Troubleshooting

Contacting the authors

The best ways to contact us are:

• Email to cannon@inmed.univ-mrs.fr preferably with "Catacomb" as the subject

• Use the feedback applet on our server. NB if you have downloaded the catacomb documentation you will have a local copy too but it will not be allowed to contact the server

• Make your report from within Catacomb: select report from the file menu

Using the report form, most fields are optional, but it helps us sort out problems if you fill them in. If you run it from Catacomb the save profile option saves you from having to retype them after the first time.

Common problems

Netscape crashes all the time

With the Java Runtime Environment Catacomb can run for hours without problems. With netscape and other Web browsers it crashes the browser very frequently on some platforms. At present the only thing to do is kill the crashed browser and start again. Under Windows you can do this from the Task Manager. Under UNIX, you can do this from top or with the command killall -9 netscape. If you don't have killall you can look up the process ID with ps and kill that. I have a window manager menu item set to execute the command
      killall -9 /usr/lib/netscape/45/navigator/navigator-smotif.real
which is often handy, not only with Catacomb.

I hate the graphs

It is well worth reading the graphs section in the user interface documentation. The behavior is predictable, if complicated.

However, you can also do everything by hand. For example, start Catacomb; select Numerics from the objects menu; click the diffeq box for the differential equation calculator, which also brings up a graph of the results. In the data menu select edit config. Among other things there are sliders for the minimum and maximum x and y values.

I hate the sliders

Put the mouse over the slider, and type the number you want at the keyboard. Press the return key when you've finished for the value to take effect.

I keep getting lost when running the tutorials

There is a reset button at the top left which puts everything back how it was to start with.