are there attempts to develop a revBrowser compatible with Linux ?

[kresten]

kresten@kresten-Pavilion-zv5200-PR977EA-ABY:~$ uname -a
Linux kresten-Pavilion-zv5200-PR977EA-ABY 4.4.0-112-generic #135-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jan 19 11:48:14 UTC 2018 i686 athlon i686 GNU/Linux
kresten@kresten-Pavilion-zv5200-PR977EA-ABY:~$

[bogs]

Perfect, thank you. So, what we know now -

1. You are running 32bit linux
2. You are trying to install LiveCodeCommunityInstaller-8_1_9-linux.x86, which is the correct version.
3. It is presently on your desktop.

I also want to note that previously you said

I copied it to a folder, which was baptised as LC.tar.gz But no luck with that.

You would indeed have no luck trying to install from that, since it means it is a compressed file. In this case, since the desktop has the installer sitting right there, we'll work from that.

What I did was download the 8.1.9 installer and set up a VM using Lubuntu 16.0.4. I don't know if your system is updated or not, so I skipped updates and 3rd party software, but it should not matter for this demonstration.

Since this is going to add a lot of pictures, I'll put the next steps into a separate post.

[bogs]

Kresten, first of all I want to thank you for bringing this up, I found it very educational in a number of ways.

In the VM I set up for this test, I initially assigned 512megs of ram, as that is what is listed on the ubuntu site for this distro.

However, I found that this caused the installer to quit with a segmentation fault (signal 11). After bumping the ram of the VM to 1gb, the installer started as normal.

This makes me wonder if it is a Lc issue, or a lubuntu issue, lubuntu itself had no problems runnning in the 512meg setting, and I was able to install other software without issues. Ultimately, though, the answer to this is above my paygrade

Anyway, as the install failed with a signal 11 on 512 megs of ram, the following assumes the machine you are running on has at least 1gb of ram.

On to the graphical install.

1. Right click on file

2. choose 'properties'
3. on tab [Permissions] choose 'Execute' dropdown, 'Only owner'. Click [OK]

4. Unless you have set opening programs to single-click, double click on the installer. I saw this pop up, choose [Execute] if you see it.

5. The installer started as expected.

Click 'Accept' and [Continue]

Click 'You only' and [Continue]

Click [Install]

After filling out or skipping the registration, you may (or may not) have to reboot to see Lc in the menu. I did not reboot, and lubuntu did not automatically add the menu entry, so I started Lc from the install folder in the home directory, and of course made the default 'hello' type program.


Next post, the command line since we know this is not how it went for you.

[mwieder]

bogs- thanks for doing the heavy lifting here. I think the 512mb setting is out of date by now. The 8.1.9 installer itself is 330mb, so that would be a lot of memory swapping to get anything done. I'm guessing the requirements haven't been updated in a while.

But some of us have been pushing for a *real* linux installer (.deb and/or .rpm) for some time now. It's not that hard to do, and would avoid the step of having to set the permissions. Just doesn't seem to be a priority for the team.

[bogs]

Yah, I can see their point of view, after all, long time users have been doing it this way since what, 2.9 came out? *Edit - my bad, 2.x for linux were all zip files, now maybe THAT is an idea they can go back to, extract and done, though I guess not real professional

And I think most companies tend to think that most linux users are born fending for themselves against wolves right out of the crib

Lastly, would you rather put out one installer, or 2 (or more) for each kind of linux packaging system out there? I know what I'd be doing.

As far as the 512megs goes, shockingly the 9 dp had no issue as far as I can tell installing in it. For practical purposes, I would suggest a bare minimum of 1gb, but of course everyone has a different situation on their hands and a different level of skills, sometimes you have to make due with what you have as it were

On to the command line discoveries -

For this, I started off by setting the ram on the VM back to 512megs (lubuntus minimum recommended setting). After restarting the machine, I made sure the installer would seg fault 11, it did.

I wanted to check to see if updating lubuntu would solve the issue, so I ran -

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

However, after this the installer still seg.faults.

Next, I increased the amount of ram to 768megs.

The installer launched as expected, but crashed on launching. As a side benefit though, the ubuntu crash reporter popped up, giving a nice list of the dependencies at the time of crash -

Anyhoo, I rebooted and launched the installer from the command line, first navigating to the desktop...

then typing 'dir' to get the listing, and highlighting then copying the file name in the terminal...

then typing ./ and right clicking to paste the file name...

However, after all that you can see it still exited with signal 11. This seems to indicate to me that to run Lc on lubuntu your going to need at least 1gig of ram in the main boards slots, which is peculiar since I have installed it on systems (not ubuntu, but other Debian variants) running far less than 1gb of ram.

What Next? Naturally I started downloading the newest and then older versions of Lc to see if it is just this version, or what version you'd have to go down to, if you don't have >= 1gb of ram, and set the machine back to 512megs of ram.

The latest 9.0 dp launched the installer and looked to run just fine. The following were the results with the previous 8.x versions...
8.2.0 dp 2 - segfault
8.1.8 - segfault
8.1.5 - slave installer quit unexpectedly
8.1.0 - installed as expected.
---------------------------
So, it looks like if your running a *low ram system, you can install up to 8.1.0 of the stable releases, or 9.x of the developer previews.

In an attempt to see if I could then update to 8.1.9, I ran the updater, however, while it downloaded and appeared to have installed 8.1.9, my lack of familiarity with it prevents me from confirming this happened.

I don't see a menu entry for x.9, and when I click on the menu link for 8.x, the title of the menubar stack indicates it is 8.1 only. when I check for updates, I don't see any listed. YMMV.

*low ram meaning < 1gb. The easiest way I know of to find out how much ram your box is running is to type 'free' at the command line -

[kresten]

Is there a way to increase RAM (if yes please explain how) or is it a physical characteristic of the old machine ?

[bogs]

Well, where there is a will, there is *almost* always a way
Since your machine is reporting it is an athlon, we are probably talking about a 1st or 2nd gen AMD motherboard.

If I lived near you, I would say this would be no problem. If you have a friend that is into hardware, invite him/her over to take a look at it. Your system is not going to be as new as this, but this should give you an idea of what we are talking about (picture is a link as well) -

Now, as your looking at that picture, next to the big fan and heat sink are 6 slot holders where the ram (red sticks) are sitting.

Your board won't look *exactly* like this, but the layout has not changed a great deal in a really long time. The hardest thing you would have to do is track down the correct ram for your machines mainboard.

The questions you would have to ask yourself would be ...
"is it worth the time, and money, to invest in a box that is old enough to not have more than a gig of ram in it already".
...The answer is likely going to be no, unless you already have the ram (or can get it cheaply, say $0-$20.00), and the desire to install it, or have a hypothetical friend who is able do it.

It isn't real hard to do, probably 4-6 screws to take off the outer case, flip down the levers on the ends of the ram slot, the ram only goes in one way and is notched, so pretty hard to goof sticking it in, then you use your index fingers to pull up on the outer levers while using your thumbs to push down on the top of the ram until it clicks.

As I say, if I were closer to where you are, I'd do the install free of charge, and if I had the sticks your box uses, I'd probably toss them in as well. Unfortunately, you and I are separated by a great distance and one heck of a big pond, a bit too far for me to accurately check it out.

But, as I pointed out in the post above, 8.1.0 installed with no issue even in this extreme case. The easiest solution would be to install that, then run the update and see if it goes through, it doesn't appear to have caused any issue, but I only tested that very lightly.

The developer preview 9.x also installed without issue, but I hesitate to recommend using a dev preview edition to you, and I don't use them myself other than for testing.

However, there are a lot of others that do use it, I am sure they will chime in as to what they consider its stability for actual work.

[kresten]

So, it looks like if your running a *low ram system, you can install up to 8.1.0 of the stable releases, or 9.x of the developer previews.

So it seems that if I could find a way to replace my 8.1.9 installer with an 8.1.0 installer this might solve my problem. But LC community only offers 8.1.9, -is there a way around that obstacle, a human person perhaps ?

[bogs]

Oh absolutely there is a way around that

Just go to this site, and click on the link shown below -

Selection_003.png (7.42 KiB) Viewed 11298 times

[kresten]

Thank you very much to provide me the link to all versions, which I remember from long ago, but wasn't evident on my download attempts
I now succeeded in downloading and installing the right version.
I produced a new substack ("LinuxBrowser) for browsing the internet, and tried to use the browser widget object from the tools palette. But it just opend an independent window named "LiveCode Community.x86"
Is there a way for scripting the new substack ?

livecodeall wrote
"I believe revBrowserOpenCEF is supported on Linux from LiveCode 8"
If I should follow that track, how can I get hold of such an external ? -and script its use ?

[bogs]

Your very welcome my friend

I had also meant to chime back in here this morning with some decent news, apparently all the update process needed was a reboot of the machine, the installed version now shows 8.1.9 (yay us, right? ) after the update of Lc ran last post. So that gives you a way to get up in versions (using the updater) if you need to.

Like mwieder said up there, though, while it ran ok being lightly tested, I had no other apps or really anything else in memory, so you may hit limits at some point.

As to your last question, I am sorry to say we will both have to wait for someone else to chime in on that one. I don't use 8 for much besides testing, and I don't use widgets at all, hopefully -hh or someone with a LOT more experience in those two subjects will pop in

[jacque]

livecodeall wrote
"I believe revBrowserOpenCEF is supported on Linux from LiveCode 8"
If I should follow that track, how can I get hold of such an external ? -and script its use ?

Before widgets, we had to script browser integration manually. These commands are part of LC and you can find revBrowserOpenCEF in the dictionary. That will open a basic browser overlay in the stack. Then use revBrowserSet to set its properties. Search for revBrowser in the dictionary to see what can be done.

[kresten]

Thank you for the advice. I have experimented to create a new browser window through that way, without visible result. I notice, that the dictionary specifies only for mac and windows
I guess you are aware of that, and think there are still hopes for my LC commmunity 8.1 Linux version.
I created a new substack "PossibleLinuxBrowser" and tried scripting its first card. But I am so ignorant in scripting and dont even understand the difference between revBrowserOpen and revbrowserOpenCEF.
Could you suggest a basic script, just with google as default ?

[bogs]

I took a (pathetic) swing at it, since I still had the vm that mimicked what your currently running on. Keep in mind you need to have the chrome web browser installed on your system to use the 'cef' part of this.

Here is a shot of the stack, with the browser window embedded showing google -


I put the mouseUp event right in the stacks script, again this is only an attempt to see if it worked. The code is copied straight out of the dictionary under 'revBrowserOpenCef'.

I found out (in an older dictionary) that the browser open routine sets the rect of the browser to 0,0,0,0. This is likely why you didn't get a visible result in your experiment, in the older documentation, I found it in the comments.

To counter that, I added a line after the 'end if' part of the handler that says-

Code: Select all

revBrowserSet tBrowserId,rect,the rect of this card

This causes the browser instance to be the size of the card, so you might want to modify the rect a bit.

Hope that helps you

[kresten]

Thank you, I tried to download googlechrome, and after unpackin got "wrong architecture : amd.64 I then downloadetx86-64 rpm 64bit rpm , got a system of folders, but no apparent way to start browsing.
I guess it relates to my aged Linux machine. But I did suceed in installing LC, - and Ubuntu.I see no access to older versions of chrome, any recommendations?