Running Alice on Windows, and possible problems

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Running Alice on Windows, and possible problems

Postby howardt » Thu Feb 05, 2009 12:11 pm

The simplest way to load the Alice software on to a Windows computer is to download the file Alice.zip from http://www.alice.org and extract it to a hard drive, either on a local PC, or on a networked computer. This creates a folder 'Alice' on that drive with all the required files inside.

Running Alice: Run the file Alice.exe from within the Alice folder. For slower computers run SlowAndSteadyAlice.exe

Troubleshooting:

Problem: The message "Unable to create the gallery viewer" appears and Alice is unusable except by Administrators. Explanation: This happens because Alice needs to write to the folder 'c:\Documents and Settings\username' on the computer that is attempting to launch Alice. Here, Alice needs to create a folder '.alice' to store a preferences file 'AlicePreferences.xml' and a folder 'webGalleryCache' to store the gallery items.

Solution (1): System administrators should make any modifications necessary to their network setup to allow Alice users to store their profiles in 'c:\Documents and Settings\username'.

Solution (2): Alice reads the path from the Registry key "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer\Shell Folders\desktop". You could try changing that path to one that you know Alice users have permissions to write to. This would of course affect any other applications which use this particular Registry key.

Solution (3): Install Alice on individual PCs.

Toby
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Re: Running Alice on Windows, and possible problems

Postby stoutj » Thu Feb 12, 2009 11:19 am

I notice that there's a StoryTellingAlice that appears to have a later creation date than StraightForwardAlice, although the home page says that StoryTellingAlice worlds won't run in StraightForwardAlice. I haven't investigated it (StoryTellingAlice) in any depth but it appears to have some advantages over StraightForwardAlice.

Is it possible to use StoryTellingAlice for the competition?

John Stout
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Re: Running Alice on Windows, and possible problems

Postby howardt » Thu Feb 12, 2009 1:02 pm

Yes you may use any version of Alice.

bw
Toby
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