Linux ?

[Travis Hanselman]

All,

I'm a new user to the PB console compiler. I was wondering if PB has a linux compatible compiler? If not, has anyone had success with a workaround using a dosemu? I saw some postings about linux on the forum, but they looked old. Curious if there has been any new developments for linux.

Much Thanks.

[Fred Harris]

Travis,

Here's two recent and dandy links for you...

http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pbforums/showthread.php?t=36249

and...

http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pbforums/showthread.php?t=36165

[Steve Rossell]

Dosemu is only for DOS applications not for Console or GUI applications. You might try using Wine or Win4Lin? I am afraid I cannot vouch for either application right now, but you never know...

[Travis Hanselman]

Thanks, will have a look.

[Erich Schulman]

I am not holding my breath for a PB/Unix. I have always felt some letdown that the native OS/2 version turned out to be vaporware and that a bug affecting PBDOS in a VDM was never fixed.

There are several free BASICs out there for Unix. Some are pretty good, but some are no better than GW-BASIC. Bywater Basic is one of the latter.

If you have plenty of hard drive space, you might want to run VirtualBox under Linux.

One final option for your cross-platform needs is to consider another language. Perl, Python, and Ruby are all supported on both sides (including Cygwin). IronPython will also give you .net integration (except for asp.net code-behind), and you can install it alongside CPython or Cygwin Python. If you like Python, check out PythonCard too. If you plan to distribute your programs, don't forget to consider the licenses involved; they may or may not be appropriate for you.

[Volker Butzlaff]

Linux and PB

@Erich,

I've tested some of my Win32 PB programs (v8.x) with Unbuntu Unix (v5.x) and Wine Emulator (v0.9x) on a very, very (over 10 years) old notebook with 128 MB Ram and they run!

bye,
Volker

[Hubert Brandel]

I have always felt some letdown that the native OS/2 version turned out to be vaporware

I have never heared about a native OS/2 PowerBasic Compiler.
Was it a PBCC version or a GUI - or just a missunderstanding ?

[Erich Schulman]

I have never heared about a native OS/2 PowerBasic Compiler.
Was it a PBCC version or a GUI - or just a missunderstanding ?

At the time, only PBDOS 3.0 existed, so I was expecting something like that. PB had not even had its divorce from Spectrasoft. But on CompuServe, there was not only talk about it, but it was said Mr. Zale liked OS/2 as well. So I was really looking forward to PBOS2.

I did upgrade my PBDOS 3.0a to 3.0c when that version came out. But in time it became more and more obvious PBOS2 would never see the light of day. The sense of letdown was the biggest reason I stayed at 3.0c. I did eventually get PBDOS 3.5 and PBCC 4, but not until early last year. I also started getting interested in other languages (particularly Python) and last January finally got around to taking on C++.

PBDOS's COMMAND$ doesn't work properly in the IDE when running in a OS/2 VDM. I also felt some letdown about that bug going unfixed.

I eventually transitioned out of OS/2, as much as I hated to do it. I still miss the Workplace Shell. I would replicate it for X myself, except doing so far exceeds my qualifications.

[Scott Hauser]

Dosemu is only for DOS applications not for Console or GUI applications. You might try using Wine or Win4Lin? I am afraid I cannot vouch for either application right now, but you never know...

Dosemu and Freedos together work very well with all of my dos compilers PBDos 3.x, MS QuickBasic 4.5, 7.1 and VBDOS. PBDos 3.x and VBDOS work flawlessly while the QuickBasics exibit some glitches with floppy drives. I believe these were known issues with the QuickBasic compilers and aren't caused by dosemu and freedos.

I have had good luck running programs compiled by PBWin or PBCC under Wine, but have been unable to actually compile under WINE. The error message is "Can't access resource compiler results." I haven't really had much free time to investigate this further.

Win4Lin is a VM app and is pretty good. It allows you to install Windows as a guest on a Linux machine. The only downside is that you must purchase a key to use it beyond 30 days. If you want free, MSVirtual Machine allows you to install other operating systems, as well as other windows versions, as guests on XP or Vista. It seems to work with everything I have tried except for REACTOS -- which it venomously refuses to launch. Gee I wonder why... REACTOS is stated to be Beta. IMO, it is pre-alpha at best. Maybe I am too fussy!

The above was tested on Ubuntu 6.06 and 7.10 YMMV.

[Buck Huffman]

Scott, I'm just curious, what version of the compilers are you using. I only ask because I
was having the same problem compiling with pbwin 8.03 in wine but when I upgraded to 8.04
it worked just fine. I am also using pbcc 4.04 with wine, 4.03 also did not like wine but 04
does. The only noticeable problems so far is the help files are chm which wine doesn't seem
to like and console apps frequently need to be run with the wineconsole command. you can
view the chm files with one of the many chm viewers available for Linux but that doesn't
give context sensitive help. Their may be a way to set it up but I haven't figured it out yet,
I haven't tried very hard either.

buck

[Scott Hauser]

Buck,

8.01 and 4.01. You may have solved what I have been seeing. I haven't tried the chm files under Linux yet. Thanks for the heads up.

Scott

[John Spikowski]

I think PowerBASIC has an established market in Windows and has done a fine job over the years keeping up with the changes to the OS.

I personally don't see the point of trying to compete with open source Basic solutions on the Linux platform. When someone runs on Linux they assume FREE software and trying to overcome that mindset will break the PB bank. IMHO

If you want to develop under Linux, use FreeBASIC, Euphoria, ScriptBasic (interpreter) with GTK. These are all well supported offerings by the open source community.

I would like to see Bob and company spend their time on .NET integration rather then on Linux.


John Spikowski
ScriptBasic Project Manager

http://www.scriptbasic.org

support @ the above URL

[Marco Pontello]

I would like to see Bob and company spend their time on .NET integration rather then on Linux.

And that in turn would probably mean running even on Linux, and other platforms, under Mono.
I seems to remember that sometimes ago Bob said they would have probably done something with/for .NET, so there's probably hope.

Bye!

[Darrell Price]

Those who are looking for something along the VB line might want to look into Gambas.

[Donald Darden]

VirtualBox Can Give You Windows and PB/CC+PB/Win

I've had great success installing VirtualBox on Linux, then adding Windows as a guest OS and running PB/CC and PB/Win from there. The only other thing you need is to add EXT2 FS for Windows, and then your programs can deal with the EXT2 and EXT3 partitions, folders, and files that are part of the Linux world, as well as the regular FAT and NTFS partitons of the Windows world. You just have to make the partitions appear as sharable folders, then map them as networked drives with a drive letter.

VirtualBox is a commercial product, but free for the individual user to download and use. It is also in development as an Open Source product, in case you are interested in developing it further. It's stable, solid, fast, and works fine on my older PC with a max of 1 GB of RAM. A typical virtual drive for a guest OS is about 4 GB of disk space, so most people can probably find room on their existing drives. I added a second hard drive to give me more room to play with it, and my experience with it is all positive. It really works!