app opening randomness

I just installed emphatic, empacman, empsoko, and emptris on the empeg using the new @EXEC thing. I had empacman and emptris working before using the old preinit way but decided to try and install the other 2 now that there is an easier way. I installed all 4 using @EXEC. My problem is, sometimes when I open one of them, a different one will open instead. For example, if I click on empsoko, emptris will open. The next time I try and open empsoko, empsoko will open. The next time I try it, empacman might open. It seems to be completely random. Does anyone know what would cause this?

Someone else just complained of the same thing in the last few days, so you're not alone.

One of them is probably being naughty with it's hijack calls.

Try disabling all but one, and then adding them back one by one to find out which.

My problem is, sometimes when I open one of them, a different one will open instead. For example, if I click on empsoko, emptris will open.

I have seen this as well.

I think it might be related to some of the other problems that we've had hooking apps into Hijack. There's the thing in GPSapp where the keystrokes sometimes get through to the player software, and then there's the thing where you open up one of the apps (such as emphatic) and see another app's graphics instead (such as emptris). I don't know if these are Hijack bugs or app bugs.

Why is this happening for me but not other people? It seems to me like if it was a software bug, then it would be happening to everyone if it were all installed in the same way. Is there something I can do to fix this?

One of them is probably being naughty with it's hijack calls.

Try disabling all but one, and then adding them back one by one to find out which.

Ok, I know this is an old thread but I finally got around to doing this. I've just been running emphatic for the last month or 2 or however long its been out, but with summer approaching, I'll be making some pretty long road trips with friends in the car so I wanted to get the games working. If I only have one of these 4 programs in the hijack @EXEC_ONCE thing at a time, they work fine. If I have more than one running at a time, I get problems. I tried several combinations of just 2 of them at a time and none of the combinations worked. So this would mean either all of them are being naughty with their hijack calls, or its a hijack bug.

Now for the strange part. After playing around with this for a while, I can no longer edit my config.ini. Well, I can edit it, but when I synch, the changes didn't happen. For example, I currently have emphatic and empsoko "exec"ed in my config.ini (which by the way is one of the combinations I tried that doesn't work). I want to just go back to only having emphatic in there so it will work right again, but when I delete the line to exec empsoko, so that only the emphatic line is in the config.ini then synch, empsoko is still under the hijack menu, and when I look at my config.ini, that line is back. No matter what I change in config.ini, after I synch, its back to how it was before.

So I guess my two questions are:
1) Why wont more than one app work at a time on my player?
2) Why cant I change my config.ini anymore?

2) Why cant I change my config.ini anymore?

Not sure why, but you can work around it by downloading the config file (use binary mode), edit it with an editor that can save with Unix style linefeeds and then re-upload the edited version with ftp (again, use binary mode)

/Michael

I can no longer edit my config.ini. Well, I can edit it, but when I synch, the changes didn't happen.

This is because synchs don't work when you run a program by EXEC from anywhere on /drive0 in AC/Home mode. The fact that the program is "live" keeps the drive from being unmounted/remounted by the synch process.

To fix this, you need to either make sure that the programs run only in @DC mode (since you can't synch in DC mode anyway) or that they're run from a non-music partition such as /programs0 (which you would have to create and maintain yourself and recreate the mount point after each upgrade). You are also, because of what's happened so far, currently in the position of needing to manually FSCK your disks.

I'd love to see some kind of a solution for this problem in Hijack. For instance, if it gets a command to mount/unmount a partition that's got an EXEC'd program on it, it could terminate the program first. Or suspend the program's execution and allow the mounting to proceed. Or something like that. Doesn't the kernel control all that anyway?

This is because synchs don't work when you run a program by EXEC from anywhere on /drive0 in AC/Home mode

When I only had emphatic running, synching would work with the new 2.0. With the old beta software, yes, I had to quit emphatic before it would synch properly, but I haven't had to do that since I upgraded to 2.0.

Well, I just made it so the programs only run in dc mode and I was able to change the config.ini again. Its strange that it would still work properly with emphatic running though. But now that I've gotten that all figured out, any ideas on question 1? I'd like to be able to have this stuff work for some of the long trips I have coming up soon.

I've been using the launcher app, I highly recommend this program, nobody else does. You set exec to launch the launcher app. Then in the config.ini, you setup your menu structure for the launcher, and what apps it should run. This way, you don't have a ton of programs eating up memory while they are sitting idle. And when you launch pacman, it will then load up pacman into the hijack menu, and let you select it. It does still have a problem with multiple stuff running at the same time, but at least you can choose on the empeg what you want to use without a sync!