Is there a Quartus available for BSD? I don't recall seeing one.
You may be stuck with a legacy OS for Quartus if you don't want to run Linux.
Quartus under Linux works just fine by the way.
Hmm...did I once hear there was some compatibility layer in BSD such that it would run Linux binaries? Sounds messy but might work. If it exists that is.
Well I guess I could install VirtualBox equivalent and then install a Linux, but that does not seem right. I noticed that BSD has some kind of jail thingy, and they have either Debian or Gentoo available to use. Not even sure how that works, it sounds kind of weird having something in jail and you are designated the warden, maybe Linux should be in jail.:-)
Ha hahh, Linux is in jail all the time. It can be in jail and create jails.
I have not looked into this much but the idea was that you can run an app in some subdirectory that is not your root directory. As far as the app is concerned that sub directory is root (/) and so it has no way to mess with anything else in your system. Quite a nice security idea.
Basically you can run pretty much a whole OS is such a jail. After all your app is going to need a bunch of libraries and stuff in it's jail in order to work.
I guess the jail in BSD is similar. Makes me want to look into it even more.
I believe that somewhere there is an entire Debian distro using the BSD kernel instead of Linux. A different thing of course but it means you can run "Linux" without running Linux at all
I haven't used jails, but I have used Solaris containers which are supposed to be similar. They basically created virtualized userland spaces which look like they hard the entire machine to themselves. Each container could access its local root password and install applications requiring root access, but they didn't install on the host OS. They're different from full virtualization because the host and guest OS are actually the same OS. So you can only run Solaris on Solaris.
When my work switched from Solaris to Linux we stopped using them. Full virtualization is a little more flexible because you can do something like Windows on Linux or Linux on Linux.
I was just glancing through the PC-BSD manual, the best manual I have seen in a while, and they have a section on Linux compatibility mode. I really do not want to become a system administrator, but it seems to get this kind of stuff to work, that is what you have to be. The only concern that I have is if I am able to load and install the Linux version of SimpleIDE, I am still wondering how it will deal with the ports. It would be a real PIA, after all that work, and not being able to access the ports to program the Propeller board. But, I guess I will have to be the one to try it out and see if works, now if they only had a Windows 7 compatibly mode...
My approach would be to build propgcc, the open source Spin compiler and SimplelDE from sources on the PC-BSD. Then you don't have to mess with any compatibility mode.
I'm sure getting at serial ports is not impossible under BSD.
I just downloaded the Linux package from Learn, and extracted the zip, looks like it is missing the essentials like setup.sh, so I guess the Linux compatibility mode is not working on a straight zipped download. Now the next thing is to get the sources and compile it, hopefully I will get something that works.
Hmm, after thinking about it, I think I want too try PropellerIDE first, but I need a refresher course as to how to get the source. Do I need to install something on PC-BSD, to get to where the source is?
I just downloaded the Linux package from Learn, and extracted the zip, looks like it is missing the essentials like setup.sh, so I guess the Linux compatibility mode is not working on a straight zipped download. Now the next thing is to get the sources and compile it, hopefully I will get something that works.
Ray
We no longer support the old linux package because of the many, many dependencies. Only .deb packages are supported at this time. The .deb packages will work on Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, and other Debian based distributions. Support for other Linux OS distributions is TBD. Please download the Installation Instructions and follow them for the Linux .deb packages.
If you are using FreeBSD or Linux Distributions not based on Debian you will have to get all the repositories, resolve all dependencies, and build them yourself. I recommend starting with the PropellerIDE easyside project since it does not require building PropellerGCC.
When you know how to build all this for FreeBSD, then you can teach me.
I got the source for PropellerIDE and I tried opening the project, once it got opened up it complains about a kit that is missing, not sure what exactly Qt is looking for because PC-BSD has GCC installed. Not even out of the gate, and I am stalled.
I would suggest building PropellerIDE from the command line following the instructions in the README or INSTALL text that are in the source package.
Assuming you have all the Qt libs installed correctly and what ever other dependencies that sounds like it should work more easily.
I think that Qt is not fully implemented for PC-BSD, everything that I have tried, including building a 'hello' project from scratch, still asks for a kit, which is not implemented when chosen, so I think something is wrong. It is funny because PC-BSD was built using Qt. As for command line instructions within the easyside(PropellerIDE) download, I could not find any. I guess this will have to be put on hold until I can get more information as to what is going on with Qt for PC-BSD.
As for the general use of PC-BSD, the new distribution still has some minor glitches, some things do not work as expected, for instance the AppCafe, sometimes it works as expected and sometimes it does not.
I registered with the PC-BSD forum, that is a little different setup, when you post something it does not appear in the thread for at least 12 hours. Not sure if that is just for the newly registered or it affects everyone. I guess that keeps a lot of threads under control, just think if they switched over to that method here.
The thing is that qtcreator can be used to build binaries for many architectures and platforms. From the desktop machine you are running on to Android or Rasperry Pi. So you need to tell it what it should build and which compiler/cross compiler it should use.
Recent versions of qtcreator introduced the idea of "kits" which is basically how you specify what the build tools will be.
Assuming you have gcc and the Qt libraries installed you should be able to open up the relevant dialogues where these kits are defined and specify the tools to be used. It normally finds the compiler and libs automatically for you to select.
This is a necessary complication given that Qt is a cross-platform too kit.
Qt apps can of course be built without qtcreator using qmake from the command line. Which is what the build scripts do, they have to do more than just get the Qt app compiled though.
I must admit that building PropellerID, SimpleIDE etc has confused me. Starting from the fact that the repositories they live in are not named after the programs the build.
Just now I have pulled the latest "easyside" repository here. Which actually builds "PropellerIDE". It can be built with a simple:
$ qmake
$ make
From the command line. Assuming Qt is installed and qmake is in your PATH.
I also have the propside sources, which builds into SimpleIDE. The "qt5side" branch of the repo builds with Qt5.3 here by simply using:
./plinrelease.sh
That of course assumes you have propgcc installed first...
The "release_1_0" branch of propgcc builds and installs Propgcc with:
./rebuild.sh
The "default" branch of propgcc is built and installed with just "make".
How easy could it be? :)
I have no idea of course how well any of this works under BSD. That is where you come in....
Who said anything about "qmake *.pro"? A simple "qmake" should do. Followed by "make".
I will admit that a command line is a bit tougher than a GUI. However in general we cannot do what we want to do in a GUI. For simple cases that you do a lot a GUI is OK. For anything interesting a GUI would be so horribly labyrinthine it's easier to use the command line and hack on config files.
I checked on the internet, and some of the examples for using qmake with PC-BSD had 'qmake *.pro'. maybe there is a difference between how qmake is used in PC-BSD and in Linux?
Ray
[ray@pcbsd-5490] ~/easyside/ide% qmake
CORRECT>make (y|n|e|a)? yes
make: no target to make.
make: stopped in /usr/home/ray/easyside/ide
[ray@pcbsd-5490] ~/easyside/ide%
Actually, Qt Creator was already installed when I installed PC-BSD. I did go through an exercise today of uninstalling Qt and then reinstalling it. Basically you have something called AppCafe which holds all the programs that can be installed. So I just type in qt, when the program shows up, I hit the install icon and it installs Qt and all of its parts. Now I am not sure as to how you could verify that everything that is needed got installed, I only assume as much. Lots of digging but not coming up with any real solutions.
[ray@pcbsd-5490] ~/easyside/ide% qmake
CORRECT>make (y|n|e|a)? yes
make: no target to make.
make: stopped in /usr/home/ray/easyside/ide
[ray@pcbsd-5490] ~/easyside/ide%
I have just twigged what is going on here. You typed "qmake" which it cannot find. The nearest thing it could find is "make" which it helpfully asked if you want to run.
You said "yes" so it went ahead and ran "make" which of course failed as it has no target to build because you have not run qmake yet to set that up.
[ray@pcbsd-5490] ~% cd easyside
[ray@pcbsd-5490] ~/easyside% cd ide
[ray@pcbsd-5490] ~/easyside/ide% qmake-qt4
WARNING: Failure to find: ioapi.h
WARNING: Failure to find: iowin32.h
[ray@pcbsd-5490] ~/easyside/ide%
But just in case you are not a troll do you have any links to any instructions as to how I can do that with the XP or Win 7 I have here. I have never seen it done before.
Sorry to sidetrack it to a previous sidetrack...
This registry key sets what shell starts upon boot: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell
Normally, it's set to explorer.exe, but you can set it to cmd.exe to make it command prompt only.
I've also had occasion to make a custom shell to do HMI startup tasks and keep the operator from clicking about (sometimes quite disruptively).
Comments
You may be stuck with a legacy OS for Quartus if you don't want to run Linux.
Quartus under Linux works just fine by the way.
Hmm...did I once hear there was some compatibility layer in BSD such that it would run Linux binaries? Sounds messy but might work. If it exists that is.
Ray
Ha hahh, Linux is in jail all the time. It can be in jail and create jails.
I have not looked into this much but the idea was that you can run an app in some subdirectory that is not your root directory. As far as the app is concerned that sub directory is root (/) and so it has no way to mess with anything else in your system. Quite a nice security idea.
Basically you can run pretty much a whole OS is such a jail. After all your app is going to need a bunch of libraries and stuff in it's jail in order to work.
I guess the jail in BSD is similar. Makes me want to look into it even more.
I believe that somewhere there is an entire Debian distro using the BSD kernel instead of Linux. A different thing of course but it means you can run "Linux" without running Linux at all
When my work switched from Solaris to Linux we stopped using them. Full virtualization is a little more flexible because you can do something like Windows on Linux or Linux on Linux.
Ray
My approach would be to build propgcc, the open source Spin compiler and SimplelDE from sources on the PC-BSD. Then you don't have to mess with any compatibility mode.
I'm sure getting at serial ports is not impossible under BSD.
Ray
Ray
We no longer support the old linux package because of the many, many dependencies. Only .deb packages are supported at this time. The .deb packages will work on Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, and other Debian based distributions. Support for other Linux OS distributions is TBD. Please download the Installation Instructions and follow them for the Linux .deb packages.
If you are using FreeBSD or Linux Distributions not based on Debian you will have to get all the repositories, resolve all dependencies, and build them yourself. I recommend starting with the PropellerIDE easyside project since it does not require building PropellerGCC.
When you know how to build all this for FreeBSD, then you can teach me.
Ray
I would suggest building PropellerIDE from the command line following the instructions in the README or INSTALL text that are in the source package.
Assuming you have all the Qt libs installed correctly and what ever other dependencies that sounds like it should work more easily.
There is only a simple script to run.
As for the general use of PC-BSD, the new distribution still has some minor glitches, some things do not work as expected, for instance the AppCafe, sometimes it works as expected and sometimes it does not.
I registered with the PC-BSD forum, that is a little different setup, when you post something it does not appear in the thread for at least 12 hours. Not sure if that is just for the newly registered or it affects everyone. I guess that keeps a lot of threads under control, just think if they switched over to that method here.
Ray
The thing is that qtcreator can be used to build binaries for many architectures and platforms. From the desktop machine you are running on to Android or Rasperry Pi. So you need to tell it what it should build and which compiler/cross compiler it should use.
Recent versions of qtcreator introduced the idea of "kits" which is basically how you specify what the build tools will be.
Assuming you have gcc and the Qt libraries installed you should be able to open up the relevant dialogues where these kits are defined and specify the tools to be used. It normally finds the compiler and libs automatically for you to select.
You can read about "kits" here : http://qt-project.org/doc/qtcreator-2.6/creator-targets.html
This is a necessary complication given that Qt is a cross-platform too kit.
Qt apps can of course be built without qtcreator using qmake from the command line. Which is what the build scripts do, they have to do more than just get the Qt app compiled though.
I must admit that building PropellerID, SimpleIDE etc has confused me. Starting from the fact that the repositories they live in are not named after the programs the build.
Just now I have pulled the latest "easyside" repository here. Which actually builds "PropellerIDE". It can be built with a simple: From the command line. Assuming Qt is installed and qmake is in your PATH.
I also have the propside sources, which builds into SimpleIDE. The "qt5side" branch of the repo builds with Qt5.3 here by simply using: That of course assumes you have propgcc installed first...
The "release_1_0" branch of propgcc builds and installs Propgcc with: The "default" branch of propgcc is built and installed with just "make".
How easy could it be?
I have no idea of course how well any of this works under BSD. That is where you come in....
This not for everyone, we are so used to plug and play, we are lost at the first sign of trouble.
Ray
I will admit that a command line is a bit tougher than a GUI. However in general we cannot do what we want to do in a GUI. For simple cases that you do a lot a GUI is OK. For anything interesting a GUI would be so horribly labyrinthine it's easier to use the command line and hack on config files.
Ray
Well, now you have got me. Never seen that response to qmake before.
Dammit I'm going to have try and install PC_BSD again just to try and play along with you.
Ray
It's pretty obvious that you don't have the qt development environment's qmake in your path.
What command did you use to install qt (if any)?
I have no idea how to install qt on FreeBSD and am waiting for you to figure it out and tell me.
Ray
Maybe this will add qmake for you:
$ pkg_add -r qconf-1.4
Packages that have qmake http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=qmake&stype=all
You said "yes" so it went ahead and ran "make" which of course failed as it has no target to build because you have not run qmake yet to set that up.
The answer to you qmake problem may well be in the post #4 of this PCBSD thread http://forums.pcbsd.org/showthread.php?t=16143
Note the part about needing to add the path to qmake to your PATH.
Ray
It is possible you need Qt5 to build easyside. But go ahead and type "make", you'll soon find out.
Ray
That looks very much like the kind of error I have seen when tying to build a Qt5 program against Qt4 libraries. Or vice versa.
Can you do: And tell us what you get.
If you can't find a Qt5 package for PC-BSD you can build it all from sources fetched from here http://download.qt-project.org/official_releases/qt/5.3/5.3.1/single/qt-everywhere-opensource-src-5.3.1.tar.gz.mirrorlist
It's only a 230MByte download!
I have managed to build Qt from like that a few times.
Ray
Used find.
It builds with Qt4. The plinrelease.sh may suggest Qt5 for a few seconds IIRC, but the script will finish with Qt4.
Make sure you have the loader branch as suggested in the main easyside page.
Use the plinrelease.sh script to build without qtcreator. It uses qmake and the whole folder where qmake is installed which must be in your path.
Sorry to sidetrack it to a previous sidetrack...
This registry key sets what shell starts upon boot: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell
Normally, it's set to explorer.exe, but you can set it to cmd.exe to make it command prompt only.
I've also had occasion to make a custom shell to do HMI startup tasks and keep the operator from clicking about (sometimes quite disruptively).