(via pop-forum) Poplog-on-andLinux Works on Windows 7!
Aaron Sloman
Last October, Christopher Martin (in Australia) sent me a first
draft guide for installation of Poplog-on-andLinux.
After a little editing I placed his guide here
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/winpop/andl
I have no idea whether anyone has actually used it -- until I did,
last night.
I recently acquired a laptop (Dell Latitude E6410) with a lot of
memory and a lot of space on its hard drive (mostly for use with
linux), so I thought I woud try the installation guide, not because
I'll need to run windows, but because it may be useful to
demonstrate to others, e.g. school teachers considering new ways of
teaching computing.
I am very inexpert at using windows, and I really really hate the
user interface on Windows, especially as it offers so few options
for tailoring to do what I want, e.g. typing into a partly covered
window without causing it to be foregrounded, allowing me to push
part of a window past the top of the screen, use of multiple virtual
desktops, swapping keys to reduce risk of RSI (e.g. CTRL and
CapsLock, ESC and grave) etc. etc. (though I eventually found a tool
for that, not provided by microsoft).
[I don't know whether the lack of such options in Microsoft products
is due to arrogance ("We know what's best for you") or incompetence
("We don't know how to make it work differently"). I find it quite
amazing that after all these years of work on their user interface,
proper support for user preferences has not been provided, or if it
has been provided is made very hard to find by using the obvious
search processes.]
I was also slightly hampered by being very familiar with Fedora
(e.g. using yum, and yumex, whereas andLinux provides Ubuntu, using
apt-get and synaptic). But that was less of a problem.
The combination of all the above made me very slow: and I kept
getting confused or making typing errors. Eventually, however, after
3 or 4 I hours managed to get it all installed.
A windows expert with a high bandwith internet connection could
probably have done it all in about 20 minutes.
Amazingly it all works, and I now have a desktop icon to launch
Xming to provide a local X11 service and another to launch Andlinux
which opens an xterm login window hosted by Xming. Graphical
commands, given in that window, e.g. running XVed, using rc_graphic,
are also handled by Xming (preferably set up in multi window mode).
Following Christopher's instructions I was able
(a) to get Windows to fetch and install Xming and its fonts
(b) to get Windows to fetch and install andLinux
(c) to set up a directory shared between Windows and andLinux
for transferring or sharing files
(d) use apt-get to get the extras for unbuntu required by Poplog
(for which it should be easy to produce a script instead of
a list of commands).
(d) fetch the script to install linux poplog, then run it, so
that it downloaded the tar file and fetched and ran the
installation scripts and put poplog in /usr/local/poplog
with appropriate links from
/usr/local/bin and /usr/local/man/man1
To my amazement, everything just worked, including XVed and all the
keyboard functions, except for sound: the version of Eliza that
pipes its output through espeak does not work. But that's because
espeak, which is not really part of Poplog, does not yet work. I
probably missed a step in setting up sound.
I tried a subset of the examples given here
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/examples
without any problems, though some of the demos are a bit slower than
running under linux on the same machine. Nevertheless I had to use
slow settings for some of them, because otherwise they ran too fast.
I have not yet tried David Young's popvision libraries, and I have
not yet installed the linux Blas and Lapack linear algebra libraries
so that I can test his interface to them.
A minor annoyance is that although I requested Xming to provide a
'clipboard' shared between linux and windows it has so far not
proved possible to select text in a linux (e.g. XVed) display and
paste it into a windows program, though copy and paste in the other
direction seems to work. (Not sure.)
What next:
I suspect it should be possible for a windows expert to produce a
script to do all the installation required for steps (a) to (c), and
it would be trivial to produce a linux shell script to do (d) and
(c) once andLinux and Xming are working. I should probably do the
latter anyway for ubuntu users.
I think there are minor font problems that need to be sorted out, by
ensuring that some legacy fixed width fonts are installed.
This was all done using 32 bit windows 7, and 32 bit poplog. it
would be interesting to know whether the 64 bit versions can also be
made to work. But I run only 32 bit linux and windows because 64 bit
versions would have no advantages for me, and would have some
disadvantages (more space required to handle 64 bit pointers).
One temporary benefit for me of running poplog on windows like this
is that when giving talks I often use PDF slides and demonstrations
running on pop-11, including graphics. But the linux drivers for the
windows graphic card on the E6410 don't yet support an external
monitor or projector (the machine just crashes). So until that is
fixed I can give presentations using acroread and pop11 running in
andLinux.
===
If anyone else tries running linux poplog this way, I'll be very
grateful for a report on how it turns out.
Unfortunately I still have not installed Waldek's proposed fix for
Poplog Lisp, which I had forgotten to do.
Aaron