How to create bootable GUI programs? - bootable

*"for Retro computing purposes only"*
Some programs are directly bootable and have a nice GUI
e.g. Acronis OS Selector and Disk Director (screenshot)
How can they run wihtout underlying OS? Can this be acheived by using a minimal Linux distribution?
goal: the program should run such that it appears independent of the os (e.g you dont have to launch it from the os cmd or desktop)
also the OS should not have increase the size of the program a bit too much
Also I wonder if Qt GUI's can run like this...

I suspect that Acronis OS Selector and Disk Director uses their own version of Windows 7.
Yes, you can produce a program that has it's own operating system. You could use a bootable Linux distribution.
Knoppix, to pick one example, is a bootable Linux distribution.

The story behind a comprehensive GUI + bootable program is somewhat like this:
Develop the program in a linux GUI toolkit
On boot, load a linux kernel (without any desktop environment)
Hand over the control to the program GUI
more info: Bootable Qt-Linux Application

Related

Bootloader Written for Java

Is there a boot loader written for booting Java virtual machine without an operating system? As far as I know Java virtual machine can run on a machine by itself, without help of an operating system.
Java defines the guest language, not the host / JVM.
You'd need a JVM written to run on bare-metal of whatever machine you want to run it on. (i.e. to be an OS kernel as well as a JVM, handling interrupts and so on). So there isn't something generic called "Java" that a bootloader could load.
The mainstream JVMs like OpenJDK / HotSpot are not written to work as kernels, only to run under some existing mainstream OSes. But as you found, there are some: Can you run JVM on a computer with no operating system?
Even for a specific platform, the things a kernel needs a bootloader to do may depend on the kernel. There are a few standards, like multiboot for x86, that define a kernel file format that bootloaders like GRUB know how to recognize and load, but otherwise you'd probably expect a bare-metal JVM to come with its own custom bootloader, especially if it's for a platform other than an x86 PC. Or perhaps be bootable as an "EFI application".

Can I currently develop, test, package and distribute Kivy, cross-platform apps on Windows 10 alone?

Can I currently, at this time, develop, test, package and distribute Kivy, cross-platform apps (targeted to run on iOS, Android, Windows, OS X and Linux) on Windows 10 alone?
I.E. WITHOUT needing a Linux or OS X machine?
I ask because Buildozer used to need to run on linux or OS X. Maybe it has improved or there's something better now?
If not, what will aspects of the process can be done on Windows 10 and to what other machines do i need access?
Thanks for the help.
Love and peace,
Joe
You can run buildozer in a virtual machine running linux, but in won't run under windows alone at the moment (or, it will, but not the android build part, which is what you need).

What are the minimum system requirements to run Kinect application's executable?

I am working on a Kinect application. I am planning on creating an executable for the application. The executable will then be installed on a "Windows Single Board Computers". Currently I am running the application on an i7 Desktop Tower with 3.4GHz and 8GB memory.
I have looked at the system requirements for Kinect SDK:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44561
I think these specs are only when developing. But what would be the specs when I am only running the executable?
I looked at this question, how to make an executable version of a WPF Kinect Application?
To revise, I am going to program the Kinect on my Desktop tower. Create an executable for the application. Then install the application on the "Windows Single Board Computers" and then connect the connect to this new board and run the application.
What specs do I need for this "Windows Single Board Computer"?
Thank you in advance.
I did a project called Virtual Dressing Room which engage some animations with Kinect data. To run only the Kinect data and play with it just needed 4gb ram with 1.9 Ghz CPU. But when it mixed with XNA animations then it required more ram like above 6GB. So it depends upon your application. If you simply play with kinect and 2D animations then 4GB ram is ok.
Since you are new to SOF I suggest if this answer can be acceptable then mark it. So you will have better responses for your future questions.

How to make an emulator for Windows CE operating system targeting specific hardware

I think this is a common problem for all developers using Windows CE 6.0 operating systems on specific hardware. I have a client that needs a custom operating system for its ICOP PDX-089T PC with Touch panel, that is based on DM&P SoC CPU Vortex86DX-1GHz.
I do not have the hardware with me, so every time I make a change I have to send at least the NK.bin file, or the whole ghost image to the client to make the tests for.
Is there any way to build a custom Windows CE emulator to add it to Visual Studio 2005 for testing or may be a custom virtual machine to launch it through VMWare or Virtual PC?
I tried some guidelines from the internet to build one, but every effort in making one resulted in hanging up my PC.
Does anybody have similar needs and some solution?
Note: The emulator I need is for Vortex86DX processor and ICOP board.
Microsoft abandoned the x86 Emulator some time ago, choosing to support only an ARM emulator (the BSP ships in the box with Platform Builder 6.0). This means that you can't create an emulator for the x86 processor, though I'm hard-pressed to think of a scenario where you'd really need to and where just getting hardware isn't a better solution for anyway.
There is a BSP for doing Virtual PC OS builds that would run on x86. It's not had much activity in some time, and I've never tried it, so YMMV.

Best setup for Linux development from Windows? [closed]

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What's the best setup for developing Linux apps from a Windows workstation? Right now I'm connected via SSH to our Linux development server and am using Eclipse, forwarded over SSH via PuTTY, to the public domain version of Xming running on my Windows workstation. It works, but it's not great; Eclipse's response times are far from snappy (noticeably worse than Eclipse running natively on my much slower Windows workstation), I can't resize some dialog boxes, and I haven't figured out a good way to reconfigure my fonts.
Is there a better setup available?
Edit: This is for C/C++ development.
Options for Linux on Windows:
Tools Only
Given you're using Eclipse I'm going to assume you want a full IDE, but if you can get by with just the GNU/Linux tools, there are a few choices.
cygwin gives you a bash shell with lots of tools, including an X11 server. This has been around awhile and is mature.
msys is a smaller, lightweight alternative to cygwin.
GNU utilities for Win32 is another lightweight alternative. These are native versions of the tools, as opposed to cygwin which requires a cygwin DLL to fake out its tools into thinking they are running on Linux.
Linux in a Windows Process
There are several packages that will run Linux as a Windows process, without simulating an entire PC as virtualization does. They use Cooperative Linux, a.k.a. coLinux, which is limited to 32-bit systems. These don't have the overhead of virtualizing, and they start up faster since you're not booting a virtual PC. This is a little more on the experimental side and may not be as stable as some of the virtualization options.
Portable Ubuntu
andLinux
Virtualization
Virtualization software lets you boot up another OS in a virtual PC, one that shares hardware with the host OS. This is pretty tried-and-true. There are nice options here for taking snapshots of your Virtual PC in a particular state, suspend/resume a virtual PC, etc. It's nice to be able to experiment with a virtual PC, add a few packages, then revert to a previous snapshot and "start clean".
VMWare
VirtualBox
VirtualPC
In my case...
Sounds like your environment has different performance characteristics, but here's my situation: I started out with Eclipse on my Windows laptop (doing Rails development), found this sluggish, and switched to using putty to ssh into a fast Linux box. I do my editing via an emacs running on the Linux server, displayed on Windows using Xming. Or I use native emacs on Windows, editing the files shared via NFS. The latter is slower in my environment due to sluggish saves.
When working from home, I ditch X because it is too slow with remote clients, and just run emacs -nw within a putty window. I then use GNU screen so that I have multiple "windows", and so that I can easily resume where I left off if my network connection flakes out.
The best approach that I've found is to:
keep your code portable
develop natively on your desktop
verify any OS dependencies (minimize these as much as possible)
deploy to your target regularly, test & debug there
I know that this isn't a direct answer, but using an IDE for development through X is painful with most of the free tools. The only way that I've been productive doing work this way was when I was running a UNIX-like on my desktop so X was native. If you are going to use this approach, try a commercial X solution on the desktop.
Other than that, consider ditching the IDE and doing your development and debugging via SSH, a terminal editor (e.g., vi, pico, ee, emacs), make/ant, and gdb.
The best approach for you is going to be driven by your programming language and the type of application you're developing. If you are doing GUI applications, then using X might be the only approach that is acceptable. If you are doing back-office/daemon development, then the SSH and terminal approach will probably work though you probably want to get really comfortable with either vi or emacs.
EDIT: just noticed that you are doing C/C++ development. Consider using a cross platform framework if you aren't already. Using something like Qt, APR, ACE, or Poco should make it possible to natively develop under Windows with a deploy/debug step to your Linux environment.
For development I usually use a Linux virtual machine on my Windows box. It will probably send Linux users running to the bathroom to wash their hands, but I do all of my development in Visual Studio, and I have a custom Visual Studio plugin that invokes G++ through the virtual machine and pipes the output into the VS output window. With a quick change of a Combo box I can build and test for Windows or Linux.
An easy to setup option would be to run Eclipse natively in windows but deploy the code via a Samba share on the Linux machine (which you can mount as another drive) (or SSH/SCP if SMB is not an option) and then run it there via SSH console.
Another easy to setup option is to simply develop on Linux via freenx or a similar tool instead of a full blown X session, check this answer: https://serverfault.com/questions/11367/remote-desktopping-from-windows-to-linux/11372#11372
The other options (Virtualization, Linux running inside windows, Cygwin) are indeed valid but have their drawbacks, like being more machine demanding, harder to setup, or not equivalent enough to the actual linux environment, but may very well be worth your while if you have the machine and the scenario justifies their use.
Doing everything on the Linux side will always have some drawbacks
if your machine is Windows.
I personally have a Linux box where everybody else has Windows and
do Windows dev inside a VM, but it has costed me a lot of RAM and some network setup pains.
I find coLinux tremendously helpful when developing on Windows for Linux, it's basically a linux system running in parallel to your Windows OS (i.e. as a service) and can be configured to simply show up on your LAN, basically like a virtual machine does. Also, it's much more full featured than CygWin, and its performance is really remarkable - I can easily run non-trivial stuff under coLinux, and still run simulators at 90+ fps.
Also, coLinux can be easily set up to run X11 and window managers like gnome/KDE, so that you can for example use something like vnc to access your linux desktop.
Cooperative Linux is the first working free and open source method for optimally running Linux on Microsoft Windows natively. More generally, Cooperative Linux (short-named coLinux) is a port of the Linux kernel that allows it to run cooperatively alongside another operating system on a single machine
. For instance, it allows one to freely run Linux on Windows 2000/XP, without using a commercial PC virtualization software
such as VMware, in a way which is much more optimal than using any general purpose PC virtualization software.
(source: colinux.org)
There are multiple solutions, I'd recommend No. 1
A VM (Virtual Machine) running a flavor of linux as a guest operating system inside Windows. Start with VirtualBox which is free.
To make managing it easier you can use a tool like Vagrant. Vagrant is a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow. With an easy-to-use workflow and focus on automation, Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, increases production parity. So you code in your Windows PC and compile/run the application on a Linux system using Vagrant. Vagrant is free! Similar tool: Docker can be used too. For this setup you can use any IDE, I'd recommend VSCode its quite handy for C/C++ with intellisense but Eclipse should work too.
Web based tool like Nitrous.io which is discontinued, but you can host your own open-source version of the Nitrous IDE called Nitrous Solo which lets you host your own instance of the Nitrous IDE on your preferred cloud provider.
Windows 10 provides provides Windows Subsystem for Linux, try using that to compile and run your project. This requires a 64-bit version of Windows 10 Anniversary Update or later (build 1607+).
Cygwin / MinGW are popular bash tools for Windows, they might be able to compile and/or run your application.
Cygwin might be helpful.
I've done what you want to do for exactly the same reason: full control over the output (you're having font issues with your current solution) and much slower Windows machine than the remote Linux development box.
Most answers are bogus: having a "Linux development environment" is not just "having an IDE". It's about having the whole Un*x power at your fingertips.
Is it a local or remote Linux server? bandwith issues? Because on a LAN, even an old 100 MBit/s LAN, FreeNX flies. How's the load on that Linux server?
Setup the free FreeNX on the Linux system, install the free FreeNX client on the Windows machine and bingo, you've got your Linux development environment at your fingertips.
FreeNX is much more efficient than VNC, it's night day (VNC is actually pretty bad perfs wise, even compare to Windows's Remote Desktop... But FreeNX flies).
Regarding speed, a long time ago, I set up my main Linux workstation (it was a Pentium 4 / 2GB of memory back in the days) on which I was developing full-time using IntelliJ IDEA (another IDE), to serve a full X session (complete with a window manager etc.) that another developer was displaying remotely to... run another IntelliJ instance (and access all the Un*x niceties). It was on a LAN 100 Mbit/s and it was as if the app was local for the other developer.
Anyway, on today's hardware I cannot imagine how this could not work: I now have here a Core 2 Duo / 4GB of ram as my main desktop and a Gigabit LAN.
Such a setup was working perfectly 4 years ago, it would work perfectly today.
Now if you tell me you have bandwith issues or that the Linux machine you've got your account on is under heavy load or that it's not on the LAN, then things may be different...
How the younger developers who want a powerful Un*x system do it at the company I'm consulting for nowadays (that only has Windows desktops)? Most of them bring their shiny MacBook Pro and use that to develop ;)
I'm using xming as well and suffer from the same problems with Eclipse. Apparently, neither switching to cygwin makes it fast enough. Eventually I switched to developing in vim via xming. It doesn't take as much time as I feared to get used to all the key combinations, and the performance is absolutely smooth. Actually, now sometimes I use vim even when working natively.
Either a Virtual Machine with a Linux-based dev environment, or a local copy of some toolchain-agnostic IDE (e.g. Notepad++, with testing done via MinGW or CygWin as far as you can), or just write in Notepad++ and keep uploading to your dev machine and testing there, which is what I do.
You might try other X servers on Windows such as xwin32 and hummingbird. Note that these are commercial implementations.
Another solution is to install a VM server on your Windows box and install Linux on the VM. Options include VMware (non-free) and Microsoft Virtual PC (free download). VMware is much nicer than VirtualPC (64-bit support, more incentive to support Linux client OSes, etc.).
EDIT: In the last 13 years since this post was originally made, Cygwin/X (and Xming) has gotten a lot better. It's worth trying again. I now use it for my everyday work again.
You could take a look at setting up a svn server on the linux box and then using something like TeamCity todo a build on commit. You could write your code locally and do a commit when you want it to be compiled.
I don't know if there's a more modern route, but the standard way in my time was to run X Windows in Microsoft Windows, that way you can run any number of applications on your Ubuntu machine and control them and display them in Microsoft Windows
Check Check out.
You could try using any of the linux distros for windows, even windows-store have ubuntu, SUSE etc for windows and this could help reduce your coding efforts. This linux distros contain linux shell, kernel etc so you won't be needing linux system everytime debugging or testing your code.
You could also use Visual Studio Code which is far better and fast compared to eclipse and is even supported in linux and mac.
Check this for ubuntu distro on windows store.
Linux distros can also be downloaded from other sources but microsoft urges to use the one from Windows-Store.
Use Linux! I usually have the other problem: developing win under linux.
There is no reason for not doing so: I have win running on a virtual box now almost all the time.
Linux comes with a lot of development tools.
The problem is:
is it a graphical interface?
If no you will have no problems as soon as your code STD/portable.
(X allows you simple stuff too but for an nice application today you need a bit more.)
If Yes then you will have a lot of problems when you actually port the code
on the running platform.
Is it supposed to be portable/exchangeable between linux and windows?
if not, just develop on the native OS. Way less pain. You have Eclipse for both
platforms. Even if you think to port the code on a later stage,
just do the work for one first.
I developed a couple of graphical application under linux which are actually right now
used only under windows. My recipe is: GTK/GNOME. I made it running with cygwin and mingw.
But I guess that Qt has the same usable environment too.
My code went on win with no changes!
[ok.. a couple of touching on file paths... but was a bug..]
There is no way to develop under win and hope to be running on linux unless you are sure
not to use any win libs. That is: in a graphical application almost no chance. Or a lot of
checking... Or you will not be using any win facility. Forget Visual Studio.
Check indeed wine and the winehq pages.
Unless the problem is another, like: using team sharing facilities, or svn or whatever.
Which is not a code development problem but a bit more on the organizational side.
Bottom line:
It is way easier to port a free code on win then a proprietary code on the free market.