Run Google Native Client (nacl_sdk) on Samsung Chromebook - linux

I was trying to follow the the installation tutorial of the Native Client SDK found here. However, my Samsung Chromebook (in developer mode) does not want to run ./naclsdk (chmod +x done), but instead returns the following:
32-bit runtime environment was not found on this
system. Specifically the 32-bit dynamic loader which is needed by the NaCl
compilers was not found ('/lib/ld-linux.so.2'). On modern debian/ubuntu
systems this is included in the 'libc6:i386' package.
On here they write that the PNaCl should run on ARM computers, however, on some other forums I read that wasn't the case. I've tried enabling two flags, as described on a site which I can't post due to a lack of reputation, but it looks like that'll only change things when using PNaCl, not during the installation of the SDK.
Is it possible to install that SDK on my Chromebook and, if so, how?

There's a bit of confusion: when the documentation says "PNaCl and NaCl work on ARM", it means the part that runs inside of Chrome which users would use. The SDK is currently only built for x86-64 Windows/Linux/OSX, and not for ARM. The main reason is that it's never been requested, probably because ARM machines are quite slow compared to usual development machines.
That being said, I don't think it's silly to use ARM as a development machine, and I've built my own PNaCl toolchain for ARM in the past. There are build instructions for the toolchain. I haven't built it recently, and it may have bitrotted a bit so if you run into issues I suggest emailing the team or better yet sending a patch! I expect any issue to be fairly minor, especially if you only want to use pnacl-clang or nacl-clang (as opposed to the GCC toolchain).

Related

Can one compile Windows code on Linux?

I have an Ubuntu server (with a VPN and a samba share), where I store all my project files and so on.
I would like not to have to back up the files I have on my computer to the server, but instead, directly use the files that are on the server.
But, when I want to build a project on Windows, it gets really slow, since I basically have to be transferring that whole bunch of files visual studio creates through the internet, so I can build the project.
The core concept is:
Open files that are on the server and use them (ie. saving one file at a time is fast enough not to make a difference).
Compile the code on Linux (Maybe code a VS extension with sockets that will tell the server to build, and that server-side, when done building, will send a message back, for VS to run and debug the program). Which would be much better since my laptop is nothing compared to the server performance-wise.
Run and debug the program with VS on windows.
I've so far only been able to find this(which is not what I want because it uses g++, and I'd like VC++) and this(which is not what I want because it's compiling for linux and executing it remotely). What I'm looking for is a mixture of both.
Remote compiling, local programming and executing.
Would also be great because supposedly, I could build with whatever VC++ version I wanted with whatever SDK I wanted. So I could basically easily switch between compiling for Windows 7 and 10.
I'd just like to know: Is it possible to achieve that? And if so how?
Using VC++ directly on Linux is not possible.
To let the Linux server do the compiling with VC++ anyway you could either use wine which apparently works with older Versions (see https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=5766
) but propably is not easy to set up in a CLI envrioment and might cause License Issues with Microsoft, or use Windows Virtual Machines, which tend to have some Performance drawback.
The best Solution would be to use GCC (g++), which works on a wide range of architectures and operating systems and supports cross compiling.

Building on Windows XP, when development is on VS2012?

We're planning moving from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2012 (Visual-C++-11).
(We would very much like to skip 2010 if we can help it, since the newer version is already there and offers a better C++ experience.)
But we've hit a little roadblock:
Our build servers still run Windows 2003r2 (all inside dedicated virtual machines), and due to messy tool support/issues, we're in no position to upgrade the build servers to a newer OS.
Developers mostly have switched to Windows7 by now, so moving the remaining Windows XP developer boxes shouldn't pose a problem.
Since VS2012 only runs on Win7 we are wondering whether we can leverage it's tools (C++ compiler, C#) and still do a full equivalent build on the W2k3 build server - after all, we don't really need a VS GUI there, just build C++ and C# projects from VS2012.
What are our options?
Will the SDK (7.1? 8?) compilers + msbuild command line get me anywhere?
In Project Property Pages, there an option "Platform Toolset" that allow you to choose compatibility of your project. So, you can work in VS2012, but built it with "VS2008 compiler"
Here is what we do:
Use CMake
CMake allows you to create build systems for your operating system. Thus we are able to use the same code within VS2005, VS2010 and Eclipse, XCode etc.
You could do something similar: Install VS2005 on your old machines and let CMake create the projects for you from the sources. On your newer machines you can use CMake to generate VS2012 Solutions (I don't know if they have 2012 support yet, because we don't use 2012 yet too).
A big pro here is: If you plan to migrate to any other IDE or even Linux you just can re-run CMake and get your source code within these environment easily compilable.
A big con: You have to start reading about CMake and create CMakeLists.txt for all your projects (might be a lot of work depending on the amount of projects, amount of source code files within each project, specific compiler options, linker options etc.)
Our build servers still run Windows 2003r2 (all inside dedicated
virtual machines), and due to messy tool support/issues, we're in no
position to upgrade the build servers to a newer OS.
Well. Not much came out of this question. We recently re-evaluated this issue, and I see two options (I haven't tried any yet):
Just do a full VS installation on a supported OS (Win7), zip up the whole VS+WinSDK directories (as well as the neccesary runtme DLLs that live somewhere under %WINDR%), and try if you can get that thing working on an XP based OS. Might work. Not a great idea if you ask me.
Split up the build process to distribute the build across several OS, so that we can work with tools that are only supported on one of them. -- This actually sounds more complicated than it'll be. We already run our build spread over several Jenkins jobs, so I should be able to get that to work. (And all build nodes are already VMs anyway, so adding more VMs isn't that much of an issue.)

Deploy a Qt Application Binary on Linux, compatible with LSB

I have developed a small application in Qt Creator on Ubuntu 12.04 which I want should run on any other linux distro (mostly different versions of CentOS and ubuntu), just like any portable application on windows does.
I want to be able to simply share the binary file of the Application, and run the application.
I am able to successfully do this in windows, by just building the project in QT Creator and then putting the required libraries in the Application directory and then transfering them to other windows systems.
I searched all over and found out that I should be trying to build the project using LSB(Linux Standard Base) Compatibility, so that it runs on other linux distros. Is that the right way to do this?
I am very new to Qt and also to Linux (dont know much of Shell Scripting).
Thus, I dont know how I should proceed to make the Application LSB Compliant.
I have refered to, the following links:
Distributing Qt-based binaries on Linux and
Deploying Qt applications on Linux but have not beem able to understand what I am suposed to do.
I also found this question here which states a very similar situation as mine, but because I am a novice, I dont know how I should do this.
Moreover, considering that the first two articles were written 6 years back, shouldn't there be a simpler way to deploy Qt apps on the linux platform now?
I also saw something about static linking, is that the way to go?
Isn't there a way by which all of this can be done through Qt Creator itself?
If there is no hope of creating a portable Qt Application for Linux, then is there a way, say a shell script or something that would combine all the steps required to compile the Qt project on another computer and run it. Say, download Qt-SDK if not present, run qmake and make and then the newly compiled application, if not already there, so that the user can run the program just by running one script.
Your problem here is not the Linux Standard Base, but rather the presence or not of the specific version of Qt you need (or a later one).
Exactly like on a Windows machine, a user may have any of Qt installed, or they may not have it at all. On Windows it is easier to check for the presence of a certain version of Qt than it is on Linux, thus it is easier to write install tools that automate the experience.
To solve your problem there are a few ways:
Inform the user that your program requires a certain version of Qt or higher, and let the user handle the problem
Learn how to create packages for every distribution you want to target and create specific packages
Use a program like 0Install or Elf Statifier to create a package/executable containing all the necessary libraries.
The latter is similar to what many Windows and Mac programs do (they include every library they need within the installer), but it is not the preferred way on Linux, which relies heavily on shared libraries.
Making a binary application compatible with any other Linux distro is practically impossible since you will never know in advance which libraries are available in distro X, or what version of that library is available. Even among a single distro (e.g. Ubuntu), binary application are almost never backward-compatible, since anything built on Ubuntu 12.04 will have dependencies on versions libraries which are installed on that version of Ubuntu, and trying to run that binary on Ubuntu 10.04 will most probably fail simply because it doesn't have a recent enough version of glibc or some other necessary library.
However, the idea can be much more implementable if you limit yourself to a finite list of distros and versions of those distros. You can then know which libraries are available for those distros, and aim for the lowest common denominator. I used to maintain a binary application which had to support several distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, SLED, Mandriva), and the way I would do it is install the oldest distro I was targeting on my build machine. That way, the binary application would be linked to the oldest versions of the libraries available on those distros. Unless there's a new major version of such a library (which happens quite rarely, and even then, distros usually distribute the previous major version for a while for compatibility purposes), your compiled binary will then be compatible with all your targeted distros.
Therefore, the quick piece of advice I would give for your situation, use the oldest LTS version of Ubuntu which is still supported (10.04 at the moment) for your development, and you should be pretty safe for most recent popular distros. For the application you already developped on Ubuntu 12.04, you should have no problem simply recompiling the same source on 10.04. Understand that you will never however achieve 100% compatibility with a compiled C++ Qt application.
If Qt is not all that important to you, you could use a higher-level or interpreted language such as Python, Java, Perl or Ruby. With such languages, you can usually count on the language implementation already being installed on the target distro.
Deploy an application in Linux is a nightmare, luckily there are some solutions. Check this projects to build a portable binary with all their dependencies bundled:
http://statifier.sourceforge.net/statifier/main.html
http://www.magicermine.com/index.html
http://www.pgbovine.net/cde.html
Another solution is make a portable 0install package:
http://0install.net/
I recomend this solution. Personally I have been problems with the 3 first packagers.

How can I compile my Windows program into a single Linux binary that runs with Wine?

Just today i checked my ubuntu with installing wine in it ,
Delphi 3 to 7 worked perfectly (Rad studios did not work because they use .net scraps).
But all of the application i made worked perfectly!!!!!
And i heard that it also works well in mac with WineBottler
Is it possible to create a header linux executable and put my vcl application and requird wine stuff into it and distribute as a single executable (.bin)
there is(was) a solution for Linux from Borland, called Kylix. Kylix is based on some older Qt-stuff.
But I would give FreePascal/Lazarus a try, it's pretty cool! and the compiler compiles for many different platforms.
I guess this is what winelib is for. However I have never tried it. (Wasn't Kylix Delphi + winelib compiled for Linux?)
Since Wine is now stable (reached the 1.0 version some time ago), it could make sense to ask the user to install it using its Linux packages manager. It's very fast and easy. So Wine will be always up to date, according to the distribution used.
Then it's very easy to install any Windows program with Wine.
Since Delphi executables are mostly self-contained (if you don't use the BDE or some external database libraries), your clients will install your Delphi application alla "Windows" way, that is, by running a Setup program from Wine.
And it will work fine, as is.
Using WineLib is not a good idea, even not advised by Wine developers, as far as I remember. At least for closed-source software: in one or two years, perhaps you won't release another version of your program, but Wine and WineLib will have evolved a lot... If you use Wine as an external package, your client can be sure there will be some end user enhancements.
If your software is purely Open Source, then using WineLib could make sense. But even the WineLib headers can evolved, so perhaps your source won't evolve at the same speed...

What is Cygwin and how to use it in relation in Android NDK

Hi I am new to android NDK Devlopment.I downloaded Android NDK 4 for windows.I read through the docs.But i am not clear with it.
First thing is that,I want to develop the native file which may be c 0r c++.I think Using Cygwin will come to play.I dont have any idea or how to use cygwin .From the Docs i just read Cygwin is required for Windows platform.Apart from it ,i dont have any knowledge about it.
Not yet started with NDK Concepts.Help Required
Cygwin is a way to make Windows support some linux functionality. If you install cygwin on your windows machine you'd be able to run some linux software on windows (you'd have to recompile it especially for cygwin though). You can find it and more information about it here. There's also a good explanation at the wiki page here.
If the Android NDK needs it I suppose the Android NDK needs some linux functionality or tools to work properly. The other option might be to install Linux on a machine and run the Android NDK on there, it might be better since I assume Linux is the native environment for Android NDK development.
Since you're saying that you're a bit unclear about the NDK, you should probably be aware that as far as I understand you can not build a whole Android app using it, you can only develop bits of it, you will still need to develop at least part of the app to run on top of the Dalvik virtual machine, which, as far as I know, means that you'll have to write that bit in Java. In general I think that you should develop Android apps only in Java unless there is a specific reason to build certain parts of it using the NDK.
From wiki:
Cygwin (pronounced /ˈsɪɡwɪn/,[2] SIG-win) is a Unix-like environment and command-line interface for Microsoft Windows. Cygwin provides native integration of Windows-based applications, data, and other system resources with applications, software tools, and data of the Unix-like environment. Thus it is possible to launch Windows applications from the Cygwin environment, as well as to use Cygwin tools and applications within the Windows operating context.
Cygwin consists of two parts: a Dynamic-link library (DLL) as an API compatibility layer providing a substantial part of the POSIX API functionality, and an extensive collection of software tools and applications that provide a Unix-like look and feel.
So, Cygwin is a set of tools which allows you to emulate a unix-like (or linux) environment on your windows machines.
The NDK is the Android Native Development Kit. It allows you to write parts of your application in native code (C/C++) and integrate them into your application. Your application still runs under the Dalvik VM but it can load shared objects creating using a cross compiler. The NDK contains all the necessary tools and build scripts to generate native code binaries. It's an advanced concept and one you should probably wait on until you fully understand the architecture.
The reason why it requires Cygwin (or some flavor of linux) is because it uses GnuMake and other linux tools such as awk or Nawk. These tools are not available (or are really hard to use) on windows platforms, hence the need for at least Cygwin (though I would advise you do yourself a favor and just install linux).

Resources