[Pkg-scicomp-devel] Paraview: help failed

[Ondrej Certik]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 11:03 AM, Gerber van der Graaf
<gerber.vdgraaf at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, I downloaded the paraview 3.2.1-1 deb package from
> http://debian.certik.cz/debian/ in the hope it can be used with the
> OpenFoam CFD software (not packaged in Debian). Therefore I currently
> have two problems:
>
> To learn and understand Paraview I launched the program and looked for
> the online help. Though this fails. When pressing F1, Paraview launches
> a terminal window reporting: "Failed to start Qt Assistant." I do not
> know if this is a error from upstream, the packaging or a failure on my
> system. By the way:
> - It seems that libqt4-assistant has been installed on my
> Debian/Unstable i386 system.
> - The KDE Help applications does work fine within another program, like
> Kalzium.

The help system stopped working for me as well. So I guess the
qt4-assistant has changed.
Now I get this in a window when running help:

Unknown option: -server Usage: assistant [Options] -collectionFile
file Uses the specified collection file instead of the default one
-showUrl url Shows the document with the url. -enableRemoteControl
Enables Assistant to be remotely controlled. -show widget Shows the
specified dockwidget which can be "contents", "index", "bookmarks" or
"search". -activate widget Activates the specified dockwidget which
can be "contents", "index", "bookmarks" or "search". -hide widget
Hides the specified dockwidget which can be "contents", "index"
"bookmarks" or "search". -register helpFile Registers the specified
help file (.qch) in the given collection file. -unregister helpFile
Unregisters the specified help file (.qch) from the give collection
file. -quiet Does not display any error or status message. -help
Displays this help.

>
> Following the instructions in the README.Debian for using the paraview
> python module: everything went fine until "view.StillRender()" command.
> This launches a terminal window but nothing else. By the way:
> - I am using an older binary release of Python ((using Python 2.4.4 (#2,
> Apr 26 2007, 00:02:45) ) than the one mentioned in the README (Python
> 2.4.4 (#2, Jan  3 2008, 13:36:28). Maybe this is the problem? When

Could be. But doesn't have to be. It works for me though.

> upgrading my Debian/Unstable the pyhton-2.4 deb package has been kept
> back, but I do not know why and how to force upgrading this package.

That's probably because Debian unstable has moved to python2.5. Try
apt-get dist-upgrade. Or post more details of your session.

Ondrej