the error was that i failed to compile the external as a shared module, or whatever it is called, using a second pass of cc with the -shared flag. but i guess this procedure makes sense, and now it works. thanks! sorry for the bandwidth occupation!

-yon

on loading, i now get an error message (pasted below) which does not seem to appear anywhere in the Pd source code, so i thought it must be linux specific? (i'm running linux on PPC) /usr/local/lib/pd/externs/smpmodel.pd_linux: /usr/local/lib/pd/externs/smpmodel.pd_linux: ELF file's phentsize not the expected size smpmodel 10 6 2 3 3 ... couldn't create