Bugfix release to 6.0.0.
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.
This release requires Java 6 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. The 6.1 release will not run on Java 5 or below.
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.
To install CPC from scratch, follow the instructions inside the distribution archive.
Please see the Checkpoint Commander 6.0.0 release notes for details. (Checkpoint Commander 6.0.0 was a closed beta release.) Please note: this is a major upgrade, and you need to read the notes.
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 audio player: If you launch the player against an XPSF file directly, this should work. However, if you have the audio player registered to play XSPFs, launch it against an audio track, and then scroll through the folder until you encounter an XSPF, it won't work.
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: 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!)
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