Since Mac virtualization is technically illegal on anything but a Mac computer, is it possible to use one of the Darwin distros as a platform to test applications meant for Mac OSX?
From the little I've read, it seems *Darwin and MacOSX have a very tight relationship, but I haven't really found any information on the internet about using Darwin for MacOSX development -- So I'm a little skeptical if it is even possible.
Has anyone tried it?
Darwin does not have Aqua or any of the Core technologies, so only pure POSIX apps can be tested.
Related
Short of buying a SPARC processor, what emulators are there? Thanks.
Pickup a second hand Power Mac G5 and you can run a fairly recent version of a mainstream OS (ie. OS X 10.5.8) and a modern development environment (Xcode 3.1.4).
You get a pretty fast, modern RISC machine running an OS that is still highly used (for the time being, I admit.)
You could also install Linux onto it if that would be better for your needs.
Probably a lot easier to find and cheaper than a SPARC machine.
You could also install the SPIM emulator for MIPS
On revisiting this, it's worth noting that nearly all modern smartphones run on ARM processors, which is short for 'Acorn RISC Machine'. So, an easy answer is 'Android Studio' or anything else targeting phone applications.
Similarly, there's a plethora of simple development boards available inexpensively, such as the BeagleBone Black and the Raspberry Pi, that also carry ARM processors.
I've got a programming device called USB AVR JTAG-ISP v. 1.2.
Where can I find drivers and a good IDE for it?
For Windows, AVR Studio 4 as per the other answer.
For Linux, you want the avr-gcc and AVRDUDE packages from your OS distribution, plus your choice of C IDEs for Linux.
For OS X, you want Crosspack and Xcode.
On Linux or OS X, depending on which device you are programming, you may need to download the source for AVRDUDE and rebuild it, which will require that you also get libusb 0.1.12 (not libusb 1.x).
Try the "AVR Studio 4" on Atmel's website.
I find AVR studio to be infuriating, buggy and generally terrible.
Eclipse (available on all platforms) has wonderful end-to-end AVR integration available if you install the avr plugin, avr-gcc and avrdude.
If you're running on Ubuntu beware that it doesn't always identify the ISP right off the bat
Seems like there wouldn't be, but it would help us out if there was. I wish to pull the source down to a windows server and compile it and have it be the same as if I had pulled the source code down to a mac machine and used xcode on it. Any Ideas?
Reasons: Release Engineering and IT are much more familiar and comfortable on windows, so it would be easier on us, and LaunchD sucks.
Your original question had less detail... I think you are creating more problems than you are solving buy not using a Mac. Is it really that hard to learn to compile under Xcode or type make in the console?
Anyway...
Apple uses a modified version of the GCC C/C++/Objective C compiler with a proprietary runtime library... You could develop using a port of this code to Windows. See GNUStep.Org. This is not binary compatible though but it isn't impossible that you could rebuild it to cross compile to something that was Mac OS X compatible.
Another idea would be to develop using c# .NET and then move the binaries across to Mac OS X and run the binaries using Mono....
None of these options are robust enough to allow you to do this blind without a Macintosh to test and get up and running in the first place.
You can compile cross app with Cocotron but only on Mac
Why do you need launchd? cron works just as well on Mac as it does on Linux, just have a cronjob that does (Extremely simplified version ahead):
cd /my/source/dir
git pull # You are using Git, right?
xcodebuild MyCoolProject.xcodeproj
cp -r build/MyApp.app /the/distribution/folder
I've noticed that all betas for Dropbox are released simultaneously for Windows, Mac and Linux. How do they do that? Anyone knows which platform they're using? I'm aware that there are many native -very impressive, actually- functions in each of the platform clients, but they seem to release critical bug fixes efortlessly for all platforms.
So any idea of which GUI platform they're using?
The Linux version includes files such as wx._windows_.so, libwx_gtk2*.so, etc. (I haven't checked the others), so I suspect Dropbox uses wxWidgets.
Qt is a popular cross-platform application and GUI framework with native look-and-feel.
I don't know what Dropbox uses for all its supported platforms, but it looks like its linux client uses at least Gtk: Dropbox linux System Requirements.
I'm doing a little app that I want to distribute in different platforms, at least the 3 major ones.
Is it possible to use only Windows has the host OS to compile the binaries for Linux, Mac OS X and other supported platforms without resorting to virtual machines?
Or should I ask around in some community to help me compile on, well OS X, actually, since I can virtualize a Linux machine quite easy?
It is possible to compile from one plateform to another, it is called cross-compilation. You will find extensive informations at http://www.stack.nl/~marcov/buildfaq.pdf
The buildfaq above contains sample cross-compilation :
from Windows to Linux,
from FreeBSD to AMD64 Linux
The FPC download page contains :
the i386-win32 to x86_64-win64 cross-compiler
the i386-win32 to arm-wince cross-compiler
The FPC mailing lists are at http://www.freepascal.org/maillist.var
You will find more informations about FPC at http://www.freepascal.org/moreinfo.var
(I'm the author of the buildfaq document above)
There are some limitations. You can't target x86 from powerpc, because powerpc misses an "extended" type. But in generally it works.
I have generated a complete Lazarus for OS X on Windows.
I would virtualize Linux, as even if you can cross-compile, it means you're not testing the binaries on their native platforms. OS X is a trickier problem.
It is not possible to compile from one platform to another. We have a Mac and use FPC quite often. If you need some help with compiling on a mac, drop me a message.