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Thanks for producing the best piece of fractal software for Linux!

Gnofract4d is one of my all time favorite programs.

Compile and Install Issues

Q: How do I run Gnofract 4D on Mac OS X?

A: See the instructions in this forum thread

Q: When I try to install the Gnofract 4D RPM on Mandrake, Mandriva or SuSE, why do I get this message?
error: Failed dependencies: pygtk2 >= 1.99 is needed by gnofract4d-2.13-1

A: Gnofract 4D needs PyGTK installed as a prerequisite. All these distributions provide a suitable version by default. Unfortunately they all use different names for it: Fedora uses "pygtk2", Mandrake uses "pygtk2.0", and SuSE uses "python-gtk". The RPMs I've built use the Fedora name, so they don't realize that all the packages they need are present on these distributions. The workaround is to run:

rpm -i --nodeps <rpmfile>.

Alternatively you could download the source package or even volunteer to repackage Gnofract 4D for your distribution.

Q: When I try to compile Gnofract 4D on SuSE Linux, why do I get this error?

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./setup.py", line 4, in ?
    from distutils.core import setup, Extension
ImportError: No module named distutils.core

A:SuSE splits the distutils module into a separate package which is not installed by default. Personally I think that's a really bad idea, but c'est la vie. To compile Gnofract 4D successfully on SuSE linux, you must have these packages installed beyond the defaults:

Install those using YaST then try compiling again.

Q: When I try to compile older versions of Gnofract 4D on Ubuntu, why do I get this error?

Can't set up. Error running 'pkg-config gconf-2.0 --cflags'.
Package gconf-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gconf-2.0.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'gconf-2.0' found
Possibly you don't have one of these installed: 'gconf-2.0'.

A:You need to install the libgconf2-dev package, which is required to build programs which use gconf. Newer versions will still compile if you don't have gconf2-devel, but they will be unable to pick up your browser settings from gconf.

Q: When I try to compile Gnofract 4D, why do I get this error?

cc: error trying to exec 'cc1plus': execvp: No such file or directory
error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1

A:You have the C compiler installed, but not the C++ compiler. You need to install the g++ (sometimes called gcc-c++) package, which is required to build C++ programs.

Runtime Issues

Q: When I try to load a parameter file, why do I get an error 'Can't find formula file foo.frm in formula search path'?

A:That parameter file uses a formula or coloring method which isn't included in the standard set shipped with Gnofract 4D. Try downloading the formula from the UltraFractal Public Formula Database.

Q: When I zoom in far enough, the image turns all pixelated and blocky. Why is that?

A:You've reached the limit of the precision supplied by your processor's built-in math chip, I'm afraid. On Intel architectures this will be when the image size is around 10^-13. The numbers representing different pixels are so close together that it can't tell the difference. You'll have to zoom out again.