World: r3wp

Probably not a font issue then. Works fine here on OSX so sounds 
like a Linux specific error. Does RebGUI work? (REBOL/Demos group)

Yeah works on OS X for me too, got that on my laptop. RebGUI seems 
to work fine, went through a few of the tabs, nothing crashed.

Let's see if anyone else on Linux has the same issue, otherwise a 
feedback is in order. Good find.

Yeah hopefully I can get this fixed somehow. I don't use the laptop 
that often and it would be nice to have the Word Browser for reference 
here on my desktop while learning REBOL, but the website is okay 
too. Thanks for your help though, much appreciated.

What do you call the "Word brother" ???

*Browser

ok, got it

browse !!! ?

This: http://www.rebol.com/view/tools/word-browser.r

Budzinski: No problem here with word-browser when I select a category 
and then a word. Works fine on Kubuntu 9.04 and Rebol/View 2.7.6.4.2.

Try to reload again the script with right button and then reload 
over the Word Browser Icon

ManuM, thanks for the tip. I tried it but it's still the same.

Normally it's a problem right at startup of View and it's fixed by 
installing the X11 fixed size bitmap fonts, but you seem to have 
those already. Are there any other bitmap fonts packages that you 
can install?

Kaj, here are all the available packages with "font" in the name: 
http://www.archlinux.org/packages/?sort=&arch=i686&repo=&q=font&last_update=&limit=all

Anything that sounds like it could be the right one? And thanks for 
trying to help.

Hmm AltMe cut off the message, but the link still works, just click 
on it, don't copy and paste (it's displayed incorrectly). Does any 
package there sounds like it could be the one I need? And thanks 
for trying to help.

Yeah, View has no rich text, and AltME screws up the hotlink overlays

You could try xorg-fonts-alias, in case a font is installed but not 
found because the name doesn't match

I don't see much else you could try. Maybe the ttf-ms-fonts, because 
it has popular font names, but that would be a new case of the problem

I remember trying the Biggelow Holmes fonts on Zenwalk, so you could 
try font-bh-ttf, but I don't remember if those were the ones to fix 
it

Those font packages all have different names on different Linux distros 
- one facet of the disaster

No change. I tried to install a few more font packages but those 
didn't help either. But thanks for your help, it was worth a try 
:)

Anyone has any recommandations how to setup linux for top security 
.. I have closed all ports except http https while ssh is limited 
to my static IP address. I have intergrity detection (tripwire that 
runs once per day and reports me all the changed files). Doc recommended 
Snort .. does using snort make sense in such setup where only those 
2 / 3 ports are open? I suspect snort detects attacks at realtime. 
I want some realtime thing also because once per day for detecting 
attacks is basically much much too late.

Budzinski: usually it's the bitmap fonts, but you had those installed 
already, so maybe it's not a font problem. "Bad face in screen pane" 
could also be the script trying to open a window with negative or 
zero size, or things like that. Maybe a negative offset could cause 
that error as well.

Gabriele, wouldn't an error in the script mean that the Word Browser 
shouldn't work at all? It does work fine on Windows and Mac OS X 
and from what ManuM said, it works on Kubuntu Linux too. But thanks 
for your input on this :) Maybe REBOL is incompatible with a newer 
version of a package. Arch Linux is a rolling release distro (daily 
updates compared to Ubuntu where you get updates every 6 months in 
form of a new distribution release). If it's that, then this problem 
will pop up for other Linux users in a few months too, when their 
distributions update to use newer packages.

I'll try to ask in the Arch Linux forum about this tomorrow. There 
probably won't be anyone using REBOL there but maybe a few people 
are willing to try this out. I'm far from being a Linux guru, if 
someone with more experience would try the Word Browser on his Arch 
Linux system, the possibility of a configuration error on my part 
could be ruled out.

You could have a look in the script to see what it's doing at that 
point

Yeah I started looking at the code. It's a bit hard to debug for 
me though. The error doesn't give any line number, it just says "near 
show main". I searched for "show main" and found three occurances 
in the source. I'm completely new to REBOL so going through everything 
in the code would take me quite some time without being able to narrow 
it down first because everything looks alien to me and I have to 
look it up to see if something in the script looks wrong. Is there 
some good tutorial available on debugging REBOL code? Or is there 
some trick to find out the last line that was executed? I do have 
access to the terminal at that point, the view is frozen but the 
terminal still accepts commands.

Ah, I understand

I'm not aware of a specific debugging tutorial. It takes experience, 
yes. It's not ideal, either, and in REBOL 3 the debugging abilities 
are greatly improved

BudzinskiC, as far as I know there's no real tutorial. Let's continue 
this in the Debugging group.

Budzinski: my guess is that for some reason, either a size-text fails, 
or some othe code fails, leading to a 0x0 or negative pair somewhere, 
or something else weird. REBOL's codebase is just too old, so it's 
always a bit at odds with Linux. :)

Yeah on Mac OS X there are a few problems too. The bottom of a scrollbar 
isn't shown for example (I guess the resize graphic in the lower 
right corner covers it). And the console is unusable when the view 
freezes. Whatever I type ends up as garbage and gets mixed up with 
the command history so the only option at that point is to restart 
REBOL. REBOL seems to work only good on Windows at this point. But 
cross platform is always a hard thing to achieve, I haven't found 
any solution other than Java & Swing that "just works". Well, maybe 
Adobe AiR but only on Windows and Mac OS X, on Linux you get into 
trouble as soon as you use something other than Ubuntu :)

More a problem with VID (the dialect) than REBOL/View per se. I think 
REBOL lives up to the "write once, run everywhere" moniker better 
than Java ("write once, test everywhere") ... *as long as* you don't 
rely on OS-specific calls/fonts/paths, etc.

I hope we get those things fixed and resolved for View/VID 3 ....

We will for Windows and OSX ... but the problem for *nix land is 
the continuing lack of a standard distro to target for. You can't 
make *any* assumptions about what you're running on. I think the 
RT approach of, "this is the Linux distro we are targeting, uses 
others at your own risk" is about the only practical option.

Is the situation really so bad? Well then - there is no other chance 
than to do it on per distro basis then, and isolate what is common 
for more platforms, and then do special configs ...

I never had any trouble with Java + Swing working everywhere, but 
I only recently started using Java for real (about a year ago I think) 
so maybe it's just gotten a lot better now and was awful in the past 
^^ But I guess it also depends a lot on what you are trying to do. 
Programming shouldn't be generalized. There are so many vastly different 
categories of programming (database, web, server, games, system, 
scripting, image/video processing, automation, A.I., embedded, etc.) 
that your mileage may vary depending on your area of interest. And 
don't get me wrong, I don't want to bash REBOL in any way. Apart 
from being completely new to the language which means that I can't 
really say if it's bad or good yet, I wouldn't be here if I didn't 
think it was useful and had potential :) Thankfully I already had 
some basic experience with Scheme, Clojure (a lisp) and Haskell so 
that REBOL's syntax didn't come as a shock for me :)

Rebol crosplatform GUI support kind of sucks :-)

We are waiting for R3, but R3 takes kind of long to complete. We 
learned a lot with VID2 and VID3/View3 should address our problems 
of the past. We don't try to pretend, that REBOL is ideal solution 
for you ....

From my experience, no language is ideal for a person, but for a 
specific task instead. I try to use the best tool for the job when 
I can (same goes for operating systems, I use Windows, Mac OS X and 
Linux). At the moment all my projects are C++, Java, Clojure, Ruby, 
Objective-C, C#, Python and Vala (compiles to C). And sometimes I 
use even two or three languages in combination. I can't say if that's 
the best solution but for me it works good so far ^^

REBOL can cover an amazing stretch of that ground, but it often falls 
down on details, such as the one you just found. It's very frustrating, 
so we have pinned our hopes on R3 which is going to fix most of them

I guess a demonstration of its stretch is rebcode, which I had no 
idea was possible. It won't be in R3, but the fact that it's even 
possible to do in a scripting language and was implemented in as 
short time as it was is a great demonstration of how generic REBOL 
is.

Budzinski: REBOL's shortcomings wrt to "multiplatformness" are mainly 
due to Carl not having the time/resources to really keep all platforms 
up to date. Design wise, I think that we don't have the problems 
Java had/has; they do, though, have enough manpower to fix all of 
them, no matter how awful things end up being. ;)

Gabriele, that Java is open source should help a bit too ^^ But from 
what I read maybe not as much as it could. Seems like Sun needs to 
be forced to accept patches and it can take months until they give 
in. May have been just a few rare cases though, people who are angry 
about something are often more vocal than people who are satisfied.

Henrik, I read about rebcode. Any idea why it's not going to be in 
R3? Sounded like a pretty cool feature. Although I would probably 
never use it, haven't done anything with assembler yet and I don't 
think I ever will (which usually means that something will happen 
that will force me to learn it tomorrow).

I've read the explanation multiple times, but BrianH knows it better 
than me. It has something to do with how functions are implemented 
in R3, which would make rebcode work slower in R3. Therefore it's 
better to spend time perfecting extensions, so you can write time 
critical code in C and use that instead. Rebcode is not for beginners 
anyway (but it did bring up that oldschool feeling for a while :-)).

For REBOL, supporting all platforms, theoretically if you have one 
person who knows enough about all modern OSes to maintain ports of 
R3, that should be enough for good support. Most of the compatibility 
problems are specific and known.

It'll be at least a lot easier to write C extension instead of using 
an assembly like language ^^ I've used inline C and C++ in the past 
when writing Ruby code. I don't know much about C/C++ because I always 
try not to use them, but I read that nowadays the gcc compiler has 
gotten that good that sometimes the code it produces is as fast as 
hand written assembler would be.

hi rebol R2  do not working under ubuntu 9.10 !!!!!  probleme with 
lib libstdc++5

perhaps i must do a link with libstdc++6

what i can do thank in advance