Build MSI in Wine - linux

Hoping this is still on-topic for StackOverflow.
I'm doing all my development on a Linux machine, but the code will be run by both Linux and Windows machines.
I'd like to use Linux to compile the code, and I have mingw-32 and mingw-w64 for that.
But I'd like to package the resulting executables into a nice MSI installation file. Is it possible to do this using utilities in Linux or running under Wine?
Thanks!

You can use a combination of Wine, Mono and WiX to create .msi packages on Linux.
For openSUSE, I have created a wrapper package called wixwine which gives you the 'candle' and 'light' commands from the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset ready to use on Linux.
You can find my wixwine package here

I just released v0.01 of msitools, a collection of utilities to inspect and create
Windows Installer files. It is based on the Wine code, but ported to POSIX.
You can find the source and binary packages at http://bonzini.fedorapeople.org/ - unfortunately you will need to build libgsf from git, because I found a bug and no released version has the fix as of now. The linked page has Fedora RPMs with the fix.
$ msiinfo streams ~/download/Firefox-16.0.2-it.msi
Binary.New
Binary.Up
Binary.info
Binary.dlgbmp
Binary.CustomBin
Binary.bannrbmp
Binary.completi
Binary.custicon
Binary.exclamic
Binary.insticon
Binary.removico
Binary.repairic
_MAKEMSI_Cabs.MM01.cab
Binary.BannerGraphic.BMP
Icon.firefox.16.0.2.0.ico.exe
DigitalSignature
SummaryInformation
$ msiinfo extract ~/download/Firefox-16.0.2-it.msi _MAKEMSI_Cabs.MM01.cab > firefox.cab
$ cabextract -l firefox.cab
Viewing cabinet: firefox.cab
File size | Date Time | Name
-----------+---------------------+-------------
917984 | 24.10.2012 12:50:38 | firefox.exe
18912 | 24.10.2012 12:50:38 | AccessibleMarshal.dll
There is a companion utility msibuild to build MSIs. It is very low-level, but you can use the two tools together to make small changes to an MSI you already made on Windows.
update: now hosted at https://live.gnome.org/msitools, it also has a tool (wixl) that supports a subset of the WiX XML. Requires libgsf 1.14.25 or newer. Fedora 18 and newer have it packaged.

Related

How to create RPMs under Windows only by useing install free binaries or .net?

I am looking for a lightweight method to create rpm packages under MS Windows environments.
Actually I use Cygwin. I generate the rpm by using cmake(cpack). For cmake I need to install gcc to bypass the compiler check. For the rpm generation I have the rpm & rpm-build packages installed. When I am checking the size of the Cygwin dir it is around 2.2GByte. Quite a lot for generating a "simple" rpm.
Is there a "better" way to generate RPMs? Maybe in .net etc.?
I know I'm a bit late to the party, but I've started the dotnet-packaging project, which allows you to create RPM and Debian packages on any platform that hosts .NET/.NET Core. So that includes Windows.
You can either use it as a library or as a .NET command-line utility (e.g. you could just run dotnet rpm on your project and it would create a RPM file for you).
https://github.com/qmfrederik/dotnet-packaging has the code and a getting started guide, let me know if that works.

New C++ GPP device in RedHawk2.0

The release notes for RedHawk 2.0 say that the GPP device previously written in Python has been replaced with one written in "Written in C++, so it is more responsive". But I find it still running in Python (according to ps command python is running GPP.py, and the $SDRROOT/dev/devices/GPP/GPP.spd.xml which also has softpkg version="1.10.0". Was my installation defective and I still have parts of the 1.10 runtime system? My IDE says 2.0.
It sounds like REDHAWK 2.0 was not properly installed on your system, the IDE and the framework/assets are separate and it is possible to get into a situation with conflicting versions depending on the installation steps taken.
Determining what version of REDHAWK you have installed can be determined in a handful of ways. If you installed via yum or rpm you can check the versions of the rpms installed with:
rpm -qa | grep -i redhawk
The redhawk package, and redhawk-ide package should both be at 2.0. Note that the REDHAWK assets are versioned independently.
If you installed via source, you can use the package config files to obtain version information. The framework keeps it's pc files in $OSSIEHOME/lib64/pkgconfig:
cat $OSSIEHOME/lib64/pkgconfig/ossie.pc
Will print out version information for the core framework installed. Depending on what is installed, there are pc files for the framework, bulkio, frontend, and burstio.
I am sorry. The GPP-2.0.0-3.el6.x86_64 DOES contain an ELF executable for GPP device. But the rpm does not install unless I manually erase the GPP-1.10 pkg. Until erased yum says "nothing to do" for some reason. I saw the source code in GPP-debuginfo but did not notice the executable in GPP-2.0.0 since it was all caps and looked like the directory.

Linux standalone 'installation' of Postgresql

For easy deployment, I'd like to ship an installation of Postgres as part of the application. Is it possible to include an already compiled and runnable version of Postgres that can be launched as process? I was able to do such thing with a Windows and MacOS version, but haven't found anything about Linux on that matter yet. Perhaps someone has tried this before and can share some insights...
You haven't stated what linux OS you're using.
Assuming it's a Redhat variant why not package your application as an RPM package? You could then declare a dependency on the standard Postgres package which would be automatically installed yum. Same principle applies if you're using Debian based systems, just a different packaging format.
From the user's perspective the OS's native packaging format is always the easiest way to install your application. Just requires effort to package it properly.
You can find cross-platform binaries from these pages on PostgreSQL official website:
For easy GUI .run installers, use links provided at http://www.enterprisedb.com/products-services-training/pgdownload.
If your target machine has no X installed on it, or you want to automate installation process with shell scripts, then you can download RPM or Deb packages from http://community.openscg.com/se/postgresql/packages.jsp
I found these links on http://www.postgresql.org/download/linux/ubuntu/, under "Cross distribution packages" and "Graphical installer".
I quote from those pages:
Note: The cross distribution packages do not fully integrate with the platform-specific packaging systems.
You must have root priviliges to install these packages, however, none of your systems library files will be altered. The supporting libraries that these binaries require are included locally as part of the install. This is the "special sauce" that allows identical binaries to run on different linux distro's.

linux, freepascal, fp-ide: No debugger support availble. How to enable debugger?

How to enable debugger in fp-ide? I read somewhere that I should compile fp-ide from sources, but I don't know how to do this. Can someone help me?
Get the generic linux tar installer (fpc-2.6.0.x86_64-linux.tar) for FPC from http://www.freepascal.org/down/x86_64/linux-hungary.var It comes with a precompiled IDE with integrated debugger support and it works fine at least on 12.04 LTS.
I wasn't able to find a PPA for fp-ide, but I can describe how the CLI IDE is compiled on Arch Linux as documented in the repository. Do note that compiling will not enable the debugger in the CLI, as it seems to be an incompatibility between gdb and fp (fp-ide) according to e.g. this bug report in Debian. On Arch Linux, the fpc package also doesn't support the debugger in fp by design (it is explicitly disabled using the NOGDB flag).
Anyhow, here goes the compilation process:
Make sure you have FreePascal installed already, as you need it to compile the IDE
Download the source tarball
Extract the tarball to a location of your convenience and cd into that directory
Execute the following code from within your shell:
pushd fpcsrc/compiler
fpcmake -Tall
popd
make build
make -j1 install
# in Arch, the switch "NOGDB=1" is present in both make lines
That should compile the IDE and install it (you can even try to integrate it in dpkg by using checkinstall instead of make install, but take a look at the Arch PKGBUILD to see an example of what might be needed).
But why do you use the command line IDE fp instead of lazarus? With lazarus you can also make console applications and it offers much more features (e.g. working debug support).

Generating Xcode build on linux machine using GCC

i have gcc installed on my linux machine and i have my xcode project on my linux machine.
now is there anyway i can generate a xcodebuild using gcc on linux machine?
Very unlikely - the project file is designed for the sole use of Xcode and its command line friends. You are better off creating a Makefile for use under Non-Mac systems; this will be much quicker that trying to determine how the Xcode project file is structured and how to use the information contained within it.

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