New alphaMELTS installation

[jhenson81]

I recently downloaded and installed alphamelts 1.9 on my laptop. I have the same version on a desktop and I have not had any problems so far in getting it to work. On this laptop however I am having the following issue.

After installation I attempted to run alphamelts and the following error occurred.
RUN_ALPHAMELTS.COMMAND WARNING: Cannot open "log_file.txt" (Permission Denied) Run again? (Y or N)

Y just puts the program in an endless loop.
N closes the program completely.

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you

[Paula]

Either you are running it in such a way that it needs to write to a folder that you don't have permission to write to, e.g. Program Files, or you have the log_file.txt file open in another program. If this is the first run then the latter seems unlikely. I'd need more information on how it's set up, and how you are calling it (e.g. where the links are, whether you are opening from the command line or double clicking the script, if you specified an output folder with the -p switch etc.) to be able to tell more.

Bear in mind that if you double click the run_alphamelts.command link, and drag and drop the output folder (as described here) then the script and program will need to be able to write to the folder where the links are - the output files are only moved to the chosen output folder after the program finishes.

Paula

[jhenson81]

Paula,

I start the program through the perl executable from where it was installed. As far as I know the logfile.txt is not in use any where else on this computer. I do have admin access on this machine. The path that I had to modify according to the instructions in the install is as follows.

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps;C:\Users\Johnny\Documents\bin

[Paula]

OK, you shouldn't open the script with the Perl executable because then it is trying to run where the Perl executable is located, which is likely to be somewhere that you don't have write access for (unless you are using the portable version of Strawberry Perl). It's similar to why we advise against double-clicking the scripts; if a user want to double-click, they should double-click the links in "C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\bin" because they should have write access there.

The recommended way is to open the Command Prompt e.g. right click the Start button, select Run and type cmd.exe. Alternatively, download the new Windows Terminal program from the Microsoft Store, open and select "Command Prompt" from drop down menu (the "V" button). Navigate to where your input files are with the "cd" command and then type "run_alphamelts.command", with or w/o some command line switches.

Slightly different but related issues came up a few times recently (off the forum) e.g. a user was wondering why they couldn't "cd" when they opened the command line. As it remains relevant for alphaMELTS 2 also,  I'm marking it as a FAQ.

Note: you do need use the Perl executable to open install.command, but only the first time you install it. After that the .command extension gets associated with Perl and you do not need to explicitly open Perl. (You would only need to repeat this process if the location of your Perl installation moves e.g. you are using the MATLAB version and you upgrade MATLAB to a later release.)

Hope that helps,
Paula

[jhenson81]

Paula,

I was able to get it to work by updating Windows. There was an update notification and since I did that it has worked fine. A bit of a novice mistake I know but this was the 1st time I have installed it after a Windows update. I will also in the future open it up from the command line. I have not as of yet encountered any problems using the executable, but I rather be prudent about it. Thank you for your help.

[Paula]

Hi Johnny,

Interesting, thanks for letting me know. We've noticed that updating Windows sometimes fixes problems in other versions of alphaMELTS, but I didn't realize it could affect v1.9.

I've been trying out the Windows Terminal more, and it definitely makes running alphaMELTS easier. One thing to watch is that, by default, it maps Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy and paste. Anyone using it for alphaMELTS will probably want to change that so that Ctrl+C can be used to break out if alphaMELTS hangs or gets in a loop. To do that:

In Windows Terminal, go to Settings, and scroll to the bottom. Comment out or edit the lines under "keybindings". For example, I replaced "ctrl+c" and "ctrl+v" with them "alt+c" and "alt+v" respectively because the Alt key is in a similar position to the command key on an Apple keyboard, and Alt+ doesn't seem to be mapped to anything else.

Paula

[jhenson81]

Paula,

Thank you so much for your help on the alphaMELTS installation. I am now trying to run rhyolite-MELTS on the same laptop. Everything runs up to the point of having to load the GUI interface. When I select n in the initial run I get the error

Error: Can't open display:

I saw in a previous post someone else was having the same issue but a solution was not posted. I am using X410 and the port address is 127.0.0.1:0.0

Thank you

[Paula]

What happens if you type "echo $DISPLAY" at the WSL command line?

Did you work through the enabling the WSL post? I'll actually be posting an "updated for 2020" version very soon (like today or tomorrow). So you might want to just wait for that.

Paula

[jhenson81]

Paula,

Yes, I did the WSL in the settings for Windows. I have downloaded Ubuntu 20.04. When I type in "echo $DISPLAY" it does not show anything and just goes to the next line. 

[Paula]

Hi,

I finally managed to update the WSL posts. The new one for 2020 is here. It sounds like you are missing the DISPLAY line in the .profile file. I don't know if you want to install alphaMELTS in the WSL, given you already have the native Windows version. But if you repeat the last bullet point in "Set up the ubuntu command line" and repeat either either "Install alphaMELTS or alphaMELTS 2 (optional)" or "If you did not install alphaMELTS" then it would work.

Let me know if it's still misbehaving...

[jhenson81]

Paula,

Thank you for the update. The past few Windows updates and getting the work arounds from that have been a challenge. I suspect that update was one of the reasons why the display was not loading in the GUI, but everything is working fine so far.

I am now trying to export the GUI-Melts output files into a more readable excel file. So far I have been using a few published papers from the mid 90's as tests to see if I am close to the findings in those papers. I have had some success with them within margin of error. I am now just trying put the output files into an excel file so that I can do a more through statistical analysis. I have seen "excel_combine_tbl" post but I cannot seem to find the output files. My understanding is that the output files should be in the path I setup on the initial install. At the moment the excel macro cannot seem to locate any of the output files.

Do you have any suggestions? Thank you

Johnny

[Paula]

The output files will be where you opened Melts-rhyolite. We set the path so that it can find Melts-rhyolite from anywhere. So, for example, if Documents is one of the folders you made links to, then you could have a workflow something like this:

cd Documents
mkdir newworkingfolder
cd newworkingfolder
Melts-rhyolite
cd ..

The output files should then be in newworkingfolder and you can browse to it with "Combine tbl".

Paula

[jhenson81]

Paula,

Thank you for the help. I was able to find the output files. My Question now is I do not have any .tbl files for the excel macro to work with. Is this some I make myself or is created by melts in a similar fashion to the .melt files?

Thank you for all your help in this process.

[Paula]

The melts.out and .tbl files should be in the same folder. I thought those were the output files you were talking about. When you do "Save As..." it saves the input file, with the composition etc. The output files are written automatically when you run some calculations. On some systems you need to exit the Melts-rhyolite-public program before you try to access the melts.out and .tbl files.

Paula

[jhenson81]

Paula,

You are correct I must exit the Melts program completely and I also had change the view in my folder so that I could see all of the files listed. Windows by default did not list the .tbl files on this laptop. They were hidden for some reason. Thank you for all your help in this.

Johnny