EchoLink Install Hangs
Today I was shown how EchoLink works – it’s an amalgam of Amateur Radio and the Internet – see www.echolink.org for details, really neat if you can’t put up an antenna or the band conditions are horrible. It’s closely related to IRLP but enables you to access remote repeaters without a radio at your end.
Anyway, I came home and tried to install EchoLink on a recently received box with Windows XP SP2 and found the installer would start up and then just fails, it terminates with no message, no event in the Event Log, nothing …
Searching around I found the note about the InstallShield 16 bit installer not being happy with the %Temp% and %tmp% folders having names like C:\Documents and Settings\Fred\local settings\temp (or whatever it is – I just made that up but it doesn’t like having spaces in the name.
I went to the Control Panel/System/Advanced/Environment Variables and changed both tmp and temp for both “User Variables” and “System Variables” to be c:/tmpfiles and problem fixed … Any name less than eight characters is probably ok.
There was also a problem with MusicMatch V7.5 not installing (same symptoms) but this was related to Internet Explorer V7 – deinstalling that and it was happy too.
This is a new PC and I’m discovering just how much software is (was) installed and how little I use on a daily basis :-(
