Change my Monitor, Change my Life: page 4

Perl's of Wisdom

I right-clicked on the installer Icon and chose "View Package contents" from the popup menu. I then examined the resources until I determined which of the perl scripts was aborting. Yes, Wacom programmed their installer in PERL.

Hey, that's nice and geeky, and it lends itself to working in different environments, so long as nobody's gone and customized their PERL install. Which I had done, four years ago when I Installed Bricolage on my Laptop.

Silly Me, I thought. My skills at hacking were both the cure to my issue, and the cause. There were three PERL modules missing. I was not about to spend the amount of time required to install three PERL modules. Of course, the other option was to revert to the Mac standard version of PERL.

A smart programmer would have made a backup before installing a custom version of PERL. After all I had gone through today, I did not have many hopes as I dug into my /usr/bin directory. Well, every now and then I surprise myself in a good way. There was a directory titled PERL-BAK next to a symlink labeled PERL.

After a few moments of text line geekery, and a reboot (I forgot how to restart PERL, as I haven't had to do it in four years) I did a quick perl -v and found that yes, indeed, I had an original PERL install designed specifically for my Mac.

Having had this much good luck, I was afraid my Mac would burn to a cinder when I ran the Wacom installer. Much to my surprise, it ran flawlessly and I now had a working Wacom tablet.

My PC now sits unused under my desk. In my mind, it's a twenty pound apendix, as is my KVM Switch and the PC keyboard on which I'm typing this story. I am NOT going to remove it, however, as I'm pretty sure that if I DO, all hell will break loose, and I'll need to us a PC for something. With my luck, it will be shortly after I give the damned thing away.