Win over the XWINPLOT...

Since XWINPLOT is still a plot editor that belongs to the 'archaea' branch of computer programs, time and again you can end up with the frustration of making peace between the old and the new. One such instance arose when I upgraded the RHEL v4 to RHELv5.4 on DRX499, which runs Topspin 1.3 PL8.

Fortunately, I did not throw away the v4 distro and that saved me a LOT of trouble, as you will see below.

First, when I start the plot command,  the status bar says that plot progam is starting but it silently commits suicide, without leaving a discernible trace. When I captured the hist output (there is no savelogs command here; another of the quirks of TS1.3) and sent it to HQ, Mike Engelhardt forwarded me this Bruker Knowledge base link and said that my problem is similar to the one addressed :

http://www.bruker-biospin.com/shell/bkb/show_bug.cgi?id=8702

Basically this item highlights the fact that how xwinplot dies quietly if some of the needed shared libraries are not found.  In my case, there were two :

libdps.so.1

libdpstk.so.1

This is where the old distro. came in handy. When I located these files in RHELv4 distro., they were sitting under /usr/X11R6/lib.  The lib directory was completely absent in the case of RHELV5.4.

Solution :

• I copied over the entire directory /usr/X11R6/lib from v4 to the v5.4 distro. Even though the above said libraries were now available, the plot program could not still see these. 
• Therefore I created a soft link from /usr/X11R6/iib/ for the above two files into /usr/lib/ with identical names.  This solved the problem of plot dying prematurely.  It turns out that, with RHELv5.4 distro, /usr/lib is where the plot program is looking for the libraries. 
• By the way, the command I used to list out the libraries that were missing is given in the Knowledge Base article : 

topspin -e ldd /opt/topspin/prog/mod/xwinplot.mod

Now plot is working properly and I am also able to print the spectrum, as before.

Before I stumbled onto using the old distro to rummage the files, I tried some web search for the above two library files and the process was ugly, to put it mildly. So, it is a good thing to keep the backward compatible stuff around for a bit, until we iron out all the problems in the migrated system.