Linux installation

[Bob Warren]

J. Landman Gay wrote:
 >
In HyperCard, a standalone simply meant that the engine was embedded 
into the file on disk. And that is pretty much what Rev does too.

Revolution extends the process a bit by embedding as many resources from
the IDE as it can (script and image libraries, mostly,) but
"standalones" still depend heavily on certain features of the OS. If you
think of them as "executables" you will probably be more on-track.

-------------------------
Thanks Jacque. If what you say is strongly true, then that's a sad day 
for Rev Linux users, since there is not one Linux but hundreds. But 
since I need to be a bit more optimistic, let me try another definition:

"The output program from Rev is as 'standalone' as the Rev development 
environment itself. If the Rev IDE runs on your particular flavour of 
Linux, then so will your standalones." [True or false in your opinion?]

The definition above simply refers to whether the program executes or 
crashes. I'm not sure what you meant by "certain features of the OS", 
but when I wrote my first Linux programs (File/Picture Chooser Widgets: 
see http://www.howsoft.com/runrev/stacks.htm) I immediately came up 
against a lack of information about the file system, which has largely 
been the subject of this thread. Consequently - and this is only an 
example of what you might be talking about - although my widgets can 
successfully mount the CD-Rom and Floppy Diskette drives in Ubuntu Linux 
(Gnome) as they were designed to do, if you run the same widgets in 
Kubuntu Linux (KDE) the drives cannot be mounted using the same HD paths 
to obtain the necessary information. Nevertheless, this does not prevent 
my widgets from 'running'.

So now I'll try a 2nd part of the definition:

"If you transfer your standalone program to another flavour of Linux, it 
will not crash upon intitialization. However, if your program attempts 
to access HD or network paths that are differently placed in the runtime 
environment, and appropriate error routines are not included, this might 
cause your standalone to crash." [True or false in your opinion?]

Quite possibly, you will confirm the first part of the definition 
affirmatively. Regarding the 2nd part of the definition, you might tell 
me that you have insufficient experience of Linux to give a clear 
answer, particularly in relation to the first sentence. Am I right?
Or am I talking out of my hat?

Trying to sum up a little on what has come out of this thread regarding 
the obtaining of fundamental Linux system info, I would like to point 
out that the apparently useful suite of functions provided by RB is 
insufficent, even if it were failproof and always correctly identified 
all 8 HD paths. A good example is the problem I mentioned above. If you 
want to use CD-Rom or Floppy Diskette drives in your program, they have 
to be "mounted" and you need to discover where in the file system this 
can be done. And what would I do in #2 of my file/picture chooser 
widgets if I wanted to access local network drives? I have not even 
begun to discover how to do this for the distro I am using, let alone 
other distros. And what about if my program needs specific information 
about the distro it is running on? To know that the "platform" is 
"Linux" doesn't help very much. I need to know that it is "Ubuntu" for 
example, that the Gnome rather than the KDE interface is in use, that 
this is a Debian-based rather than a Red Hat-based distro, etc., etc.

Until more uniformity is established in Linux, or until Rev itself can 
be of much more help in establishing fundamental distro information, it 
seems that the ordinary programmer such as myself is condemned to 
programming for a single distro.

Regards,
Bob