recommended Linux distribution for OHRRPGCE ?

[rifter]

I'm currently using 64 bit Xubuntu 14.04 LTS and it is time for a change since it's out of date. I had been planning to go with the current Lubuntu to see if things work better for me.

Meanwhile, I was looking into OHRRPGCE and interested in checking it out. But it seems that it needs 32 bit libraries and that those are harder to get on 14.04 than I remember previous Ubuntu versions. When I started digging into it, what I was reading suggested that getting 32 bit libraries on the 16.x versions is even harder to do.

I'm planning to basically nuke this install and restart from scratch, so my options are more or less wide open. I notice a lot of people here are using Ubuntu or mint of some description. I was wondering what insights I could get into a proper platform and an install path that is more likely to meet with success in this quest to get OHRRPGCE going.

Thank you in advance for your time and patience.

[TMC]

Hi, welcome.

Sorry, we really should distribute 64 bit builds of the OHRRPGCE. Support was only added in the most recent version, so we haven't gotten around to it yet. It's not hard to set that up, but we also should add an the option in the 'Distribute Game' menu to package with 64 bit builds.

Regardless of what GNU/Linux distro you use, you'll probably want a 64 bit one, unless possibly if your computer has a low amount of memory (x86_64 executables use more memory). There are no preferred distributions for the engine, it should run the same on all, although we do distribute .deb packages. If you compile from source you can use the "scons install/uninstall" command to install system-wide, or install into a 'destdir' folder to invoke your OS's package creator (e.g. dpkg in Debian/Ubuntu, makepkg in Slackware).

I have Lubuntu on my netbook, 14.10, and it's also badly out of date and I'm considering reinstalling from scratch since Ubuntu upgrades always seemed to break things (and why do they move files around on their upgrade server, breaking software upgrades for older versions of Ubuntu?!? I think they didn't even wait a year before breaking my apt-get!) Some of the Lubuntu programs are nice -- pacman-fm is by far the fastest and most responsive filemanager I've ever used, despite the netbook being ancient and slow. On the other had I've hit some very annoying problems with LXDE, and it doesn't seem that much faster than stock Ubuntu.

[rifter]

Hi, welcome.

Sorry, we really should distribute 64 bit builds of the OHRRPGCE. Support was only added in the most recent version, so we haven't gotten around to it yet. It's not hard to set that up, but we also should add an the option in the 'Distribute Game' menu to package with 64 bit builds.

Regardless of what GNU/Linux distro you use, you'll probably want a 64 bit one, unless possibly if your computer has a low amount of memory (x86_64 executables use more memory). There are no preferred distributions for the engine, it should run the same on all, although we do distribute .deb packages. If you compile from source you can use the "scons install/uninstall" command to install system-wide, or install into a 'destdir' folder to invoke your OS's package creator (e.g. dpkg in Debian/Ubuntu, makepkg in Slackware).

I have Lubuntu on my netbook, 14.10, and it's also badly out of date and I'm considering reinstalling from scratch (why do they move files around on their upgrade server, breaking software upgrades for older versions of Ubuntu?!? I think they didn't even wait a year before breaking my apt-get!) Some of the Lubuntu programs are nice -- pacman-fm is by far the fastest and most responsive filemanager I've ever used, despite the netbook being ancient and slow. On the other had I've hit some very annoying problems with LXDE, and it doesn't seem that much faster than stock Ubuntu.

Oh, I didn't mean I was going to install a 32 bit version of linux - I'm definitely staying 64 bit - it's just that OHRRPGCE seemed to be distributed as a 32 bit application and wasn't finding libraries because I didn't have the 32 bit versions installed. It turned out that getting those installed is harder now, so I was wondering what other people are doing.

Are you saying I can just compile the source as a 64 bit target? Because that sounds like an interesting option, too. I didn't try compiling from source because I kind of assumed there was a reason it wasn't distributed that way.

[TMC]

We do have a source package download, just like everyone else. Compiling the OHRRPGCE yourself requires installing FreeBASIC, scons, and euphoria; see the wiki, it's detailed on that matter. Those are unusual requirements so most people won't want to go to the trouble of compiling. I'm not sure whether there's even a 64 bit deb of freebasic for download. (You can skip euphoria if you don't compile the script compiler, hspeak). You just need to pass "arch=64" to scons; it defaults to x86.

I've updated the nightly build scripts to also produce a 64 bit .tar.bz2 package. Producing a 64 bit .deb package won't be hard either, but I don't have time right now. You will have to wait until the script gets installed and run.

I did notice a problem though: hspeak will still get built as 32 bit, although maybe it's easier to run because it only depends on a couple things: libc, libpthreads, libdl, libm. Without it you can still use the engine aside from importing scripts. It looks like we can produce a 64 bit build of hspeak by upgrading the euphoria compiler on the build machine, so hopefully we will get that sorted in a couple days.

I'm surprised that installing a multilib debian/ubuntu is getting harder; Iif so all the more reason to have 64 bit builds.

[rifter]

I finally got my machine wiped and installed lubuntu 16.10 which is good so far. I was able to dig deeper into this problem.

What happened is that the ia32-libs package was removed. This meant I needed to hunt down the 32-bit versions of everything, which was a little tedious, but I got further than before. I will update this later with the steps I needed. At one point I included --install-recommends in my package install, which selected a bunch which weren't necessarily required. Maybe. In any case, using the script command I was able to capture everything I did in trying to install OHRRPGCE and the results.

Not every package seemed to have a 32-bit counterpart I was able to find, but I was able to achieve a state where OHRRPGCE installed with its dependencies ostensibly satisfied. I had tried to get some help through the Ubuntu support channels without getting an answer. I seem to be blocked from the forums because reasons and wasted a bunch of time trying to get that fixed. I tried in irc because of that and that didn't happen either. Lots of web searches didn't give me a satisfactory answer except that it was going to be harder now and it made me wonder if there would even be 32 bit versions of stuff. People in the #ubuntu irc channel seemed not to be able to even acknowledge my question, but that didn't overly surprise me because I tend to ask questions they cannot answer.

At this point, OHRRPGCE launches and I seem able to edit a game. I don't know if everything is going to work yet - I'm most concerned about whether the sdl packages will end up working - but at least I am not getting the dependency messages anymore. I will update with further info as things progress and as I edit the file I made for clarity.

Thanks again for all your help.

[TMC]

Ah, hello again.
SDL_mixer can be built to only load the libraries needed to play specific audio formats at run-time, and Ubuntu's copy might be built like that. So yes, until you actually test the various audio formats (ogg, midi, module (xm/it/s3m), and deprecated mp3, which is used by almost zero OHR games) it's not certain that you have all the required 32 bit libraries.

Unfortunately we hit some snags in making 64 builds available. Sorry to hear of all the trouble it's been for you!

Firstly, it turns out that the machine James is using to produce gnu/linux builds runs a 32 distro, so can't produce 64 bit builds anyway. I don't know what his plans are to fix that. Maybe I should host unofficial 64 bit builds myself for people who need them.

Secondly, it turns out there is a major problem with ohrrpgce-custom; 64 bit builds crash in certain menus. We know that this is because of use of setjmp-longjmp (a hack to implement GOSUB), and it thankfully won't be much work to get rid of the last few uses of GOSUB. ohrrpgce-game runs fine, because it doesn't use GOSUB.

Thirdly I still haven't tried building a 64 bit hspeak binary.

[Bob the Hamster]

Right now my plan is to replace the old nightly build servers with as much dang cross-compiling as I can manage to set up on my home computer.

I do want to say that I have been using the 64 bit linux builds, and getting them to compile was way easier than getting 32-bit libraries installed for a 64 bit system (which I haven't done yet for my home computer (mostly due to lack of trying))

I know that I'll be able to get Windows cross-compiling going, simply because TMC said it works, and he is always right about these things ;)

As far as I know, cross-compiling mac os x binaries is not doable just yet (?) so I may look into virtualization for that. I have read that Mac OS can be reliably run in Virtualbox, but I haven't tried that yet due to the enormous downloads involved and being too busy with other stuff

[TMC]

So you could already switch linux nightly builds to your home machine?

I actually generally don't use the 64 bit builds, just because they take longer to compile!

I still haven't looked further into crosscompiling to OSX, but am hopeful.

There are only ~15 GOSUB blocks left.

[Bob the Hamster]

So you could already switch linux nightly builds to your home machine?

I could yes, I just have to take the time to set it up.

There are only ~15 GOSUB blocks left.

~14 now! I just got rid of the one in the vehicle menu