Troubleshooting

Windows Problems | Linux Problems | Other

Feedback

We'd like to hear from you! In particular, right now we'd like to hear about bugs in this beta release. If you're problem isn't fixed by the solutions provided below, email To discuss Alloy with other users, post a message to our alloy-discuss group on yahoo.

Common Windows Problems

The most common problem with Alloy 3.0 is that the platform specific binaries suffer some system compatability issue. There are many combinations of hardware and operating system that people want to run Alloy on, so there are many causes for this hiccup.

Alloy should work with cygwin1.dll anywhere on your path, including the Alloy directory, but sometimes the binaries have difficulty finding cygwin1.dll. So, the easiest thing to try first is to copy the cygwin1.dll to the directory where you installed Alloy. If that doesn't work, try copying it to your Windows directory.

If neither of those attempts work, and you already have Cygwin installed, try upgrading your Cygwin installation. You can do this by running the Cygwin setup.exe, which will download new versions of the Cygwin software you have installed. If it still doesn't work, try copying the cygwin1.dll to the directories named in the previous paragraph.

If none of these attempts resolve the problem, try the diagnostics procedure listed below.

Common Linux Problem

Symptoms:

• Alloy can find solutions but can't visualize them
• exception like: java.io.FileNotFoundException: /tmp/alloy326/layoutfile.dot (No such file or directory)

Problem: The dotbin binary can't find some library it needs (probably libttf.so.2).

Solution: Following the diagnostic procedure below, see what happens when you try to run the dotbin executable. It will tell you the name of the library you need: install that library. Here are some installation commands that have worked for other users on various distributions:

• Debian: sudo apt-get install libttf2
• Suse: sudo yast -i freetype
• RedHat/FedoraCore: install freetype1

General Diagnostics (All Platforms)

If the above platform specific advice does not get Alloy to work, please try these diagnostic steps and report the results to , along with information about your operating system and hardware (ie, name, version).

First check if Alloy will build and execute one of the example models:

1. Run Alloy in the way you normally do. See if it will build and execute one of the example models.


2. If you normally run Alloy via your operating system's GUI, try running it from the command line:
1. cd alloy
   (ie, change to the directory where you installed Alloy)
2. java -jar alloy.jar
   (assuming java is on your path)
3. See if Alloy will build and execute one of the example models.

If that doesn't work, then try to gather more diagnostic information via the following steps.

These steps were written for the bash command line shell (which is available on all platforms Alloy runs on), but will probably work in other shells too: they should be fairly easy to adapt to your local environment. The basic idea is to extract some of the platform specific binaries from alloy.jar and try to run them and see what happens.

1. cd alloy
   (ie, change to the directory where you installed Alloy)


2. unzip alloy.jar dotbin sat2cnf
   (on Windows, they are named dotbin.exe and sat2cnf.exe)


3. chmod +x dotbin sat2cnf
   (this may not be necessary or useful on some platforms)


4. ./sat2cnf
   hopefully produces a message like this:

    digraph g {
            node [label="\N"];
            graph [bb="0,0,54,124"];
            a [pos="27,98", width="0.75", height="0.50"];
            b [pos="27,26", width="0.75", height="0.50"];
            a -> b [pos="e,27,44 27,80 27,72 27,63 27,54"];
    }
    

Please report the results of these diagnostic steps to , along with information about your operating system and hardware (ie, name, version).