I was looking for a debugger for Windows, other than GDB, which is freely accessible. I found WinDbg and it looks quite good so I wanted to give it a try. Now when I go to the MSDN page it offers to download the SDK for Windows 8. As this is a rather big package, I wonder if I can use this WinDbg version still for Windows XP?
Since my company still uses Windows XP for some time to come, I'm stuck with it for now. Is there another, free debugger which is user friendly?
I'm used to Visual Studio for debugging, which is quite nice. Currently I use Eclipse with GCC and GDB. GDB is good enough, but when I do some assembly I don't really like it, and all in all I don't find it very user friendly.
The latest WinDbg will work with Windows 2000 onwards and most commands work with Windows XP. There will be some that will only work with later versions, but these are documented in the included help file.
Just to ease your download pain, firstly there is the option to select what to download from MSDN, or you can just download the version you want here thanks to a kind person who is hosting the individual components.
The DITA OT documentation has quite a bit of information about how to run the DITA OT in a Windows environment, but not much at all about running it in Mac OS. What is the procedure for running it in Mac OS (Mountain Lion)? Especially if you need to set environment variables (which is kind of tricky in Mac OS)
DITA-OT installation for OS X is documented in DITA-OT user guide.
I just want know why some games are only Windows-based and won't run on other OSs like Mac OS X and Linux. What makes them different, and how does the program know that the OS is Windows, Linux, or Mac?
Also, similarly, why won't a Windows 7 32-bit driver work on 64-bit and vice versa?
Besides how Mac and Linux use a different executable type (they use Mach-O and ELF, as far as I've seen) than Windows (PE), if the executable loader was able to parse everything and load it into memory, many things can go wrong. Library calls, such as printf(3) rely on underlying system calls, which calls the kernel of the OS. In the case of printf(3), it calls fstat(2), sbrk(2) and write(2). (Note that this is the case under the newlib library; I am unsure about the other standard C libraries.) As far as you know, the system call interface for Windows can be very different from the one Linux uses, and Windows may even be missing a few system calls that Linux has (like fork(2))
I want to create Perl scripts that run on older OS X machines as well as on current versions. Is there a list or a resource where I can find out which Perl versions were distributed with older Mac OS X Versions (10.0 to 10.6)?
I'm sure there is some online resource to find this, probably at Apple Development Connection
However I have three machines to hand which show me that /usr/bin/perl versions are:
5.8.6 on 10.4 (Tiger)
5.8.8 on 10.5 (Leopard)
5.10.0 on 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
In all cases these are thread enabled.
Starting from Snow Leopard, multiple versions of perl are supported under the hood and it also comes with Perl 5.8.9 which you can switch to like so:
defaults write com.apple.versioner.perl Version 5.8.9
Also note that 5.10.0 on Snow Leopard is 64-bit. You can switch to 32-bit by using following:
defaults write com.apple.versioner.perl Prefer-32-Bit -bool yes
/I3az/
Update:
A full list of Perl source code that Apple has compiled with Mac OS X can be found on their Perl opensource page.
Working out what the packaging version numbers mean and how they refer to each version of Mac OS X may take some effort. However each package does show which Perl was compiled with the options, patches & extra modules Apple applied to it.
See Perl and Mac OS X versions for my best stab at working all this out.
Does anyone know of a good software development framework or similar that has the following properties?
Cross platform: it should be runnable on XP, Vista, OSX and common versions of Linux (such as Ubuntu and Kubuntu).
No installation: Be able to run the software from a USB stick without having to copy anything to the host machine.
Have good GUI support (this is why this question doesn't give a suitable answer, as far as I can tell).
Permissive licensing such as LGPL or BSD or such.
Among the softer requirements are having a set of abstractions for the most common backend functionality, such as sockets, file IO, and so on (There is usually some platform specific adaptations necessary), and supporting a good language such as Python or C++, though it is usually fun to learn a new one (i.e. not perl).
I think possible candidates are Qt 4.5 or above (but IFAIK Qt software will not run on Vista without any installation(?)), some wxWidgets or maybe wxPython solution, perhaps gtkmm. The examples I have found have failed on one or another of the requirements. This does not mean that no such examples exist, it just means that I have not found any. So I was wondering if anyone out there know of any existing solutions to this?
Some clarifications;
By "framework" I mean something like Qt or gtkmm or python with a widget package.
This is about being able to run the finished product on multiple platforms, from a stick, without installation, it is not about having a portable development environment.
It is not a boot stick.
It is ok to have to build the software specifically for the different targets, if necessary.
The use case I am seeing is that you have some software that you rely on (such as project planning, administration of information, analysis tools or similar) that:
does not rely on having an internet connection being available.
is run on different host machines where it is not really ok to install anything.
is moved by a user via a physical medium (such as a USB stick).
is run on different operating systems, such as Windows, Vista, Ubuntu, OSX.
works on the same data on these different hosts (the data can be stored on the host or on the stick).
is not really restricted in how big the bundled framework is (unless it is several gigabytes, which is not really realistic).
It is also ok to have parallel installations on the stick as long as the software behaves the same and can work on the same data when run on the different targets.
A different view on the use case would be that I have five newly installed machines with Vista, XP, OSX, Ubuntu and Kubuntu respectively in front of me. I would like to, without having to install anything new on the machines, be able to run the same software from a single USB stick (meeting the above GUI requirements and so on) on each of these five machines (though, if necessary from different bundles on the stick).
Is this possible?
Edit:
I have experimented a little with a Qt app that uses some widgets and a sqlite database. It was easy to get it to work on an ubuntu dist and on osx. For windows xp and vista I had to copy QtCored4.dll, QtGuid4.dll, QtSqld4.dll and mingwm10.dll to distribution directory (this was debug code) and I copied the qsqlited4.dll to a folder named "sqldrivers" in the distribution directory.
You mention wxWidgets but dismiss it as failing at least one of the requirements.
I don't know what your requirements are and in what way wxWidgets wouldn't work for you, but IMO it does fulfill them:
Cross platform: it should be runnable on XP, Vista, OSX and common versions of Linux.
It does run on those platforms, but "common versions of Linux" isn't good enough, as you can never be sure that the necessary GUI libraries for wxGTK (which should not be linked to statically) will be installed. This is however a problem for other solutions as well, unless you plan to put everything onto the stick.
No installation: Be able to run the software from a USB stick without having to copy anything to the host machine.
See the previous point, you would need to specify which libraries are needed on Linux. Also you could specify at build time not to use some of the system-provided libraries (for example for graphics, compression, regexes) but to use the wxWidgets-internal libraries instead.
Have good GUI support
Check.
Permissive licensing such as LGPL or BSD or such.
Check. You can statically link wxWidgets into your application too.
supporting a good language such as Python or C++
Supports both, and there are bindings to other languages as well.
having a set of abstractions for the most common backend functionality, such as sockets, file IO, and so on
It does have some abstractions like that, but you can link to other cross-platform libraries as well.
We use wxWidgets for FlameRobin, a graphical administration program for the Firebird SQL server. It has active ports to Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, and has been compiled for at least some BSD variant and Solaris as well. It definitely runs from a stick on Windows, I haven't tried with Linux or Mac OS X, but I don't see why it shouldn't there too.
Java.
It has GUI support.
It provides your network/file/etc. abstractions.
It is cross-platform. Most platforms you can think of have a JRE available.
No need to install a JRE. Most users probably already have one, and if not, you can run the appropriate JRE right off the stick.
You can provide several startup scripts for various platforms to run the app under the appropriate JRE.
Something else to consider is HTML+Javascript. :D
You can look at Mono it cross platform, has GUI (GTK+, or Winforms 2.0) and I can execute code without installing.
This might not be crossplatform, but is maybe even better, it dont even use the platform : linux on a stick :-)
The subtitle is
Take your Java workspaces wherever you go on a USB key
Here with java and eclipse, but nothing stops you there of course.
http://knol.google.com/k/inderjeet-singh/installing-a-ubuntu-hardy-heron-java/1j9pj7d01g86i/2#
Well, it depends on what you mean by 'package'. Kylix came close to being such a thing. It was QT based, and it allowed you to write once and compile for Windows + Linux. However, it was not an open source solution.
I asked a similar question in this link
http://www.24hsoftware.com/DevelopersForum/CrossPlatform-C-Library.html
and the best asnswer seems to be QT.
I have started using QT, but it is not as easy as I expected mainly due to deployment problems due to the DLL hell, Winsxs hell and manifest hell.
Tclkit is a single-file, self-contained Tcl/Tk system. The mac version I have is about 3.8 megs. You can get a version for just about any modern OS. I carry around a thumb drive that has mac, windows and linux binaries so I can run my scripts on any platform. No install is required, just copy one file wherever you want.
The most recent versions of tcklit use native, themed widgets (though, on *nix there really isn't a single "native" set of widgets...)