Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Ethereal Win32 and $HOME

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From: "Visser, Martin (SNO)" <Martin.Visser@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 4 May 2001 07:29:16 +0800
Hi,

I installed Ethereal 0.8.17 Win32 on a colleague's and we were having
problems trying to add the a column for length. The issue is that we can
change the preference, but it is not applied until you restart Ethereal.
That's OK, however we couldn't save preferences as we getting an error about
not being able to write to "M:\.ethereal\preferences". Wondering where
Ethereal was getting "M:\" I suspected, from the documentation, that this
indicated the the HOME environment variable was set to this. In turned out
that my colleague does not have HOME but rather HOMEDRIVE which was set to
M:\. Unfortunatlely this is a mapped share, that was not availble from his
laptop at the time. (He believes that this M: was only used when he set up
MS Outlook ). So as a workaround I wrote a batch file to set HOMEDRIVE to
C:\ before launching ethereal


The long and short of it is, I'm not sure that most Windows uses know what
HOME is. (Also in fact it seems to be using HOMEDRIVE). Obviously the
preferred Win32 repositry for such configs is the Registry. I understand
that this is probably not a good thing for portability reasons. Maybe as
part of the install we should ask where preferences,filters should be
stored, or maybe it should be in the directory that ethereal.exe is in?

Regards,

Martin

Martin Visser
Network Consultant - Compaq Global Services

Compaq Computer Australia
410 Concord Road
Rhodes, Sydney NSW 2138
Australia

Phone: +61-2-9022-5630
Mobile: +61-411-254-513
Fax:+61-2-9022-7001
Email:martin.visser@xxxxxxxxxx