Checkpoint Commander 6.0.0 release notes
Synopsis
Advanced connection options for helper apps. Support for saving result sets. Support for rearranging result sets. Improved MIME management / viewer binding interface. Improved XSPF support. Checkpoint 6 compatibility.
System specification
Minimum supported: Windows98, 200MHz CPU, 64MB RAM, lots of patience. This may be marginal for the audio player.
Recommended: 600MHz CPU, 256MB RAM, Windows2000 or Linux (Kernel 2.6, modern glibc). A faster CPU is recommended if you want to play video clips (3rd-party helper application required). More of everything may be required for Windows XP - see Microsoft's recommendations.
Java Version
This release requires Java 6 gold release or better. It won't run under Java 1.4 or below. Java 5 (most recent update) seems to work on Linux but is not supported.
Browser Version
We make a great effort to be fully standards compliant, and our interface technologies are deliberately rather minimalist. Therefore, browser-fronted Checkpoint Applications should work with any fully standards-compliant browser. Browsers are complex, full-featured applications in their own right, so in the event of rendering or other problems the most likely culprit is the settings in the browser itself.
In general it is important to keep your browser up-to-date, even more so than other applications, since it interacts so strongly with the outside 'net. Therefore we recommend that you always use the latest stable version of your preferred browser.
- Opera (8.54, 9.0)
- Supported. Please note that Opera is now available at no cost, and no longer contains adverts.
- Mozilla Firefox (1.5.0.4 or better)
- Supported.
- Konqueror (KDE)
- Rendering works, but there are issues with X.509 / TLS support. This makes Konqueror fine for desktop-replacement Checkpoint Applications, but problematic for Internet-hosted servers.
- Internet Explorer (6.x)
- We do not support this product and do not recommend it. However, if you must use it, anecdotal evidence indicates that it may well work.
- Safari (Mac OS X)
- Due to resource constraints we are unable to support OS X at this time. We would welcome the opportunity to collaborate with OS X users to rectify this.
- Mozilla Seamonkey (old-style Mozilla suite)
- Not supported, but recent builds ought to work.
Installing
To install CPC from scratch, follow the instructions inside the distribution archive.
Upgrading from earlier than 5.7.0
Upgrade to 5.4.0 or better before attempting this upgrade. Then upgrade in the usual way, ie. install "over the top" of the current installation. Follow the installation instructions which come with the distribution.
The modules subfolder of the Checkpoint folder is no longer used.
It can safely be deleted if present.
The files classbase.cdb and concurrent.jar, both located
in the lib subfolder of the Checkpoint installation, are no longer
used. They can safely be deleted after the upgrade has been completed.
The following libraries, all used by the audio player, and all located in the
lib subfolder of the Checkpoint installation, have been upgraded.
The older versions (version numbers given here) can safely be deleted if present:
jl0.4.jar, jogg-0.0.5.jar, jorbis-0.0.12.jar,
mp3spi1.9.1.jar, vorbisspi1.0.jar.
Upgrading from 5.7.0
If any of your profiles has a password, and the password contains characters which aren't in US-ASCII (ie. normal English characters, numerals and punctuation, basically), and your locale isn't UTF-8 (or you're not sure whether it is or not) then you need to remove the password before upgrading. After you've done the upgrade, you can put the password back on.
Important! When a Checkpoint Commander archive is opened for the first time with Checkpoint Commander 6, it will be automatically upgraded to add basic metadata support. This upgrade is practically instantaneous - you won't notice it. If the archive can't be written to (eg. because it's on a read-only medium such as a CD) then it won't be upgraded and will operate in legacy mode - this should be fine. However, upgraded archives are not compatible with Checkpoint Commander 5.x.
After you've checked any of the above points which apply to you and acted accordingly, upgrade in the usual way, ie. install "over the top" of the current installation. Follow the installation instructions which come with the distribution.
Existing files inside existing archives don't have metadata (file size and when-last-modified) entries. To add this metadata, you need to update the file. To do this, copy it somewhere else, and then move (or copy) it back in.
XSPF and M3U
XSPF is the new standard playlist format, which fixes most of the problems with older, ad-hoc formats such as M3U et al. Checkpoint Commander generates these itself (by saving result sets). The audio player will now play XSPF files directly, as playlists; it accepts both XSPFs generated by Checkpoint Commander itself, and XSPFs from third parties.
The partial M3U support in Checkpoint Commander 5.7.1 (the audio player could play M3Us, but there was no support for generating them) has now been withdrawn in favour of the full support for XSPF.
Please see the manual for more information.
Default MIME type
In 5.7.x the "default" mime type was a special MIME type called
x-unknown/x-unknown. This was used as the MIME type for any file
whose extension wasn't in the list; any plug-in or helper application bound to
this type was used as a fallback for any recognised type which didn't have
any of its own.
However, this was a misfeature: this is what application/octet-stream is supposed to be for.
Therefore, when opening your profile in CPC 6, x-unknown/x-unknown will be deleted automatically if present. Anything bound to it will be transferred automatically to application/octet-stream.
Known issues
Unix only: If you're installing in Server configuration,
and are only installing CPC, you will need to run browserset
(located in /opt/cpoint/bin) as the Checkpoint user, before
trying to run CPC as yourself.
CPC text editor (Windows2000 only): CPC's internal viewers prefer to use Alt+Up and Alt+Down (arrow keys) to track through whatever result set they are operating on. (Apart from the Internal HTML Viewer, which plays differently because it's running inside a browser). However, when using the Internal Text Viewer on Windows2000 these key combinations inject junk characters into the text. Workaround: Use Alt+Space and Alt+Backspace as alternatives. (These also work on the other viewers).
CPC text editor: The text editor Save as... dialog is not very tolerant of Strange Things, and in particular it doesn't appreciate the current folder disappearing while it's using it. Most users won't run into this, but if you do - well, the results are undefined. (They probably won't be very severe - say, a wierd error message - but even so.) To avoid this, don't do anything else while the dialog is open; if you need to do manipulations other than those provided by the dialog itself, close the dialog, do what you have to do, then re-open the dialog.
CPC audio player: Some files don't disclose their own
duration, and so the length is reported as ??.??.
Occasionally you may see the sample size and sample rate reported as -1. There
seem to be some WAV variants which have a variable data rate; the player can't
handle these. (It's not alone in this.)
CPC audio player: The FLAC audio codec is problematic.
The arrangement as shipped appears to give the best compatibility. However,
there are known issues with playing WAVs. If you don't use FLACs, you might
want to disable the FLAC codec; this should fix the WAV problems. To do this,
edit the file cpc.map located in the lib subfolder
of your Checkpoint installation. find the line which begins *-flac=
and comment it out by adding a # at the start of the line.
Restart Checkpoint Commander.
CPC image viewer: full-screen mode image display can be somewhat fragile; this appears to be an OS / video-driver interaction with Java itself. If you encounter problems, don't use Alt+Tab (or the equivalent on your OS) to bring up other windows while in full-screen mode. You can also try disabling image preview in CPC. However, the surest workaround is to minimise CPC. As usual, make sure your video drivers are up to date.
CPC image viewer (Windows only) Full-screen mode currently does not work properly with Java 5 on Windows. If you need to use Java 5 on Windows, try the latest update; YMMV. If you can, use Java 6 instead.
CPC image viewer: Please note that having large images (eg. those from digital cameras) open in multiple copies of the image viewer really chews up memory! Java limits Checkpoint Commander (and / or any other app) to quite a small memory heap size (typically 64M); if this runs out, Checkpoint Commander will stop working properly. To check memory status, use Help|Memory status. For more details, and a tweak for Sun VMs which allows for larger heap sizes, please read the user guide entry for this menu item.
Linux / KDE 3.5: Java dialogs occasionally come up in "shade" mode, for no apparent reason. This can fool you into thinking that CPC has crashed. If this happens, the dialog will come up with only the title bar showing. To fix, right-click on the title bar and uncheck the "shade" option. This seems to be a bug in java.
Scalablility: The directory objects in Checkpoint Commander archives don't scale that brilliantly. As the number of entries in an individual folder becomes large, you may start to notice performance declining. For best results, try to keep the number of entries in each folder below a thousand or so. Performance is not affected (noticeably) by the total number of files in the archive as a whole: as long as you keep each folder under control you can grow the total number of files almost without limit. (Eg the root folder contains 100 subfolders, each of which contains 100 subfolders, each of which contains 100 more subfolders, each of which contains 100 files... no problem!)
