Hi Henning,
On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 4:55 AM, Henning Lichtenberg
Ladies and Gentlemen,
we have been preparing a course about using Athena including some exercises (practical examples) for tomorrow, March 20th. For that course we reserved a computer pool in the computer science department of our university, and they created course accounts for the participants. They also installed the IFEFFIT package on that computer pool. Unfortunately it is not possible to run IFEFFIT on those computers (although it is installed) with a course account. It only works after administrator privileges have been added to the account. I was temporarily given such privileges, but just for troubleshooting. We cannot get those privileges for the course participants.
Has anybody out there ever encountered a similar problem? Any idea how this could be fixed? (probably either by modifying the accounts or changing program settings)
Thank you very much!
Just to be clear, you must be using Windows, and probably Windows 7, if you're getting new-ish computers from a pool service. Background: The Ifeffit programs generally assume they can write to their installation folder... This is considered unsafe in Windows Vista and 7, and we should instead be creating an folder under users\USERNAME\Application Data to write data (such as Athena project files) to. For now, it should be possible to install Ifeffit so that it doesn't need admin privileges to run by installing to a folder other than C:\Program Files\Ifeffit, that the unprivileged user can write to, say to C:\Users\USERNAME\Ifeffit. Everything should work from there just fine. At install time, a small batch file is written that sets all the path information anyway, so that using C:\Program Files\ is not required. Hope that helps --- let us know how that works out. And good luck with the course! --Matt Newville