Can't receive a FLEx project from a USB drive

[Kim Blewett (gm)]

Sorry for cross-posting, but I'm trying to reach as many people as possible for help with a puzzle.

Running Fieldworks 8.2.(current) in a freshly installed Wasta 16.04.1 VM (VirtualBox; all updates applied) on a Mac. First we tried this in Mint 18; when the error described below happened we created a Wasta VM. When it still failed in FW 8.2 we installed the current FW 8.3 beta from PSO-experimental, but the same the same problem happens every time.

Here's what we've tried:

1. Insert a thumb drive that has received the FLEx project "Sos Kundi" from another computer. Make sure the drive is mounted in the Wasta VM.
   
2. Open FLEx, choose "Get project from colleague."
3. Choose USB, etc. The dialog "which project do you want to copy?" appears; click Sos Kundi (the only option), click "Copy to computer" button.
4. Nothing appeared to happen the first time we tried it with FW 8.2, but the dialog appeared to be hung. After killing mono and mono- we tried again. This time we saw a popup message: "The project Sos Kundi is already using this repository."

I tried deleting the directories ~/.local/share/fieldworks/ AND ~/.config/fieldworks/ starting again; we saw the same message even though the FW Help says you can delete a project and re-receive it in this way.

So the first time in each system that we've tried this we are able to click the "Copy to your computer" button. In 16.04 the copy operation completes but the FW project can not open. Comparing the .local/share/fieldworks directories on this VM and on my computer, the only thing that gets copied into the VM is the .hg directory under  .local/share/fieldworks/.

After this initial try, each time we delete the two dir's, then restart FW and work through the "Get project from colleague" dialogs, now we get the "already using this repository" message. The Sos Kundi project on the thumb drive and "Copy to your computer" are greyed out.

We tried receiving the same project from the same thumb drive on a Wasta 16 computer with FW 8.3 installed; it worked fine, so the drive or the stored repository DB on it are both good.

The only thing I can think of that we didn't try was deleting the above two dir's and then restarting the VM before opening FW again. I've asked the user to try this and report back; both people and computers needed refueling after a few hours of troubleshooting. ... If this turns out to be what works I'm gonna feel a bit silly, as I should have thought of it after several rounds of deleting the directories that magically reappear after being deleted.  :)

Anything else we can do? The thumb drive is definitely recognized and mounted in the Wasta VM; we could explore it in File Manager.

Feeling frustrated...
Kim Blewett
Language Technology
SIL PNG

[Beth-docs Bryson]

Kim, does it by any chance work with a fresh USB drive?

We have found that (a) if a thumb drive has been used for S/R with an older version of WeSay, it will stop working with FLEx S/R, and (b) there are other ways a USB drive can become "corrupted" such that it doesn't work with FLEx S/R.  I can't quite tell if this sounds like the symptoms of either one of those, but for some of our S/R problems, we found that a freshly formatted USB drive worked whereas an existing one didn't.

There are challenges with finding a good solution to this, especially in the case of using an older version of WeSay....

-Beth

On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 5:59 AM, Kim Blewett <kim_b...@sil.org> wrote:

Trying again... I posted this near the start of a long weekend and haven't gotten a response. Has anyone else had problems using S/R to Fieldworks in a VM, or does this problem ring a bell, please?

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[Sue Newland]

Kim,

We have had some trouble with using USB drives for Flex projects and found that sometimes it was because it was an older drive, particularly if the drive had ever been used before for a WeSay lift project. Did you try formatting the drive then doing the transfer again? Or using a different USB drive? I realize this means you would have to get the project again from where ever it came from, but doing these steps helped solved most of our problems with this kind of thing. Just an idea.

Sue Newland

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[Kim Blewett (gm)]

We found the problem! The VB extensions package had not been installed along with VB on C's computer. No one thought of this right off because everyone thought someone else had helped her install VB.

I have a question for those of you who know more than I: Why do VB proper and the extensions come in separate installation packages? Wouldn't it make sense for the whole thing to be installed in one go, and people who don't want the features enabled by the extensions could turn off those features?

Just wondering...
Kim

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