Re: Pyla on OS X

[Adam Augustine <adama@augustinefam.org>]

Daniel E. Markle wrote:
> I'm working on this myself, I'm finding that Python's tkinter doesn't
> seem to work without a lot of work on OS X.  Either I'm missing
> something or getting it to work aquafied is nearly impossible and
> getting it to work with X11 is tough.
>
> Am I missing something here?
Maybe. The version of Python included in Mac OS X (10.2 anyway) is, 
well, incomplete (missing tkinter support as well as other things) and 
old (version 2.2 I think). You need later and more complete versions to 
get pyla to work properly.

Once the proper parts were all installed, the basic functions of the 
program worked fine for me without any modification. The tricky parts 
were getting it to work with CUPS the way it works in Windows and 
getting the fax viewer to be called properly.

I haven't tried different profiles and such since pyla doesn't 
(currently) support them in a MacOS convenient way. I expect that will 
change if Andrea decides to support ~/.pylarc profiles like you 
requested. Currently, everything just uses the default profile since 
there really isn't a way to select different profiles from the GUI.

Anyway, I am using:

Mac OS 10.2.8

TclTkAqua 8.4.4 BI (Batteries Included version) 
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/tcltkaqua/TclTkAquaBI-8.4.4.0.dmg?download 

MacPython 2.3.1 http://ftp.cwi.nl/jack/python/mac/MacPython-OSX-2.3-1.dmg

After installing TclTkAqua, I installed MacPython. Then I ran the 
Package Manager for MacPython. It connected to the package database and 
I installed _tkinter-2.3-binary.

Then, from a terminal window, I changed directories to when I had 
extracted pyla and ran "/usr/local/bin/pythonw pyla.py". That worked (at 
least as far as getting the GUI to appear). I configured it and it 
connected properly to my Hylafax server. I was able to send postscript 
files through the File->Send File dialog (tested using 
/usr/share/cups/data/testprint.ps).

In order to make it more Mac-like, I used BuildApplet to construct the 
application bundle. I dragged pyla.py over and dropped it on 
BuildApplet, which creates an icon in the pyla directory.

I then right clicked on the icon and selected "Show Package Contents". I 
went into the "Contents" folder, then the "Resources" folder. I copied 
the folders "covers", "faxcover", "gifs", "profiles" in "Resources" as 
well as the files "hylaproto.py", "hylaform.py", "pyladebug.py", 
"ldapclass.py", and "tooltip.py".

I then could double click on the new "pyla" icon and it would launch 
pyla properly.

The tricky part came when trying to use it like a regular printer. That 
was a long and painful process. It required a simple modification 
pyla.py, but one that broke it badly for normal use. I will post that 
process sometime soon.

Anyway, that information should be enough to get you going. Let me know 
if you have problems.

Adam Augustine