Linux Yet?

[Buck Huffman]

In the past I've used VESA modes in Dosemu with some success. You
should be able to use modes 100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 10E, 111, 114
and 117, at least they worked for me. You may find others that work
for you. Modes 107 and under should support TTY so you don't have
to worry about creating fonts, but the powerBasic PRINT statement
doesn't put the text where you want it so you'll have to use the
Video bios interrupt (interrupt 10 service 0e or 0a IIRC) or the
STDOUT statement to put the text on the screen. Or just use a VESA
library to simplify the whole thing, You can find one here

But I'm sure there are many better ones out there.

Also I noticed that most of the examples that came with PBWin 8 run
just fine on my machine running suse linux 9.1 with Wine
although PBWin itself refuses to compile the code from within Linux

Of course this may not help at all with what anybody is doing, But I
wanted to chime in anyway (just in case it does help).

Just a thought.
Buck


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[This message has been edited by Buck Huffman (edited July 01, 2005).]

[Michael Torrie]

One of the cool features of dosemu (the terminal console version) is that your pb applications and pb itself work over ssh on a remote connection. This is very cool. Maybe I'm an old school person, but I love having the ability to run all kinds of things remotely. If you combine dosemu (or any other console app) with a java web-delivered ssh client and you can do PB programming from anywhere in the world using just a browser!

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[david thain]

I have found the solution for my PB3.2 programs, Ubuntu Linux, and Dosemu. I needed to execute Xdosemu instead of dosemu. My Powerbasic programs now work fine except I had to change back to 25 lines on the screen instead of 50 and printing to my printer doesn't work yet. I haven't been able to solve this problem but if I can, the rest works just fine including peek and poke to the screen. One other difference is I have a small window to view instead of full screen like that using W2K but my screens still work.

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djthain

[David J Venable]

Here's another one. This is commercial (sort of).
$25 for the professional edition. I haven't used it
myself, but according to the web site it is:
* Object oriented
* Modern BASIC language
* Full featured IDE
* Complete documentation

for:

Windows
Linux
MacOS (soon)

It also claims:
"It comes with truly Java-like object orientation and backward
support for VB6 and QBasic, as it is 100% syntax compatible.
KBasic combines the expressive power of object-oriented languages
like C++ with the familiarity and ease of use of VB6. It allows
developers with an installed base of VB6 applications to start
developing for a mixed Windows and Linux environment without
having to face a steep learning curve: KBasic uses the familiar
visual design paradigm and has a full implementation of the BASIC
language."

Oh yes, it uses QT.

Anyway, the site is: http://www.kbasic.de/

I think I'll stick with perl (which I find perfectly simple to
read and maintain).

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[Michael Torrie]

I've pretty much given up on most compiled languages period. For the work I do on a daily basis, script languages are a far better choice for me than C or Basic. However there are times when I wish I had PowerBASIC for doing quick little interactive apps. Looks like Python, Java, and
C# are filling that void for me. Doing graphical apps with GTK# in C# is pretty slick.

There are several implementations of BASIC on Linux. Most of them are not compiled, but either interpreted, or byte-code of some kind. I think this is perfectly okay. The problems that I do have with these projects (some of which are very cool) include:
- limited, isolated runtimes; in other words limited wrapping of third party libraries.
- incompatible syntaxes (none are quite like what I'm used to with PB)
- specific graphical toolkits (QT-only, for example). I'm much more in favor of toolkit-neutral languages that merely have great bindings for QT, GTK, etc.

A small sampling of what's available now:
- GamBas: QT-based IDE/BASIC interpreter/vm. http://gambas.sourceforge.net/
- wxBASIC: wxwidgets-based IDE/yet another BASIC dialect. http://wxbasic.sourceforge.net/
- GNU LibertyBASIC compiler collection - commandline compiler for win32 and linux. LibertyBASIC dialect. http://lbpp.sourceforge.net/

Unlike C, Python, or Perl, each dialect has significant differences.

You can use these languages for CGI, but I can't understand why you'd want to.

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[This message has been edited by Michael Torrie (edited June 18, 2005).]

[John Krahn]

Wow, March 2005 and people are still asking about a Linux version of PowerBASIC! I gave up on that hope a long time ago and I haven't used Windows for many years.

John

[david thain]

I have use Ubuntu linux OS and DOSEMU but PB 3.2 doesn't work very well. The letters in the ide are skewed. Full screen mode locks up the DOSEMU program and skewed the letters also. Has anyone else used Ubuntu with better results?

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djthain

[Michael Torrie]

I find perl very difficult to read and maintain. I think PHP would appeal more to those familiar with PowerBASIC.


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[David J Venable]

In all honesty, why not just use perl? It's just as easy
(maybe even easier), arguably more powerful, and free. Not
to mention that, contrary to popular belief, it can be compiled.
Although, for CGI stuff, it really doesn't matter since mod_perl
only compiles perl scripts once anyway.

Besides, a PowerBasic for Linux has been "in the works" for
at least 4-5 years now. And perl is just a beautiful language.
I love it.


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[Frank Cox]

I see no reason why it shouldn't be possible to do cgi progamming with PB/DOS.

Off of the top of my head, you may want to consider the idea of either re-writing autoexec.bat as needed and then calling dosemu, or writing a semaphore of some kind to the disk, then looking for that when you call dosemu.



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PB/DOS 3.5 on Fedora Linux

[Shawn Anderson]

Frank,
your article is very interesting. I want to do CGI programming
on Linux. Is this possible with a DOS emulator?

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shawn at nbson net

[Frank Cox]

You can use PB/DOS under Linux in the meantime. I do it every day of the week. See my article here: http://theatre.sasktelwebsite.net/articles for more details.

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PB/DOS 3.5 on Fedora Linux

[Mel Bishop]

No.

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[Art Overturf]

Is there a PB-Linux yet?

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PowerBasic for Linux