[Coco] Drivewire & Linux

[gene heskett]

On Wednesday, April 18, 2012 10:38:24 PM Aaron Wolfe did opine:


> On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 9:00 PM, gene heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:

> > On Wednesday, April 18, 2012 08:58:30 PM Bill did opine:

> >>  I saw that DriveWire was compatible with Linux, but I don't see the

> >> software for Linux anywhere. Did I miss it?

> > 

> > One of the advantages of a .jar file.  It runs on ANY* java-1.5 or

> > newer JRE.  IOW, no special linux version, and it works fine here on

> > a PCLOS-2012 box.

> 

> * Well.. almost :)  Before somebody throws it on their old

> SPARCstation, OS/2 machine or S/390..

> 

> While the server certainly can run on all of those platforms, I used a

> jni based serial library called RXTX in DW.

> This means we use a shim of native code to communicate with the serial

> hardware, defeating a bit of Java's run anywhere style but giving us

> nice serial capabilities.

> 

> RXTX has builds for about 30 architectures and you can build it from

> source pretty easy on most anything *nixish,

> however only a select set of native drivers are included in the jar.

> 

> If you are using one of:  Win 32 or 64, Linux 32 or 64, OSX 32 or 64,

> or FreeBSD 32 or 64 then it will (should at least) detect this, pick

> the corresponding native serial driver from the built in set and all

> is well.

> 

It was easy here, but IIRC I did have to build it.  AIR it wasn't that big 
or long a deal.

Thanks for the correction.

> If you are using anything else, you will have to acquire RXTX on your

> own, which may be easy or not easy.

> 

> Even if you get the server running on an "exotic" platform, the GUI

> has its own set of challenges due to my use of the SWT graphics

> library.  I could have used swing and made it work everywhere, but

> swing is ugly and I just don't like it.   So.. for the GUI to work you

> must be using one Win/Lin/OSX * 32 or 64 (sorry no freebsd for the

> UI).

> 

> Adding a new GUI platform requires building DW4 from the java source.

> Each platform I pack into the default jar adds 2-4MB to the total jar

> size so I only put in the above set.  Honestly I would probably just

> stick to them when you need a GUI, as the GUI doesn't need to run on

> the same machine as the server at all.

> 

> The craziest platforms I've made work so far are a little Nokia N800

> tablet and a linksys router/nas box running the server.  In both cases

> I just ran the GUI on my windoze box.   I think these new raspberry pi

> and other very cheap very tiny linux sbcs are prime candidates for

> packing the DW server into a rompak, just haven't got my hands on one

> yet.

> 

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Cheers, Gene
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