[xcrysden] xcrysden 1.6.2 can't startup

[Tone Kokalj]

On Sun, 2020-02-09 at 03:39 +0000, John Yang wrote:
> Hi all,
>  
> This is John. I downloaded the source code of xcrysden 1.6.2. I
> planned to play it on my CentOS 8 installed in VMware. Since it is
> the newest version, I naively assumed xcrysden 1.6.2 can work well on
> my 3000x2000 resolution screen. Looking at older version of xcrysden
> is too painful.
> I started with the Make.sys-semishared, and did small adjustments.
> During the process, I have many packages installed by yum. Finally
> make went through without error.
> But when I tried to run ./xcrysden, it gave me this:
>  
> Error in startup script: bad pad value "0m": must be positive screen
> distance
>     while executing
> "pack .title.f.l .title.f.l2 -side top -fill both -padx 0m -pady 0m"


This appears like a system problem: it seems your X cannot convert
"millimeter" units to pixels. Check with xdpyinfo, i.e.:

xdpyinfo | grep dimensions

I get:
  dimensions:    1680x1050 pixels (444x277 millimeters)

but I suppose you will get something like:
  dimensions:    3000x2000 pixels (0x0 millimeters)

You can solve this with:

xrandr --dpi 96


The alternative is that you modify the xcrysden code and replace the
millimeter specs with the pixel specs. For the particular error you
got, edit the Tcl/xcInit.tcl file and change "0m" to "0" in the line:

"pack .title.f.l .title.f.l2 -side top -fill both -padx 0m -pady 0m"


Best regards, Tone
-- 
Jožef Stefan Institute, Jamova 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia 
(tel: +386-
1-477-3523 // fax: +386-1-251-9385)