[Gambas-user] Gambas Future or what kind of Gambas we want.

[Willy Raets]

On Tue, 2014-01-21 at 17:58 -0500, Kevin Fishburne wrote:
> On 01/21/2014 03:57 PM, martin p cristia wrote:
> > Stepping in this old conversation to point out my take:
> >
> > -computers nowadays are fast enough to run a VM that's fast enough to
> > run a normal aplication
> >
> > -If Benoit says it's complicated, what's left for us ??????????????????
> >
> > - so instead of trying to port gambas, why not making a installer that
> > sets everything up for the inexperinced user??? Something like the
> > SmallTalk approach.
> >
> > Making a small footprint VM+Linux+Gambas...they're all opensource, we
> > can get rid of everyhing that Gambas dont need...even more, making a
> > ligth weight Gambas or tagging components as "portable" and others "not"
> > Say it's a 500MB installer? C'mon my android phone has "Hello world"
> > like apps that weight 30MB, half giga is 15m download...even here in the
> > ass of the world (small town Argentina)
> >
> > As for porting Gambas, it will be really good.  I have the time (but not
> > the brain) to help anyone that joins the party and has the know-how for
> > a start.
> 
> Sounds like a good idea to me. I'm planning on creating my own LiveCD to 
> allow users to run my game on Windows and OSX. Not a great solution, but 
> there aren't many options that the average user will stomach.
> 
> For your idea I think we'd need to set up a script or small executable 
> that would:
> 
>  1. Install VirtualBox.
>  2. Extract a premade vdi (Virtual Disk Image) containing only what
>     Gambas needs to run its components (probably a lot).
>  3. Extract a premade vbox file (VirtualBox Machine Definition) so
>     VirtualBox knows about the VM and all its settings.
>  4. Create desktop and menu shortcuts to launch the VM.
> 
> I remember Windows had self-extracting executables, like a zip file with 
> an .exe extension. Perhaps there's an open source program that can 
> create those on Windows and then run a script afterward? If so that 
> would take care of everything except creating the Gambas VM. From my 
> experience with doing the latter, the image always ends up around 7-8 
> GB. I think getting the file size down to 1-2 GB is going to be tough.
> 

Hi,

That seems like what we try to do with GambOS. It is primarily meant as
a learning environment, a Lubuntu 12.04 dressed down of all the
excessive applications and with Gambas pre-installed and some guides to
start learning.

Exporting it to a pre-made Virtual Disk Image gives a .ova file of about
2.6 GB, but I believe that this can be brought down a bit more.
Making an installation .iso of GambOS (for those who want to install it
themselves) is about 1.2 GB.

I have tested importing the .ova file into a Virtual Box running on
Widows XP and that worked just fine. So for those running Widows and
with little to no know how on Linux, this is an easy approach for
running Gambas.

If there would be a decent Gambas repository for Debain, I would love to
base GambOS on Debian (instead of Lubuntu), so that a Raspberry Pi
version of GambOS could be made. This would be a pre installed
Debian/Gambas on a SD card. All the ideas are there, but the lack of
some needed experts is missing in the project.

I'm still hoping for a Debian packager who can make a recent Gambas
repository (the Debain ones suck), as all it would take is a ftp
location at gambos.org, to put all the stuff and from there all can be
installed and updated. But I'm no Debian packager.

I still need to buy a Raspberry Pi, to see what is possible there and
figure out how to make the OS on SD card. But again, GambOS needs to
have a repository with Gambas for that as compiling Gambas is no option.
People need to be able to easily update Gambas, not compile every new
version, as that seems to take ages on Raspberry.

At the moment I'm about the only one working on the project. The
initiator of the project somehow got to busy, and the person making the
iso has received the latest GambOS.ova to make the iso over a month ago,
but I haven't heard of him yet.

So the project is kind of stuck and meanwhile I'm attempting to make the
iso myself (first run in making an iso ended in a no longer working
GambOS VM).

If anyone is willing to work with me, that would be great.


-- 
Kind regards,

Willy (aka gbWilly)

http://gambasshowcase.org/
http://howtogambas.org
http://gambos.org