reported by miyos:

I am trying to use Processing in a class room setting and encountering
some problems.
I'd appreciate if you all could give me some advice. (I read through the
FAQ, and searched the bug database but was not able to find information
that seemed to solve my problem...sorry if it already was discussed in this
board...)

I am using
Mac OS 10.3.8
Processing .91

I have Processing in the shared folder "Application". (Installed by Admin,
hence owned by Admin).

[Problem 1]:
When I start Processing,
Processing gives me an error

"A problem occurred while trying to open the files used to store the
console output.".

I am guessing that Processing is trying to write its stdout to file
/Applications/Processing/stdout.txt
but as I mentioned before, normal users do not have write permission to
files in /Applications/Processing/.......any elegant way around this? (I
could just give all users access to stdout.txt....)

[Problem 2]

A more serious problem for me is that, Processing (Java?) seems to be using
/tmp/build as a build directory.
FAQ mentions default build directory as
Users -> (your user name) -> Library -> Processing ->build

using /tmp/build as a build directory causes problems in a multi-user
environment...one student logs out and another logs in, but cannot write to
/tmp/build due to permissions....(one can reboot the system to clean up
/tmp/ but...not an elegant solution...)
Does anybody have advice? How can I set the default build directory back
to ~user/Library/Processing/build ?

yeah.. i keep trying to find the right solution for this and each thing
i've tried seems to break in one environment or another, so i'd appreciate
your input.

writing to the console stuff is an oversight, i'll make a note to fix that.

but as for the build directory.. that's interesting that /tmp/build is
actually a problem (i can see why, and it's easily solved by randomizing
the name ala /tmp/build_14194 or something like that). in some other
environments, writing to ~user/Library/ was causing trouble, though that
was more for windows.

anyways, check out lib/preferences.txt in the processing folder for some
info about the default build path. in your environment, you can edit this
file and then redistribute a version of processing with that
preferences.txt which will be used as the default settings for any of your
users. after having installed, you can edit the user preferences.txt file
(its location is described in the faq) to set a specific path.

as of 0094, the console will now put stdout.txt and stderr.txt into the
build folder since that should be writable... now we just need to make the
build folder consistently writable across installations.

these issues seem to be worked out (as of 0122), as only /tmp is used, and
p5 may even be able to run from the disk image since it no longer messes
with its own folder. closing bug.