Win11 outmoding / running Parallax software on Linux under Wine

bob_g4bby

I run win10 on a maybe 10 year old i7 desktop, which is not win11 compatible. It's powerful and fast. Recently I dual-booted Linux Mint, which has a very 'windows' desktop and impressed me when it automatically ran my two scanners, WiFi printer and old GTS450 graphics card. I've started exploring wine to be able to run P/nut etc.

Wonder how many others are unwilling to demote their machines just because Microsoft dictate it so? How green is that? It's exactly like the cartoon film "Robots" - the former ceo of the big business Mr Bigweld (nice chap, provides all the spares for older robots) is succeeded by Mr Ratchet, who abolishes all spares and is all about expensive upgrades and new models. But, Ratchet gets his come-uppance, thanks to a small band of rebels and Bigweld steps back in. Good film, even though I'm 70 years young.

Mint is what an operating system should be - a passive canvas on which your apps run, not pushy, nosey, intrusive, overblown.

I intend to run Win10 / Mint until the machine breaks. May have to ditch windows defender in favour of another supported security app. Viable?

evanh

M$ is going down the road of making Windoze behave like smartphones. Where they spoon feed your every move. For those that don't understand computers basically. Where things as basic as files and directories are too complicated for the user.

Don't keep any credentials on it so then it doesn't matter if gets compromised. Wipe any passwords and history from the web browsers.

RS_Jim

I switched to Mint when I could not upgrade my ugh win 8 laptop. Swapped out old hd for a refurbished 500 gb SSD. I use it all the time as my only other compute power is a couple of rPi's. It boots about one and a half times faster than windoze ever did. It would be nice to have anew nd screaming faster CPU but I am probably too old to drop that kind of cash on my hobby.
jim

bob_g4bby

@RS_Jim , sounds like a very sensible extension to that laptop's life. I did the same with an oldish Mac which drives a professional film scanner I saved from the skip. Figured the hard disks were due for pensioning off, so fitted an ssd rather than wait for a failure. The faster access time means the scanner no longer pauses to wait for data to be saved - it all works much more smoothly - nice surprise and less banding on pictures.
@evanh - good points, have always kept financial stuff off the machine. Microsoft - don't seem to know what to sell apart from the old OS in new clothes. After 10 goes, you'd think it would be perfect, no need to mess about with it anymore ;-)
Bob

bob_g4bby

So rather than bellyache about Windows 11, can we run Parallax tools on Linux?
I successfully ran P/Nutv49p1 on Linux Mint 22.1 Xia base (the default download this week). As a novice with Linux, here's what I think I did:-

1. Install Wine v9 from the Mint "Software Manager" pool of software to maximise the chances it would run just fine.
2. Download P/Nut and unzip all to a suitable directory, .exe file and the spin2 examples
3. Right click on the P/Nut .exe and select "Open with" -> "Other application"
4. At the bottom of the window type "wine"
5. Press "Add to list" button
6. Highlight the wine entry that appears in the list
7. Press "Set as default" button
8. Close the "Open with" window by pressing "OK" button
9. Plug in your P2 development system to a USB socket. So then, right click on the P/Nut .exe and select "Open with wine", you should see the P/Nut window open just like in Windows. It won't work just yet, as you need to give yourself permission, as a new user, to use the serial ports! So close it for now. What it has done is initialise Wine's workspace, in particular, it has auto-mapped the Linux serial ports it's detected and assigned Windows style names to each.
10. Enable serial ports in your account: Open a command terminal and type sudo usermod -a -G dialout yourusername and press enter
11. To take effect, the computer has to be restarted, so do that
12. Go back to the P/Nut .exe file, right click and select "open with wine". P/Nut should display it's window
13. But which serial port to use? Well, under menu selection "Run" select "Get Hardware Version"
14. A small "Information" window should pop up saying amongst other things "Propeller 2 found on COM33" (or whatever number wine has selected for you)
15. Drag and drop a .spin2 from the P/Nut directory over P/Nut and it should display the source code in the P/Nut window
16. Run the program as usual with "Run" and "Compile + Load Ram + Debug". After a flurry of serial link LEDs flashing on the development board (if fitted) you should in any case see debug windows pop up and start displaying results from the program running on the P2

If you want to see the Wine serial port name allocation list, open a command terminal and type ls -l ~/.wine/dosdevices/ . A list of Linux - Windows name pairs will be displayed. Now open another command terminal, unplug the P2 development board and type in the same command as before. Notice the red entry, showing that Wine had detected your board at that address, but it's no longer there. (may be useful with other serial devices to determine which port they're sat on). Plug the development board back in, relist, you will see the red entry turns back to yellow, showing it's connected to active hardware.

Also see this page in the Wine user guide

Hope that works for other beginners with Linux, let me know if you find any snags!
Bob

bob_g4bby

A word of warning about dual booting Linux Mint with a PC running Windows. It may not install fault free. I found I had to hold down the SHIFT key during boot for the GRUB menu asking which OS you want to load, else it defaults straight into Mint. So take your precautions and don't lose your data! I'm lucky it wasn't anything more serious.

A fail-safe would be to dig out a spare PC and install Linux Mint on that as the sole OS. The Mint website tells you how to do both of the above.

Electrodude

@bob_g4bby said:
A word of warning about dual booting Linux Mint with a PC running Windows. It may not install fault free. I found I had to hold down the ESC key during boot for the GRUB menu asking which OS you want to load, else it defaults straight into Mint. So take your precautions and don't lose your data! I'm lucky it wasn't anything more serious.

A fail-safe would be to dig out a spare PC and install Linux Mint on that as the sole OS. The Mint website tells you how to do both of the above.

You can configure GRUB to always show the menu, and to either sit there forever until you pick an OS or to default to a specific one after a timeout.

evanh

@bob_g4bby said:
.... It may not install fault free. ...

That's not a fault as such. Newest Linux installed will always put its partition at the top of the bootable list.

Grub boot settings, to adjust Grubs behaviour, do exist but the installers don't present them during install. The default is to wait 5 seconds, for user selection, then boot the top entry in the list.

PS: The monitor's mode change can gobble up the 5 seconds. Rendering the select prompt invisible. One of the settings I edit is to turn off the graphics mode switch so that Grub uses a low res text mode. Most monitors will switch to that quickly.

bob_g4bby

Thanks, fellas, that's useful to know.

Has anyone successfully run other windows only compilers under wine?

Wuerfel_21

@bob_g4bby said:
Wonder how many others are unwilling to demote their machines just because Microsoft dictate it so? How green is that? It's exactly like the cartoon film "Robots" - the former ceo of the big business Mr Bigweld (nice chap, provides all the spares for older robots) is succeeded by Mr Ratchet, who abolishes all spares and is all about expensive upgrades and new models. But, Ratchet gets his come-uppance, thanks to a small band of rebels and Bigweld steps back in. Good film, even though I'm 70 years young.

That was a good one, yeah. Message way ahead of its time (remember, Robots predates the iPhone)

I personally stuck to Windows 7 until that became super-unsupported, have been using Kubuntu since. I don't think any PC in my household would meet the official Win11 "requirements" (that aren't actually required). My desktop barely eeks out because apparently original AMD Ryzen 1xxx is too old, but 2xxx (a very minor upgrade) is fine? The aforementioned Thinkpad X260 is out for good and don't even get me started on mom's old Sony VAIO (also very solid machine, though saddled with the accursed NVidia driver headaches)

@bob_g4bby said:
10. Enable serial ports in your account: Open a command terminal and type sudo usermod -a -G dialout yourusername and press enter
11. To take effect, the computer has to be restarted, so do that

The dialout thing is so stupid... I wonder where one'd need to complain to get that enabled by default.

Incidentally, I got the EXE file association with wine automatically I think? Though sometimes it has interesting ideas about which WINE_PREFIX to use.

@bob_g4bby said:
Has anyone successfully run other windows only compilers under wine?

Propeller Tool allegedly doesn't work, but there's plenty of choice in P1 Spin compilers. There's openspin, Homespun will work with mono, BSTC ought to work if you have 32 bit libs installed and flexspin has a bytecode mode that's ostensibly better than all of them.

In terms of other windows-only tools, I use GraphicsGale for low-bpp image editing. Works under wine with some anomalies (pro tip: if any program you want to use is full of poorly-sized fonts, you need to install the windows default fonts! winetricks can help in this endeavour).

macca

@bob_g4bby said:
So rather than bellyache about Windows 11, can we run Parallax tools on Linux?
I successfully ran P/Nutv49p1 on Linux Mint 22.1 Xia base (the default download this week). As a novice with Linux, here's what I think I did:-

[...]

Hope that works for other beginners with Linux, let me know if you find any snags!

There is always Spin Tools IDE that runs natively on Linux and requires only the dialout group change to work.
Just to say...

bob_g4bby

@Wuerfel_21 , thanks for all the advice Ada, I'll have a look at the apps you mention.. The Windows fonts sounds a good idea too. I just tried double click on the P/Nut .exe and that started P/Nut just fine.
@macca Spin Tools IDE looks really nice with the use of colour. So much the better being a native app, I must give it a go - the list of features sounds really useful - debug support + the right and left hand columns look really useful for navigation. I've got it installed for now.
I shall gently peck away, learning about Mint, spending as much time there as in Windows. Discussing Win11 outmoding with my old Uni mates on the 60m radio amateur band, they were nearly all affected by this. My pal Andrew had this to say "Win10 is working just fine for me at the moment and I don't want this to change. I've turned auto-update off and have taken an image on USB stick in case of ssd problems. I will stick with this as long as it works"
Bob

evanh

The Grub settings I change are in the file /etc/default/grub on Kubuntu distro flavours I've used.
GRUB_TIMEOUT=20 is a good one to start with to prove later steps are working.
I use Kate text editor. Modern version of it will prompt for password to write system files like that.

To then install such an edit into the binary boot loader requires two steps:
First sudo update-grub to rebuild the grub files.

Next step is to write Grub to the start of the boot drive. You need to be sure of which drive this is ...

evanh@controlled:~$ df
Filesystem      1K-blocks       Used  Available Use% Mounted on
tmpfs             3276952       1888    3275064   1% /run
/dev/sda2        30786532   14212652   14984636  49% /
tmpfs            16384744          0   16384744   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                5120         12       5108   1% /run/lock
tmpfs            16384744          4   16384740   1% /tmp
/dev/sda3       418590272  155822236  241478104  40% /home
tmpfs             3276948         96    3276852   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/sdb1      2883129520 1374477756 1362122128  51% /media/evanh/red30bulk

Here, I've got three volumes mounted on two drives. In particular, root "/" volume is mounted to partition 2 of drive "sda". Chances are "sda" is also the boot drive. If you know you've got a complicated boot with lots of drives then it could be different.

Then write the drive with sudo grub-install /dev/sda

bob_g4bby

In Linux Mint and other distros I've been annoyed by a loudish plop sound just before the OS makes a noise or starts a program that uses sound - unacceptable. This worked for me and disabled the audio system power saving feature that was causing the plops.
"[note: you need to be root for this].
Open file in console using: sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf [or, use Dolphin, open with Kate.]
Add the following line at the bottom of the page:
options snd-hda-intel power_save=0 power_save_controller=N
save and reboot."
Yet another "feature" like the "dialout" permission that should have been baked into the distro, @Wuerfel_21 .
Bob

VonSzarvas

I'm really enjoying learning from your progress - thank you @bob_g4bby
And thanks to all the contributors too!!!

I've a couple of daily-use W10 office machines that W11 doesn't care for, so seriously considering Mint. I'd seen evanh (I think) mention mint in the past, and it seems to have great reviews.
Absolutely no reason to ditch the hardware. SSD + 16GB ram, etc... they are faster than I need .

My laptop runs W11, so maybe I can use that for the "odd thing".
On the desktop, maybe spintools, chrome/drive and diptrace are the important things. I might take the chance to look at KiCad again; surely it's gotten good enough by now and looks like they have a native linux version.

Small steps- I'll try mint + audacity on an older i5 box first - see how I like the GUI and experience whilst mucking about in the music room!

Wuerfel_21

@bob_g4bby said:
Yet another "feature" like the "dialout" permission that should have been baked into the distro, @Wuerfel_21 .

There's probably hardware where this works properly.

---

Speaking of audio and music, though I've only messed around with it a little bit, REAPER (pro audio workstation) has a Linux version that's pretty solid.

bob_g4bby

@VonSzarvas , you're very welcome - the parallax community is a very worthy bunch of folks and it's great to be able to contribute. I think practically Win10 will be usable for many years, especially if you create a boot disk of it and back up personal stuff. I know there are free apps out there which will alow you to make a complete disk image and I'll probably save off both of those things onto a couple of cheapy usb sticks to keep in the drawer. Mint gets a good review for its Windows like GUI and it's based on Ubuntu whichis pretty mainstream. Both these distros have a lot of advice posted, which I've been poaching cmd lines from.
@Wuerfel_21 , in some ways, Linux sound is more advanced than Windows. As a ham radio operator, I had been piping audio streams around Windows from my radio receiver application to various decoder programs for display in plain text. To do that, I used Jack Audio Connection Kit and other GUI tools like Catia to draw audio links between sources and sinks. It worked OK on Windows but was more sophisticated on Linux, where it all started from. Very useful for all sorts of reasons - e.g. audio recording off a webpage or microphone audio processing prior to skype. There's a whole host of 'virtual cable' applications it can help with. This is a useful video about Linux audio - you don;t have to watch the lot, there's a heading list you can click on in the text below. Shame about the presenter's hair!
See also this video about Pipewire for Linux. This is also a means of distributing audio between hardware and software. It is compatible with all legacy systems, so is going to be the gold standard in future. Not quite stable enough by all accounts just yet.
Bob

evanh

@VonSzarvas said:
I've a couple of daily-use W10 office machines that W11 doesn't care for, so seriously considering Mint. I'd seen evanh (I think) mention mint in the past, and it seems to have great reviews.

Wasn't me. I've always talked about Kubuntu. I was using KDE before Ubuntu even existed so it was a natural move to go Kubuntu.

On the desktop, maybe spintools, chrome/drive and diptrace are the important things. I might take the chance to look at KiCad again; surely it's gotten good enough by now and looks like they have a native linux version.

Man, when I finally found Kicad I was hooked. It fit my style way better than Diptrace ever did. And I never grok'd Eagle at all.

Using Diptrace on Wine is a little glitchy graphics wise. It doesn't crash, just doesn't always render on every event. Or at least that was my last experience maybe five years back. It worked better using Direct3D rather than OpenGL from memory.