[femm] Re: troubles with triangle.exe

[Dcm3c@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 10/22/99 10:58:21 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
gascon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

> I've got a PC running with Win95, and the FEMM installation seems OK,
> but I have a big probleme with the mesh generator. Everytime I try to
> generate a mesh, the program triangle.exe and the FEMM Editor get
> stuck. Have anybody ever had this kind of trouble ?

The problem seems to be that under some installations of win95, MS-DOS 
programs do not close the MS-DOS window by default when an application is 
finished running. The Triangle mesher is an MS-DOS executable that femme 
calls to make the finite element mesh. On win95 systems that are configured 
this way, femme hangs when you mesh or try to evaluate a problem, because the 
program spawns triangle and sits around waiting for it to finish, which it 
never does because the MS-DOS window that it is running in never closes.

Although a couple of people have reported this happening, I've never been 
able to reproduce it on any of the machines to which I have access. I've 
recently discovered a different way of calling Triangle that forces the 
MS-DOS window to close when the mesher is finished running, and it reportedly 
fixes the problem.

I will include this fix in the next release of femm. In the mean time, if 
anyone out there is having this problem, email me at dcm3c@xxxxxxx, and I 
will send you a version of femme that is patched for this bug. Many thanks to 
gascon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and pekr@xxxxxxxxxxx for helping me root this one out.

Dave.
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