Hi,

After reading a post about another FPC developers trying to get a development system up and running under Solaris 10, I got curious. I downloaded OpenSolaris 2010.03 (dev 134). Installation was painless inside VirtualBox. Downloaded FPC's 2.4.4 release for Solaris. Installation was the easiest ever using that extra install script! [Yes even easier than under Linux or Windows] :)

I then went ahead and installed git and GNU binutils packages, so I can get some source code and so that FPC can link executables. Again nothing difficult there. I pulled source code for fpGUI from the repository, and fired off the build.sh script. One minor compiler error that I quickly fixed. Reran the build script. Oh yeah!!! 2nd compile and it worked perfectly! :-D

I went ahead and compiled a few more apps: The UIDesigner (fpGUI's visual form designer), fpgIDE (an example project resembling and IDE) and a few other example projects. They all worked without a hitch!

Here are some screenshots.

http://opensoft.homeip.net:8080/~graemeg/fpgui_on_solaris-1.png http://opensoft.homeip.net:8080/~graemeg/fpgui_on_solaris-2.png

or if your ISP or company blocks DynDns domains...

http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=182330

That means fpGUI Toolkit now runs under the following platforms:
- Linux
- FreeBSD
- DesktopBSD
- OpenSolaris
- Embedded Linux
- Windows
- Windows CE.
- Mac OSX 10.6.x (via the built-in X11 support)

Kudos to the Free Pascal Compiler team for doing a great job once again. FPC rocks!

Regards,
- Graeme -

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

Here are some screenshots. http://opensoft.homeip.net:8080/~graemeg/fpgui_on_solaris-1.png http://opensoft.homeip.net:8080/~graemeg/fpgui_on_solaris-2.png

It seems there is a first MSEide clone in the works. ;-)

Martin

Martin Schreiber wrote

It seems there is a first MSEide clone in the works. ;-)

What can I say, you have some really good ideas. :-)

Reality is that I doubt it will ever become a full blown IDE - I just don't have the time for that. My goal with it at this time is simply to create a bigger "real-world" application to demo some more advanced features of fpGUI, and serve as a playground for some other programming ideas of mine. At the moment I'm using it to help develop the TfpgTextEdit component. I've never written an editor with syntax highlighting before, it's a nice challenge. Also, all my day-time work is proprietary and closed-source, so I can't share any of those.

PS:
I'm using MSEide more and more. Probably 60% of my development work is now done using MSEide. I really like the fact that it compiles so easily, is extremely fast, code template implementation is brilliant, and your Project Options dialog is very well thought out. MSEide is a refreshing change from the Delphi-like IDE's.

Well done and thanks for testing. If you have any thoughts please could you append them to the wiki page
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Lazarus_on_Solaris since this also deals with FPC as a prerequisite.

Hi Mark,

Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote

Well done and thanks for testing. If you have any thoughts please could you append them to the wiki page

I'll take a quick read through that wiki page and see if there is anything I can add. The compiling and running of fpGUI based apps has a *much smaller* library requirement than doing the same with Lazarus based apps. As I mentioned, OpenSolaris came standard with everything I needed to compile and run fpGUI apps - the only exception was the one package, gnu-binutils, required by FPC for linking purposes.

I guess we can chalk this one up as one of the benefits of using a "light weight" toolkit [referring to library dependencies, not necessarily features].

If I have some time today, I'll try and compile MSEide on OpenSolaris (seeing that fpGUI doesn't have its own IDE). It would be interesting to see how portable MSEgui is in this regard. I know MSEide has some minor limitation even on 64-bit Linux platforms [MSEgui officially only supports 32-bit platforms], but that was easy enough to work around.

@Martin Schreiber
Just curious. Have you tried to compile MSEide on platforms other than Linux or Windows?

No.

Martin

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

At the moment I'm using it to help develop the TfpgTextEdit component. I've never written an editor with syntax highlighting before, it's a nice challenge.

It is rather a nightmare if you ask me...

Martin

I just tried under OpenSolaris. There was some compiler errors. Basically some {IFDEF Linux} I had to change to {IFDEF unix} when appropriate. It then managed to compile MSEide, but the linking failed due to the usage of iconv. I then tried to manually install GNU libiconv but that didn't work either. Lots of 'undefined symbol' errors. I tried to remove code referencing iconv or cwstring units, but that did not solve anything, just brought on more problems. That's when I called it a day. Back to work I go. :)

Martin Schreiber wrote

> the TfpgTextEdit component. I've never written an editor with syntax > highlighting before, it's a nice challenge. It is rather a nightmare if you ask me...

Definitely. There are so many things one takes for granted in a programming editor. A lot more work than I expected. [then again, what isn't]

Also, disabling the syntax highlighting gives my editor component decent performance. Add it back in, and my editor comes to a crawl! :-( I'm trying to use regex [another think I'm trying to learn] for the syntax highlighting, so I could maybe import gEdit or Midnight Commander's syntax definitions. But I still have lots of work ahead.

In our previous episode, Graeme Geldenhuys said:

Hehe, Martin Friebe talked a bit about the Laz. editor the last devel meeting (and the one before).

Definitely a place where I don't want to go :-)

Don't forget to avoid artificial limits on length and width :-)

Good job!

Kudos to the Free Pascal Compiler team for doing a great job once again. FPC rocks!

+1

Marcos Douglas

Mselibc.pas contains linux system constants and structures which are quite different for solaris (ioctrl, error, locale, pthread, ...). So even when it links it won't run very far.

Ludo