Ultima Linux, Mandrake, NEdit, ispell and mixed results.
Since I'd upgraded belgian from Mandrake 9.0 to 10.1 spell checking didn't work in NEdit. Today I finally fixed that. After finding that ispell couldn't find its dictionary because it wasn't there (how'd that happen, I'd like to know - I sure didn't delete it myself) I went looking for the required dictionary. After a web search proved frustrating, I turned to a local machine. I'm sure if I'd looked long enough I'd have the needed file on the web, but caspian was right here with a working ispell. So I ftp-ed the dictionary(-ies) from caspian to belgian and then NEdit and ispell were happy again.
Before getting that far, I'd run Mandrake's update tool and updated many packages. There were a non-trivial amount of fixes, mainly as I'd not done the updates in a while. That's taken care of now.
Then I went to find why NEdit wasn't doing spell check on caspian despite a working ispell. So help me, the script NEdit uses wants csh. Oy. Looking at belgian there was no csh. Well, not quite. There was mention of csh and it was a symlink to tcsh. Oh joy. I hadn't installed tcsh on caspian as I didn't expect to ever need it. I use bash for the shell. This turned into a small adventure with Ultima's (Slackware's) pkgtool which wants an exact path, no hunting or searching. Eventually I got tcsh installed from the Ultima install CD and made the csh symlink to it. And now NEdit does spell check, but not cleanly.
The spell check itself work okkay, but at the end of the check a warning dialog comes up complaining:
Warning: Cannot convert string "/usr/share/pixmaps/gnome-gemvt.xbm" to type Pixmap.
Warning: Cannot convert string "/usr/share/pixmaps/gnome-gemvt-mask.xbm" to type Pixmap.
xterm: unable to open font "-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--18-200-75-75-C-100-ISO10646-1", trying fixed"...
And offers a "Proceed" and a "Cancel" button. "Proceed" lets the spelling correction complete, at least. But it's not as nice and clean it should be.
ADDENDUM: The problem was in the .Xresources file which was added to make xterm look good. The file as copied from the web calls for things that do not exist on an Ultima install. Removing the contents of the file makes things work, but with the original (ugly) color scheme. Adding the following two lines back gives the desired result, both a nicely working spell check for NEdit and a good looking xterm for when it does it (NEdit calls xterm, even if I typically use Eterm):
XTerm*foreground: gray90
XTerm*background: black
The thing that isn't working is Ultima's ulupdate tool for security updates. Or maybe I should say it tries to work, but there might be a server issue. When I invoke ulupdate it looks good and starts to update firefox. That is, it contacts the server, it finds firefox is in need of a security update, it starts downloading a .tgz file and when the download looks like it has completed, trouble. There's a message "Error in server response, closing connection." Then it tries again, does the download again, and fails again. Lather, rinse, repeat. This one calls for an email, which I just sent, to inform the maintainer.
ADDENDUM: Still having no luck with ulupdate, but have downloaded the "Ultima 4 SP1" ISOs. I didn't know there was a fairly clean way to upgrade, but as the developer said:
Just mount the cd-rom, and run
upgradepkg /mnt/cdrom/slackware/*/*.tgz
I did and the upgrade is running now. Considering all that's going on from CD, I think that downloading the ISO might have been for the best.
A less critical nuisance is that I have yet to get Opera to launch from Xfce on caspian. I can launch Opera from a terminal if I'm in the right directory, but that's it. It's usable, but awkward and annoying.
ADDENDUM: I'm not sure what I was doing wrong before, but here's how to do it right. Get the Opera install file. Become root and copy it to /tmp and then:
gunzip < filename.tar.gz | tar xvf -
cd opera-8.50-20050916.1-static-qt.i386.en
./install.sh
Some dialog will follow asking to confirm locations of where things are to be installed. Answer 'y' to all of them. That's it. Keep the terminal open to do a find of opera.xpm for the icon.
Add an Opera launcher to the Xfce launch bar (right click on the bar...) and also change the icon to the opera icon. Done.