I am writing a C# application (in Visual Studio on Windows) that will be run as a mono application on Unix (Raspbian aka Debian). I am a Unix noob, and though I have read (well, skimmed) the Linux Foundation Filesystem Hierarchy Standard I am still not completely clear on where I should put the files my application will need. I have:
The compiled C# application (app.exe). I thought I would put this in /usr/bin, except that the application is not run directly (it is invoked by "mono app.exe"), so maybe /usr/libexec is a better location?
Configuration files (there may be more than one) (app.1.conf, app.2.conf, etc.). If they are not user specific, I would think /etc/app (a directory, not a file) would be a good place for these. How about if they are user specific? /home/?
Log file (app.log). Seems that /var/log is the right place for this.
Thanks in advance for your input.
You should look at an already established Mono app for reference. For example let's take MonoDevelop:
The exe file goes to /usr/lib/{appnameinlowercase}/bin/ , but they place a launcher script in /usr/bin, named {appnameinlowercase}, for easy launch from the command line (this script just calls exec mono YourAppName.exe).
In .NET the config files need to be in the same directory as the executable file, so you could place them in /usr/lib/{appnameinlowercase}/bin, then later for convenience, put symlinks to them from /etc/{appnameinlowercase}/.
Correct, /var/log/{appnameinlowercase}/ should be fine.
Related
I have a standalone server running Cygwin -- I did not setup this server, it was inherited. Anyway, I'd like to know what options the installing admin selected in the setup program.
I've read that I could look in /etc/setup, /etc/postinstall, or /etc/preremove but there are a lot of packages in those directories... same goes for the output of cygcheck -c.
I don't want to know every single library on the system... just how to duplicate the install. Is there a way to determine which packages were select in the GUI setup program?
Thanks!
Cygwin is pretty standalone. You should be able to archive up the entire Cygwin directory (and subdirectories) and move it to the same location on another system.
If you archive it up I recommend 7-zip. You can get it free here. The built in Windows archiver can create permission problems when an archive is extracted on a destination system. I recommend 7-zip for both archiving and unarchiving. If you use the built in Windows archiver and then move it to the new system and extract it - it will extract without errors. However you may find things don't actually work right while using some Cygwin applications
If you don't copy everything you won't move any of the original admin's custom changes.
This is a more general and noob question. I am developing a small application in Linux (Ubuntu, to be more precise) and at this point I have an executable, a shared library (.so), a configuration file (.conf) with some settings to be read by the application at the beginning, a data folder with images and other resources to be used during the application life-time (resources that can be also modified, deleted) and of course, I would need some file for logs and messages (right now I am using syslog).
So, my question is, where should each one of these be stored when the application is installed on a client's computer? What is the standard way of organizing all the application's files in Linux? On Windows everything would be found usually in the C:\Program Files\(App Folder) but it looks like on Linux things are more (or less) organized. Can you give me some advices on this matter?
Program data were historically stored in dot-prefixed folders in user's home directory. Modern Linux distributions tends to use ~/.config/program_name folder.
For all files that will not be modified after distibution follow Linux standard:
Ex: project dir: ABC
sub directories:
logs - keep log files
conf - keep configuration files here
bin - executable binaries here
traps - any trap mesg
then depend on what application we develop
Along with you can set level for starting your application from boot level if required.
For part of a large university project I have built a large java based application. To make "installation" cleaner I am aiming to write a script to copy the jar to a hidden file in the users home directory then add a menu &/Or desktop launcher.
Since I do not know what platform the markers shall be using it seems sensible to make this generic so I was going to build a shell script and a batch file.
The shell script starts off simple, check the directory doesnt already exist, make it and copy the file accross.
Then it comes to making a launcher of some kind. I presume each desktop environment shall do things differently.
After 10 minutes with google it seems everything suggested is autotools but since I have no knowledge of this it seems a bit overkill.
Is there an easy way to achieve what i need?
Thanks
These days, basically all of the desktop environments uses desktop files. For the specification for those files, see the Desktop Entry Specification.
Normally, they're put in /usr/share/applications on the system. Those files are then read and used to construct the menu.
If you have the ability to write to the system /usr/share/applications directory, that's obviously simplest, but if you had that, you would probably be putting the JAR file somewhere other than a hidden directory in the user's home directory.
If not, the path that's supposed to be honored is ~/.local/share/applications. If you drop a desktop file in there, it should show up for the user. (This is somewhat newer; I don't think GNOME 2 supports, it for example. Older desktop environments had various special places for these files.)
Then, the problem basically reduces to figuring out what to write for the Exec line in the desktop file. (See the desktop files on your system in /usr/share/applications for some examples.) If you're lucky, you can get away with just sticking a java command in there, but the details will depend on your application.
I wrote a Qt application that is going to run on Linux. It supposed to run at startup.
It's supposed to run on every Linux- Suse, RedHat etc.
What script should I write and Where to put it?
I don't know how to write scripts at all, so I would appreciate it if you will attach an example.
You need to create a desktop entry file for your application (see here) and to put it in user's $HOME/.config/autostart directory.
Any desktop entry file in that dir will get executed when a Window Manager starts up (see here).
To do this, usually you'll need to create your desktop entry file by hand (that's it, not via C++ code/script) and to just install in that directory via C++ code.
I am trying to create a standalone app with a resources folder that is writable. I would like to include this in the exe, similar as to how it is done on OSX with an .app. Is this possible?
Thanks!
Assuming that you're talking about a modern Windows OS you're probably going to have problems with this even if you could come up with a solution. Most apps gets put under the Program Files directory and by default only Admins have write permissions there so it's generally seen as a bad thing to store anything the app needs to write to next to the executable in Windows.