Isolated Development Environment - gtk

I'd like to ask for recommendations for a development environment with the following basic requirements:
on recent Fedora (e.g. 13 or 14) GNU/linux distribution
developing gtk+ apps with C
isolated (installation of files shouldn't affect the main system's system files)
allows for cheap snapshot of the entire development files
So far, the only two options I can think of are chroot jail and virtualized guest. I had a very hard time to get chroot jail to work properly with dbus (ended up snapshotting my entire system using btrfs). Also used recent VirtualBox which feels extra sluggish recently.
I would really like to know what the devs here use as their development environment.

I personally use two virtualized OpenBSD (CLI only) and Debian (w/ GUI) environments with backups, so I just wipe them clean when I need too. I use VirtualBox or VMWare.

Related

Visual Studio Code on Windows server 2008

Can I install Visual Studio Code on Windows server 2008 ?
I am a developer but I sent the information to my administrators and they told me that the setup file crashes after launched
I get seput file from hee https://code.visualstudio.com/download
procesor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6142 CPU # 2.60Ghz - 2.59 GHz
RAM: 8 GB
64-bit
virtual machine
1 CPU - 2 cores
Windows Server 2008
First time answering here so bare with my vintage reply formatting. (also pardon that i couldn't capture screen due to server is on a intranet that not accessible on this device causing a long reply)
Being a unfortunate fellow that need to work on legacy Systems and Application frequently, i happen to have a fresh 2008R2 server recently setup by my team's Server Admin with following specs:
processor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 5220 CPU # 2.20Ghz - 2.19 GHz ,
OS: Windows Server 2008R2 x64 ,
RAM: 8GB
The versions that is able to install was 1.70.3,which is the same version that is the last supporting versions for Windows 7 as well,if you happen to need to work on devices using that OS version.
although i'm uncertain whether it is a VM or not, i'd like to point out a few more things that your question did not cover but need to consider:
The installer version (System setup vs User Setup)
aside from the x64 |x86 | ARM installer differences, as you've not mentioned which versions of the build and which exact setup installer you sent to your admin, i've first replied which build version successfully installed on 2008R2, which as of writing the latest build was 1.73.0 and on run,it pop up a error message as follow regardless of System/User Setup:
This Program does not support the version of windows your computer is running.
in our current case that we want specific previous versions installer, VScode FAQ on previous versions have a URL lists that enables you to download a specific build version of your preferred setup. For my case (and also refer below to exactly why this one), i've go for System setup, and i know the aprox. supporting version was ~1.70.0, so i used the link as below and replace the {version} to start:
https://update.code.visualstudio.com/{version}/win32-x64/stable
Active Domain, Multiple user sessions etc.
Per VSCode requirements page stated,
VS Code does not support multiple simultaneous users using the software on the same machine, including shared virtual desktop
infrastructure machines or a pooled Windows/Linux Virtual Desktop host
pool.
as im not sure do you work solo or do have fellow colleagues to code on the server at the same time, you might need to reconsider to install using user or System setup.
if your intentions are to use exclusively on a specific AD account, then user setup should probably be good enough.
however, if the intentions was to setup say a shared Remote desktop connections on the VM that allows multiple RDC sessions simultaneously for coding,programming etc., so you intend to install a system setup to allow all users on said server to be able to use VScode, then you might run into the problem the VScode requirements stated it does not support.
in addition, as i was remote connected as administrator , when using a 1.70.2 user setup ,a different warning message as follow was thrown:
This user Installer is not meant to be run as Administrator. If you would like to install VS Code for all users in this system, download the system Installer instead.Are you sure you want to continue?
as the installer itself also checks with the operator on this matter, your admin may have skipped on the exact reasons why the install failed and just told you the installer crashed.
if you absolutely need VScode to run on the server but can't install for reasons, the last resort (aside from going for alternatives like notepad++) is to Setup a Portable Mode builds on your own workstation/devices first, then upload the package to the server and use it from there.
i wouldn't go into too much detail in that as this reply already span for a starwars trilogy length but keep in mind, version limitations still apply, and whatever add-ons you need, you need to download them first before bundle it into the package to upload and run on your server.
Anyone that is a System admin or infrastructure architects , do correct me on my novice understanding on Server settings etc. as although i'm primarily a programmer, i did end up touching a lot more things that i'm not specialized into over the few years of vendor career work so there bound to be incorrect/inaccurate concepts i spilled. cheers.

Installing NVIDIA drivers within VIRTUALENV

So this may seem unusual - but I am using a remote server with linux and gpus. The GPUS have old drivers and I do not have permission to update them. Can I do that within a virtualenv? The goal is then to use CUDA 10 +CUDNN and do all the nice things possible with the recent versions of these software.
virtualenv only concerns Python interpreter and its packages. It cannot handle hardware drivers - you absolutely need root permissions to install a hardware driver. Your best bet would be to contact the administrators of the server and ask them to upgrade. Alternately you can rent your own server, which is not at all as expensive as it used to be (e.g. from AWS).

Newbie Hypervisor Questions

If I install a bare-metal hypervisor (say, ESXi), would it allow me to run Windows 7 concurrently with Linux?
Would it allow me to run multiple instances of Windows 7?
When I'm sitting at the PC that's running Win7 and Linux on a hypervisor, which OS do I see when I look at the screen? (I'm suspecting that the only way to access either OS is to do a remote login.)
Assuming the answer to #2 is yes, how do you manage multiple installs of Win7 on the same hard drive?
Thanks in advance!
If you simply want to run Linux and Windows in parallel you may of course do this on e.g. ESXi. Still, the OSes would run with virtualized (or emulated) hardware available to them, i.e. you would not be able to easily access all the hardware directly and the hypervisor itself not only introduces an overhead but this overhead is not deterministic.
If you want to run an RTOS (like Real-Time Linux) or any other RTOS, then you need a "real-time hypervisor".
You can google for such hypervisors - there are a few out there.
(I dont want to recommend one here as we are a vendor of such a solution our selves)
Regards
GFL

How can developers make use of Virtualization?

Where can virtualization techniques be applied by an application developer? How can virtualization be applied on a day-to-day basis?
I would like to understand from veteran developers making use of it. I am interested in the following things:
How it helps in development.
How it could be used for testing purposes.
What are the recommended practices.
The main benefit, in my view, is that in a single machine, you can test an application in:
Different OSs, in case your app is multiplatform
Different configurations, like testing a client in one machine and a server in the other, or trying different parameters
Diffferent performance characteristics, like with minimal CPU and RAM, and with multicore and high amounts of RAM
Additionally, you can provide VM images to distribute applications preconfigured, be it for testing or for running applications in virtualized environments, where it makes sense (for apps which do not demand much power)
Can't say I'm a veteran developer, but I've used virtualization extensively when environments need to be controlled. That goes for:
Development: not only is it really useful to have VMs about for different deployment environments (e.g. browser versions, Windows XP / Vista / 7) but especially for maintenance it's handy to have a VM with the right development tools configured for a particular job.
Testing: this is where VMs really shine: it's great to have different deployment environments that can be set back to a known good configuration and multiple server instances running in parallel to test load balancing.
I've also found it useful to have a standard test image available that I can run locally to verify that a fix works. If it doesn't then I can roll back to the previous snapshot with no problems.
I've been using Virtual PC running Windows XP to test products I'm developing. I have clients who still need XP support while my primary dev environment is Vista (haven't had time to jump to Win7 yet), so having a virtual setup for XP is a big time saver.
Before each client drop, I build and test on my Vista dev machine then fire up VPC with XP, drag the binaries to the XP guest OS (enabled by installing Virtual PC additions on the guest OS) and run my tests there. I use the Undo disk feature of Virtual PC so I can always start with a clean XP image. This process would have been really cumbersome without virtualization.
I can now dump my old PCs at the local PC Recycle with no regrets :)
Some sort of test environment: if you are debugging malware (either writing it or developing a pill against it) it is not clever to use the real OS. The only possible disadvantage is that the viruses can detect that they are being run in the virtualization. :( One of the possibilities to do it is because the VM engines can emulate a finite set of hardware.

Are there any USB stick runnable, no-install, cross platform software frameworks (with GUI)?

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...)