Re: Updated ScarletDME installer - Manjaro

[Donald Montaine]

The installer package works on Manjaro Linux (an Arch based distro) as well.  Run  "sudo pacman -S base-devel" before running the installer. One  difference from the Debian and Redhat based distros is that after running the installer you will need to reboot to make sure group memberships are updated.  Just logging out and back in doesn't work.

On Monday, November 6, 2023 at 1:59:46 PM UTC-8 Donald Montaine wrote:

Allow me to apologize.  I have made several changes and improvements.  I have tested the installer on Debian 12 and Fedora 38 and it works fine.  So any recent Debian or Fedora based distro should work for installing ScarletDME.

I simplified the installer a bit, fixed one error that I found and added help text.  Please ignore the installer links in the previous thread (One Step Scarlet DME installer) as they no longer work.

I am going to move this to github at some point.  This will be the last link that I post to pcloud.

https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZJJMcVZ8rBc0ckVQeVcbpxnUlLIUX8y5YpX

[Nivethan T]

Sweet!

Much easier to inspect now.

Do you mind pull requests? I'd like to add in the checks or you can add them in based on:

https://github.com/Krowemoh/ScarletDME/blob/master/utils/install.sh

I currently check to see if the qmusers group and the qmsys user exist, I also check to see if systemd is available and which version of adduser/useradd is available. These mods make it so I can install scarletdme in Alpine linux. I'd be happy to add them to the install script.

In an ideal world we'd get rid of the make and the building directly and ship the straight binaries and the qmsys account. This way someone can install everything without have to set up the build environment.

On Wednesday, November 8, 2023 at 3:16:16 AM UTC-5 Donald Montaine wrote:

The project is now available on my personal gitlab server at:

https://gitlab.bigriverguy.com/don/scarletdme64_installer

[Donald Montaine]

I have decided to put this project on github.  I will be deactivating my personal server in a few days.

To access the files on github, go to: https://github.com/dmontaine/ScarletDME64_Installer

On Wednesday, November 8, 2023 at 7:52:18 AM UTC-8 Donald Montaine wrote:

Pull requests are fine.  You can register as a user on my gitlab server.

I  agree it would be nice to have an installer like commercial qm.  However, I didn't want to create a fork, that is why I just zipped the geneb dev branch as that is where the occasional work on the 64 bit version is done.  I did make three changes to the code.  I changed the Makefile  by removing unneeded sections that are now handled by the bash installer, and I added LOGIN and FIRST.COMPILE items to QMSYS, VOC.  These changes were made prior to creating the sdme.zip file.  They are not included in the geneb/dev github repository.  

I want to increase awareness of the 64 bit version by making the installation simpler and hopefully get more people involved in improving it.  For anyone interested, current development work can be found on github at https://github.com/geneb/ScarletDME in the dev branch.  The current contributors to the project on github have very little time to contribute because of Real Life.  So, getting new people invested in developing ScarletDME further would be a real plus.  

My interest is peripheral as I am retired and, as a hobby, am working to create a simpler version of ScarletDME by removing some parts and making some changes to the BASIC code - so my development time will be on a fork, not part of core development.  To do that I needed a reliable installer for the core system so that I can easily install and uninstall for testing.  However, I am not a C developer (as I absolutely hate C with a passion), so I am depending on the core system for the C components.

 Some documentation is available at https://www.rushflat.co.nz/downloads.php.

[Nivethan T]

Hi Donald,

Why does FIRST.COMPILE exist?

[Donald Montaine]

Because, after installation, everything in GPL.BP needs to be recompiled and it needs to be recompiled in a particular order with the -internal flag.  

The script runs that VOC item with the line  sudo bin/qm -internal FIRST.COMPILE.

The VOC paragraph is:

0001: PA
0002: BASIC GPL.BP CPROC LOGIN BASIC BCOMP PTERM CATALOG
0003: BASIC GPL.BP *

To make sure that the pcode file, which contains compiled Basic pcode concatinated into a single file and the gcat directory which contains Basic pcode in a bunch of separate files are in sync with the c code.  While I am not sure, I believe that the pcode file is loaded into memory when qm is started and the pcode in gcat is loaded as required.  This process hopefully assures that the Basic compiler, which contains Basic and C parts working together will all be current.  It also means that if someone wants to fiddle with the code in GPL.BP, they can run this paragraph afterwards to make sure that everything is recompiled in the proper order.  To do this they would have to run qm with the -internal switch and be in the QMSYS account.

[Donald Montaine]

I should have said, after the c code is compiled, the Basic code in GPL.BP needs to be compiled in a particular order during the installation process.

[Donald Montaine]

It seems to work, but no one has had time to really QA the system to make sure that it is as robust as the 32 bit system.  What is needed is someone who has time to really explore the 64 bit c code to make sure that everything that works well when compiled 32 bit still works as well with the 64 bit changes.  The reason I made the simpler 64 bit installer was so that people could easily kick the tires and, hopefully, provide help in making the system robust enough for production work. The system is Beta quality at this point and really should not be depended upon for production use without really testing that it is giving expected and correct results.  But to test (and make some development progress), we needed a system that can be installed and uninstalled quickly and easily.

On Wednesday, November 8, 2023 at 4:13:32 PM UTC-8 Nivethan T wrote:

[Nivethan T]

I've been developing without doing that and things seem to work. Does the recompilation need to happen? I may be shooting myself in the foot by not doing that step when I test changes.

The other half of kicking the tires is having a big enough system to run in both. Unfortunately I'm using only the 64bit version so I don't have anything to compare to. Most of the programs that I've written all work fine under scarletdme.

[Nivethan T]

Ah, found the issue in the github issues list:

https://github.com/geneb/ScarletDME/issues/60

I'll need to add a full re-comp to my repo.

Thanks!

[Donald Montaine]

I made a change to the installsdme.sh script that was recently patched.  The user and group add commands needed to be prefaced with 'sudo'.
Please re-download if you downloaded today (20231109) within the last 4 hours of this message.

[Wols Lists]

On 09/11/2023 19:08, Donald Montaine wrote:
> I made a change to the installsdme.sh script that was recently patched.
> The user and group add commands needed to be prefaced with 'sudo'.
> Please re-download if you downloaded today (20231109) within the last 4
> hours of this message.

Note that that won't work on my system ...

The makefile wouldn't run because it crashed with

Command not found: sudo

You can't bank on it being available.

For the makefile, I just say that '"make install" MUST be run as root'.
If the system's got sudo, you just need to do "sudo make install", or
whatever. But it's the *user* that types "sudo", not the script.

Cheers,
Wol