Synopsis
Usability Cleanups. Audio player now supports M3U files (with some limitations - see below). Improvements to text editor: undo / redo, find / replace, save as.
Java Version
This release requires Java 5 update 4 ("1.5.0_04") or better. It won't run under Java 1.4 or below, and there is a major security hole in Java 5 update 3 and below.)
Installing
To install CPC from scratch, follow the instructions inside the distribution zip.
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
Upgrade in the usual way, ie. install "over the top" of the current installation. Follow the installation instructions which come with the distribution.M3U files and the audio player
M3U is a simple text-based, "playlist" format, one element per line. At
its most basic, it consists of a list of filenames (one per line). The
audio player also supports "extended M3U" format. In this format, the
file starts with the code line #EXTM3U. Every filename line
is preceeded by an information line; this starts with the code
#EXTINF: followed by the playing time in milliseconds, a
comma, and the title of the track. CPC audio player ignores the playing
time; put in -1 if you don't know.
The CPC audio player allows blank lines, and also comments (lines which
start with a # character, other than the #EXTM3U
and #EXTINF: codes.
- M3U files must have the MIME type
application/x-m3uor the audio player won't know what to do with them. New installations should have the registry and MIME bindings set correctly to begin with; for an existing installation, you may need to add the appropriate definitions and MIME binding yourself. - The M3U parser currently does not support relative paths. All the tracks must be in the same folder as the M3U file itself.
This feature was added because we have developed a (separate) audio-player applet which does not support CPC's tracking capability; M3Us are required in order to provide any kind of playlist in that applet. Using M3U files in the CPC audio player also provides a workaround for the situation where the required play order is different from the sort order of the folder or result set being played. However, in the long term we aim to address this area by providing alternative sorting mechanisms for folders and result sets.
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 2.4, modern glibc).
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 M3U parser currently does not support relative paths. All the tracks must be in the same folder as the M3U file itself.
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.
CPC image viewer: You must avoid setting an oversize image cache: the maximum needs to be the memory limit (see Help|Memory Status) less some room for overhead (about 16MB ought to be OK). Thus, for the default memory limit (usually about 64M, give or take), the largest image cache you should set is 48MB. If you set the image cache too large, CPC will happily cache away until it runs out of memory and crashes. NB. setting a large image cache may not help performance significantly: play about if you like, but unless your machine is struggling it may not make that much difference.
Linux / KDE 3.5 only: 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.
Download
Binaries: download from SourceForge.
Sources: See
issue 15
of the CPC Collaboration Server
for instructions about building from source. Due to the messy organic
evolution of our build system, building from source is somewhat awkward.
