hardy comes packaged with a later version of Compiz Fusion and this has made a difference.



Simon

I have this problem on Ubuntu 8.04 with either java5 or java6, the GUI comes up but the overview window is missing

Hi, I think that your problem may be different. I have experienced the blank screen on startup before but this was a security issue. The resolution was to change the permissions on the .thinkingrock directory structure as explained by Fabio earlier in this thread. The other way round is to try running the application with root privileges.

I hope this helps.

Simon.

That worked... once.
And once only.
Changing ownership or read/write-privileges on the .thinkingrock directory did nothing, but running thinkingrock with sudo worked... once. Now the rror message
[WinSys.PersistenceManager.getTopComponentForID] Problem when deserializing TopComponent for tcID:'OverviewTopComponent'. Reason: Top component OverviewTopComponent could not be located or loaded from Components folder.
Cannot find Overview component. It will not be located properly in the window system.
comes up whether I run thinkingrock as root or as a normal user, and the component with the actual actions is missing -> thinkingrock becomes unusable if you see everything else but what you should actually do.
So we have a works-once-and then-gets-deadlocked-situation, because I had the same behavior after installing Ubuntu 8.04 in the first place: I ran thinkingrock as a normal user, it worked once, then the missing TopComponent
You might be right, it looks like a permissions problem, but not a permissions problem that can be solved by changing ownership for directories or running the application as root

Several people have reported problem with the top half of the Actions screen missing. This relates to both reprocessing tasks and closing TR without having looked at the Actions screen in a session. These are both acknowledge bugs that will be fixed in RC3. You can get the Action screen back by deleting ReviewActions.xml and perhaps the .ThinkingRock folder.

ThinkingRock runs on the Netbeans platform and this uses the term "TopComponent" for its window panels. These are serialized (ie saved) to xml configuration files. However the error message says there is a problem re-loading them. I cannot understand how they would run once only. TR stores data in three places.
1.) ReviewActions.xml stored with your data file.
2.) .ThinkingRock stored in %AppData%
3.) Netbeans configuration stored with the TR program files.

Do you think that when running as a normal user one of the three did not have write or execute permission? This could have caused them to get out of sink. Unfortunately I have never used Linux and I am a bit out of my depth here.

To the list you provided:
1.) ReviewActions.xml stored with your data file.
2.) .ThinkingRock stored in %AppData%
3.) Netbeans configuration stored with the TR program files.

I would add another location in Linux:
4.) the .java directory has a .userPrefs subdirectory, and thinkingrock stores settings there

This is how I got full functionality back: delete the complete thinkingrock program directory, the complete .thinkingrock user directory, the complete .java user directory and all the thinking rock data files (xml, backup, ics...), then re-install thinkingrock, start thinkingrock, bring the xml-file with actual gtd-content back from the dead, open it through the thinkingrock user interface

I could not find a ReviewActions.xml file anywhere, but now my thinkingrock works again