John Marshall writes: > I am surprised. How were you searching? I regularly search for > "prc-tools" with Google, and my page and the Sourceforge pages hosting > current prc-tools development are generally somewhere in the top > five. Both my page and the palmos.com page that you say you read point > directly to the Sourceforge pages.
I wish I'd recorded that at the time. I started from Palm's page and followed links from there, and when the trail dried up I started doing google searches for phrases like "palm development linux". I did not find prc-tools.sourceforge.net (and in fact didn't know that the project was still active). I also found a prc-tools newsgroup, where I read postings from a lot of Windows developers and a few frustrated linux would-be developers who weren't getting any farther than I was. > > and didn't address the fact that the PRC-tools > > distribution and the SDK versions don't work together, > > Perhaps you could explain what you mean by this. The 3.5 SDK and > especially the 4.0 SDK work perfectly out of the box with current > versions of prc-tools on Linux. Indeed they do, with your current version (which I just downloaded). They didn't with several of the earlier versions I tried (2.0.1 was one version I couldn't get to work; the rest I must have deleted). > You are correct that the pages at http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/tools/gcc/ > have been mostly trash ever since they were rewritten back in July. > Those pages relate to prc-tools 2.0, which is quite out of date. Perhaps That's part of the frustration; I expect most of us start there, and after spending a few hours following instructions and getting total failure and a lot of bogus files in /opt/palmdev, the frustration level may lead to things like not deleting an old version before installing a new one, or other errors that might make an otherwise working setup fail. > [Re Palm's GCC pages at www.palmos.com] > | They don't work, do they? What is Palm thinking? I have no idea. > > Perhaps it would be useful if you sent your comments on this page direct > to Palm. You'd think, but I contacted a friend who works there hoping to find out where to send something like that, and he basically told me that no one there has any interest in linux developers; he forwarded my comments anyway, but never heard back. > | Even more confusingly, when you obligingly download one of those two > | SDKs (no matter which one), you'll find that none of the prctools sample > | apps will compile > > *Which* prc-tools sample apps? For example, the multiapp sample which > comes with current prc-tools compiles with *any* SDK. SDK4 (as default SDK), latest prc-tools, latest prc-tools-samples: errorcodes: seems to hang forever running an echo | sed | perl command at the beginning of the process. multiapp: multiapp.c:11: NewTypes.h: No such file or directory gausstest, gdppanel, syslib: all compile without problems. The samples I had from my previous install were gdbpanel, multiapp, pilrctst, and tutorial. They all apparently depended on SDK2 and gave errors wanting System/SysAll.h, UI/UIAll.h, and Common.h. I eventually (after I finally got my own app working) hacked pilrctst to make it work with SDK4, and it's a terrific demo -- really does a great job of showing a newbie how to use pilrc. I'm sorry it's dropped off the list (maybe one of the new demos fulfills the same purpose?) > | The samples that come with the SDK, of course, don't > | compile because they're set up for CodeWarrior or something and don't even > | have Makefiles. > > Several of them (not enough, to be sure) have makefiles and compile with > prc-tools and pilrc. Really? Which ones? I get no match on ls */*akefile* in the Examples directory from sdk40-examples.tar.gz > This is simply not true. The older SDKs (1, 2, 3.1 -- 3.0 ought to be > in the list too, and that's on my to do list) were retropatched for GCC > and are available for Unix from > > http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/tools/gcc/#sdk > > These old SDKs *didn't contain any libraries*. Really? My bad. It never occurred to me that they would work without libraries. Okay, if I extract the old sdks into /opt/palmdev then try to compile those old prc-tools samples that wanted sdk2, multiapp now compiles, but: gdbpanel: gdbpanel.rcp:14: error : expecting: Version Text, got 1 pilrctst: pilrctst.rcp:283: error : expecting: Version Text, got 1 tutorial: tex2hex.c:13: Common.h: No such file or directory tex2hex.c:14: System/SysAll.h: No such file or directory tex2hex.c:15: UI/UIAll.h: No such file or directory tutorial uses the default sdk. But if I add CFLAGS=-palmos2 and add CFLAGS to the two m68k-palmos-gcc lines, it fails later with other errors. So getting an older sdk wouldn't have helped much; I'd also have needed an older pilrc, and something more for tutorial. > | They don't come with instructions on how to install them (of course). 4.0 > | comes in a tarball which, when extracted, gives you a few useless > | directories plus an RPM. > > I think you'll find that the obscurely named README file in one of those > useless directories contains installation instructions. Of course, it's Of course I read the README (now you're being snide). But there were other issues. For instance, I had sdk40.tar.gz (a tar file that extracts various files including an RPM which installs the sdk files) and sdk40-core.tar.gz (a tar file which extracts files into Palm\ OS\ Support/Incs/ and Palm\ OS\ Support/GCC\ Libraries which then have to be copied into /opt/palmdev/sdk*/{include,lib} I was under the impression (perhaps mistaken) that the tarball was a later addition which contained a fix for a floating point bug in the RPM (Palm's page wasn't entirely clear), so it seemed I was supposed to install the RPM then copy/rename the files from the tarball (at least the libraries) on top of the RPM files. > | I've tried quite a few versions of POSE and xpilot, with a ROM I > | uploaded from my IIIxe using pi-getrom from the excellent pilot-link > | tools, and haven't found anything that even comes close to working. > > Perhaps you could say something about what goes wrong. Most of us here > are having no problems with current versions of Poser. Inspired by another thread on this list earlier this week, I downlaoded the latest POSE source a few days ago, and indeed it does work, though it seems to have problems with some MathLib calls. What I was getting with earlier versions was that it complained about not finding a skin (even after I downloaded the skins directory) and couldn't get past that. I've also tried a few versions of xcopilot (is that a predecessor or successor, or a competing program?) -- it brings up a window that looks like a Palm but won't let me load my ROM. > Is there a reason why http://prc-tools.sourceforge.net/ isn't on this > list? Because I didn't know about it. If I had, I might have gotten this working much earlier. > Thank you for your web page. However, in general I wish that instead of > writing dozens of howtos and complex install instructions and tucking them > away in odd corners of the web, people would contact the maintainers and > tell them what problems they have been having and maybe even help *improve* > the installation procedures so that we wouldn't need so many howtos in the > first place. Yes! I agree 100%. I've listed here a few problems I have even with the current source (the examples, not prc-tools itself; I downloaded and installed the RPM and it works just fine with SDK40 once I made the /opt/palmdev/sdk symlink). Beginning Palm developers could still use a HOWTO. I will revise mine and point to the sourceforge page. You are welcome to use it, revise it as you see fit, perhaps use it to fill out the sourceforge page in place of "there's not much here right now". ...Akkana _______________________________________________ Pilot-unix mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hcirisc.cs.binghamton.edu/mailman/listinfo/pilot-unix
