Raspberry Pi / ARM support

Targets
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[quote=69508:@Charles Weger]I just wanted to bump this topic and see if there were any more unannounced and/or unnannounceable announcements re ARM and Raspberry Pi. I’ve been playing with one and it is the coolest thing since the IBM 360/91.

I’ve added Feedback Case #21370 to my favorites, but is there a specific brand of beverage or snack I should bring to XDC to help ply the developers?[/quote]

Announcement! Announcement! Announcement!
We’re not announcing making any announcements about our announcements nor are we announcing announcing any announcements.

So I think I announced not announcing any announcements

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Ahh, but the very fact of your announcing this non-announcement policy is, in itself, an announcement, yes? So by that logic, if you were an android, your head should be emitting smoke right about now. To quote an old and obscure reference: “Norman, co-ordinate…”

23

Hence

Trust me if we have things to say about this we will announce them loud & long but for right now we’re focused on getting the things we need done for iOS, 64 bit and LLVM
And some of those are, as noted, required before we could support any new platforms

24

Harcord Fenton Mudd!!!

25

@Dave: correct! You may now Move Along Home.

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HA !

Everything I say is a lie
I’m lying

27

Oh how technology trends change. Everyone was striving for the fastest CPU, most memory, the biggest hard drive and now everyone is desperate to target a fruit based biscuit which may cope with an app that is not too heavy and you can even plug a keyboard in to it and if you buy a model B you can even connect to an ethernet and plug a mouse in too.

Its like mobile phones, they got smaller and smaller until you could loose your phone amongst your loose change in your pocket, then they grew and grew until now we walk round with small flatscreen tv’s attached to the side of our face.

You wait a few years and dial up modems will be all the rage…

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And the ever popular “OMG we have to get off those mainframes and onto client server” and now it’s “OMG we have to get on the cloud” … yeah mainframes in a slightly different form :stuck_out_tongue:

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Yeah, I chuckled when I saw a commercial touting the fact that you could now watch movies on a ‘huge’ 4-inch screen

30

Well lets just hope for something as an linux arm compiler, the step can’t be to far away.

/m

31

Besides porting the framework, creating linkers and all sorts of other bits :slight_smile:
Everyone seems to equate “it can compile for this processor” with “so we can create apps that run on that platform and os etc”
Thats incorrect

Its certainly closer

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If you PM me, I can walk you through the process of how to run x-86 software on an arm processor if you need assistance in the following. Console applications being by far the simplest. Most people don’t realize but there are a number of great bytecode converters available for x-86 to arm conversion. Gui applications will work but require a GUI emulator/server. Since a raspberry pi’s OS is loaded from an sd card, you also have the option of using an x-86 to arm emulator such as qemu; when loaded from boottime, will run much faster and emulate a windows system much quicker (scarily fast surprisingly) or… You could run a debian qemu distribution… All of which will be 100% x-86 compatible (don’t believe it… tons of info on Google to help). If you do decide to use windows, stay away from windows vista, 7, 8 (unless you use the windows automated installer sdk… which is a light version of windows that is compatible with windows V/7/8). If you decide to run a xojo application under Windows xp (runs the best on RPi under classic view), don’t forget that the latest versions of Xojo no longer supports XP, so you’ll need to compile with a version that does.

An aside- if you have an ARM android phone or tablet, you can indeed run windows 7 on the phone (without hacking or unlocking your phone), and in turn run Xojo. Qemu is available in the Google Play market under a variety of names ( I think Limbo is one of them). Xojo is slightly laggy upon load and close, but development and compilation/runtime/debug is smooth. That is how I manage to develop and work on coding “on-the-go” whenever some of you contact me for code or have a question and mysteriously its available in minutes…I do not have a laptop onhand everywhere I go, but I do have my Samsung Galaxy Note 3 phone, and through USB/or dropbox on the VM, I can easily transfer files to my PC/laptop or share/email the code.
-Apple devices - unless you jailbreak your device, you will not ever run Xojo on that device until it becomes an Apple app. (regardless of lore, jailbreaking is legal under US supreme court law, and does not ‘brick’ your device. A simple restore (complex for some…who say ‘I bricked my device’) can return the device to factory flawlessness should that be needed; in which case restores full warrenty.) Warrenty does not apply to returned jailbroken devices, only devices which are returned with ONLY apple approved software installed. But if you do have a jailbroken device you can run qemu or any VM emulator from Cydia to load your favorite x-86 OS.
-ReactOS.org - the FREE open source windows compatible OS (which can run Xojo applications) ; has preinstalled qemu images available for download.

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Mmmm? maybe PI thin client could be an option to run Xojo apps…

rpi-tc-arm

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Hi everybody,

I would like to know how can i become an alpha tester for the raspberry pi?

Thank you

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www.raspberrypi.org seems a better place to ask than this forum…

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Xojo is not compatible with the Raspberry Pi at all at present. This includes alpha and beta builds.

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True and False simultaneously…

TRUE, only as far that Xojo is built for the x86 platform; which Raspberry Pi is not (ARM). FASLE in regards that x86 platforms can and will run on a Raspberry Pi (ARM). Therefore, Xojo will run on a Raspberry Pi which is running an x86 platform. Stating that something is impossible, and stating that you do not know how to do something are two entirely separate entities.

“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.” - George Bernard Shaw

Here is a step-by-step video for those whom truly wish to install and use Xojo on a Raspberry Pi. With the advent of the latest RPi, Windows and x86 linux now run much better (more smoothly/responsive) in GUI mode. It is still recommended that your Xojo applications be compiled on a development machine, then transferred to the RPi for runtime. It will save you time with large pieces of software since RPi memory swapping to the SD-Card can turn a 30 second compilation into a 3+ minute compilation.

Nothing is impossible; the possibility merely exists outside one’s scope of consciousness. - me

How To Video:

Xojo loading on an RPi, from within the ReactOS environment

A debug-build Xojo application running on the RPi

I chose ReactOS for this demo because a Qemu image already exists for download, therefore no OS install/setup was necessary, and the entire process took about 5 minutes. Installing Windows/Linux require upwards of 30-45 minutes to install and setup.

***For Linux, there are also Qemu images available, I did not take the time to search for one, but they do exist.

If you have trouble, there are innumerable videos on how to run x86 applications on ARM (as well as other) processors, and many threads in the RPi and Qemu forums describing How-To’s (even accessing RPi GPIO from QEMU!) as well.

With LLVM, in the future, Xojo Inc. should be able to compile a native ARM version of Xojo. That though, remains unannounced.

Aside:
***Running x86 OS’s from Android devices (ARM processors using Limbo) has changed slightly since the release of KitKat 4.4.x, since SD-card permissions/access (for writing) have changed slightly. KitKat 4.4.x now requires a rooted Android device to restore full write-permissions to user-installed applications.

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Not really. You are just emulating a x86 environment on top of ARM wasting much system resources on a resource limited machine.

Xojo still doesn’t target Linux/Windows ARM environments in any form. Not alpha or beta. The only ARM target is iOS.

You are just sowing confusion.

39

When people ask about “Does Xojo support” they rarely mean “Can I run a Xojo app in an emulator on such a device”.
Either way running it in an emulator isn’t Xojo supporting that device - its supporting whatever target the emulator is running.
Emulators dont count as “support”.

It’s fair to say “We don’t support the Raspberry Pi” as you can’t generate a native executable for it.

40

[quote=178817:@Norman Palardy]When people ask about “Does Xojo support” they rarely mean “Can I run a Xojo app in an emulator on such a device”.
Either way running it in an emulator isn’t Xojo supporting that device - its supporting whatever target the emulator is running.
Emulators dont count as “support”.

It’s fair to say “We don’t support the Raspberry Pi” as you can’t generate a native executable for it.[/quote]

Besides, Qemu plus ReactOS are not exactly a supported environment. Especially, ReactOS is not Windows. Very far from it, actually…