Gnome-inform7 6L38/6M62 IDE now running on modern Ubuntu & Fedora OS

Yep, I saw the check in from @ptomato :grinning:

Just trying to get some spare time to bring my build & test environment back online so I can try the code out. Right now all the systems I used to make previous builds are repurposed for other tasks.

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Iā€™m wondering if I can help at all? Iā€™m a long time Linux user (predominantly Ubuntu / Debian) and while no C coder, Iā€™ve run my fair share of make / make install commands! Iā€™ve never built packages though. But I have an Ubuntu 18.04 laptop here, and another one running 20.04, both with more than enough space to run other versions within VirtualBox, if required.

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Basically, whats needed is a build and install test. If I can get a build going that is as straightforward as: ./autogen.sh; ./configure; ./make; sudo ./make install; then some testing would be very helpful. I dont know if the build is that simple yet though.

My last attempt at building from the gtk3 branch was that it needed a few hacks to build but would eventually build. Unfortunately, I could not move to test it very easily. Packaging the resulting rpm / debs was broke so deploying the build to my normal test environment was not as simple as just cutting/pasting the deb/rpm. Since then some changes have been introduced to fix these things in the git repo.

If I get an easy build I will post the instructions here and help testing would be very much appreciated! (Fair warning, testing experimental builds can cause issues on your system so using a virtual machine is ideal if you can!)

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I would also be interested in testing on an RPi 4 but it is Arm based.

Quick update: I spent the day working with the gtk3 branch from @ptomatoā€™s github. The code base is not a straight forward build. In order to get a working build I had to make a number of hacks to the code. Packaging to rpm also was not working and needed a few hacks to bring it to life as well. The good news is that I did get a build working and I did get an RPM packaged.

The resulting RPM was tested on Fedora 29 and Fedora 31 and the really good news is that it does run. The RPM build, for those interested in trying it, is located in my build repository linked below. The build you want is the ā€œGTK3 EXPERIMENTAL Fedora 29, 30, 31ā€ build. The actual name of the rpm is gtk3-gnome-inform7-6M62-1.fc29-f30-f31.x86_64.rpm

Rather than trying to document and share all of the various hacks I made to the code base to get it running so others can also attempt to build from source, my plan is to open up a repo with the entire working source tree plus all dependencies and hacks for people to download directly. I will try to upload the sources tomorrow in a new github repo.

Some things to be aware of: #1) This is an experimental build and it will have some minor issues, #2) Creating a new project, editing code, and compiling code is all I have tested so far, #3) The migration to GTK3 has resulted in some interface differences from the prior version. The issues are mostly cosmetic.

Stay tuned and let me know if you happen to try the experimental GTK3 RPM :wink:

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Hi Everyone, I have pulled together a repo with all gtk3 gnome inform7 source dependencies, binary dependencies, and build hacks into a single repository. You can either clone the repo if you are familiar with git or you can simply download the zip file of the source tree from github and if my calculations are correct it should build from that as well. Here is the link to the new repository:

In order to build the code you need to:

  1. Either clone the repo or download the source zip file from the github link above (if you are trying to download the zip, look for the green ā€œCodeā€ button to the right of the github repository interface).
  2. Open a terminal into the root of the source directory.
  3. Run the command ./autogen.sh
  4. Run the command ./configure
  5. Run the command make

If you get this far let me know on this thread. If you have problems let me know on this thread. Most people will run into issues with ./autogen.sh and ./configure commands. If you do, just reply on this thread and we can work through the issues here as they come up.

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Ubuntu 18.04 Build Test - Working - The code provided in the gtk3-alldeps-gnome-inform7 repository will build on Ubuntu 18.04 as is.

Ubuntu 16.04 Build Test - Not Working - There is a build issue on older debian OS variants. The issue seems to be that some gtk declarations in the code are deprecated.

If you get this far let me know on this thread. If you have problems let me know on this thread. Most people will run into issues with ./autogen.sh and ./configure commands. If you do, just reply on this thread and we can work through the issues here as they come up.

Hi, Iā€™m having problems with this :frowning: Doing ./autogen.sh gives me this error:

$ ./autogen.sh 
Checking out submodules
Patching externals
Regenerating autotools files
./autogen.sh: 20: autoreconf: not found

I woke up this morning with a sudden urge to try Inform7 again after not touching it for several years, only to find that, well, I apparently canā€™t anymore. RIP.

Sounds like you just need to install autoconf.

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I see, thanks. That fixed that, but now I have this issue:

$ ./autogen.sh 
Checking out submodules
Patching externals
Regenerating autotools files
aclocal: error: aclocal: file 'm4/lt~obsolete.m4' does not exist
autoreconf: aclocal failed with exit status: 1

But the file lt~obsolete.m4 is there in the folder m4/, Iā€™m looking right at it.

Try cleaning out the partially built stuff and restarting from a clean download of the source tree.

Installing build-essential first might be a good move, too.

I removed the folder and cloned the repository again, but I get the same error. I do have build-essential installed.

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It seems thereā€™s another package called m4 that you may be missing as well. The file you are looking at may be a symbolic link.

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I tried sudo apt install m4, but I already have the newest version installed.

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Hmmm, ./autogen.sh worked for me (on x64 Linux Mint 20 ā€œUlyanaā€), though I get a different error later in the build process (I needed to install libossp-uuid-dev and several other things, but was left unable to continue because I havenā€™t got a compatible webkit2gtk-4.0 or goocanvas-2.0 available in the standard repositories, and Iā€™ve stopped trying).

Have you tried installing the Flatpak version, or one of the standard .debs? That might be an alternate path to just getting Inform 7 running.

I have also had good luck running the Windows version under Windows 10 in VirtualBox in the past.

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Yeah, the standard debs from inform7.com and gnome-inform7_6L38-ubunut-1604-1804.x86_64.deb (sic) from the repository in this threadā€™s first post threw up dependency errors, so I was hoping to fix that with the gtk3-alldeps-gnome-inform7 repo. :frowning: Both times it resulted in a broken install, where Inform7 shows up in my list of applications but wonā€™t run.

Iā€™ve literally never had good luck getting Flatpak apps to run, and didnā€™t even think to look on Flathub, so I gave that a shot just now andā€¦ it installed. I canā€™t run it from the command line, getting this error:

$ flatpak run com.inform7.KDE
error: app/com.inform7.KDE/x86_64/master not installed

But I can run it by clicking on it from my applications menu. It seems to be sandboxed so heavily that I can only save to and load from ~/Inform, butā€¦ I guess I can live with that.

Thanks for the help.

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Urk, Iā€™d forgotten how closely FlatPak sandboxes things. ā€œWe devs know better than you what the filesystem layout of your hard drive should beā€ is one of the reasons I left Windows all those years ago, and itā€™s disenheartening to see Linux becoming the thing that I moved to Linux to get away from. Can you put a symlink to another folder in your ~/Inform directory to work around it?

Anyway, Iā€™m sorry not to have been able to be more help here. Glad you got it running!

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I think it is possible to get access to the rest of your file system by hitting Ctrl-L in the ā€œopen fileā€ window and typing in the path manually. There is, or at least was, a bug in the way the Inform IDE communicates with Gnome.

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Oh, sweet. Thanks so much for all your help; Iā€™m looking forward to having some fun with this.

(Edit) Wait, that very much didnā€™t work; it looked like it did, but the folder doesnā€™t show up in my filesystem and I canā€™t re-open the test project I saved in another folder. Only having one sandboxed folder I can use is very annoying, but not a dealbreaker, so Iā€™ll just live with it.

I think it really is Flatpak sandboxing in this case, not just the former file-browsing problem.