New developers (and others) live CD's released! With videos

[belboz 0]

Everyone,

 

Posting this here since I want everyone to see it. Even those these two CD's are good for developers, they also have benefit to just the hobbyist too.

 

Today I just officially released two ISO images of live bootable CD's of my Jaguar development setups. One is text only based and geared towards systems with low memory. You need at least 48MB to boot it. The second is a full blown graphical user interface that needs 256MB of memory.

 

Both load entirely from CD and use only your RAM. No files are installed on the hard drive. You can however access your hard drive(s) partitions if you wish.

 

So why might you need these? Well if you have a Windows 2K/XP system and are having trouble with the Atari tools running properly, or you have an older system you want to use with a skunkboard, but only have an old Windows 9X installation on it, these CD'c can prove useful. If you just don't want to go through the setup and configuration of a developers setup it might just be for you.

 

So what do you get when you boot from these? Here is what the text mode live CD offers. All setup and working.

 

Linux GCC compiler (so you can compile linux console based programs)

GCC for 68K

VBCC for the 68K (I offer both compilers so you have your choice on what you want to use)

mac (atari macro assembler)

aln (atar linker)

smac and sln (SubQ's version of the above two tools)

jcp (for downloading and flashing either rev skunkboard)

Removers Library and Jaguar Library (Seb's libraries that really make getting into C programming for Jag developers easy)

Seb's rmvjcp (custom version of jcp that works with seb's library above)

converter (Seb's image converted utility)

wdb/rdbjag (Atari's debuggers for Alpine users)

bjl downloaders (for BJL users who wish to send code to their Jaguar)

unrar/unzip/wget/minicom/midnight commander/sshfs,hexdump (and much more basic linux stuff)

wget mentioned above is a nice little console app to let you download things from the internet or local net without needing a browser

sshfs mentioned above lets you mount secure file systems on other system

 

Now the GUI version (my favorite version) contains all the above plus.

 

Programmers editor. This is a nice syntax highlighting editor that I have customized to allow you to build your projects, download to your skunk, bjl jag, or alpine from the editor, and reset your Jaguar from the editor. The editor also lets you jump automatically to the line with an error during compilation or assembly. Makes for an awesome development environment.

 

Also other gui based apps on here.

 

Firefox for browsing website (flash is installed)

Filezilla (ftp client)

X-Chat 2 (irc client)

Transmission (bittorrent client)

VNC Viewer and server

picture viewers

gui hex editor

k3b ( nero like burning software)

cdrecord (this isn't a gui, but can be used for burning CD's for Jaguar encryption)

Microsoft RDC app

All the benefits you get from a GUI (graphic file system browser, network browser, calculator, etc,etc)

 

Both CD's should detect most PC hardware. So your wired network port, sound card, video card, wireless network card, etc should all be detected unless you have some real weird piece of hardware. The text based CD doesn't look for sound card, graphic video modes, since it doesn't use them.

 

Even if you have no desire to develop for the Jaguar these CD's offer some benefits. If your PC ever has trouble (virus's, hard drive crash, windows won't boot, etc) you can boot this CD and be able to use your skunk, alpine, etc. If you want to play with beta rom's out there, or recompile something someone posted source to, you can just fire this CD up and go at it.

 

Besides booting this CD on your PC, you could also boot it with a virtualization program like VMware Player. So if you have a Windows XP/2K box and you don't want to reboot to use one of these CD's, you can boot the CD under XP/2K with VMWare Player and use it develop for the jaguar. Vmware will even virtualize your parallel port and allow you to run wdb, rdbjag, or bjl under the virtual machine. Booting the livecd will be the best method in my opinion, but you have options.

 

So how do you get them?

 

Go to my website at http://www.hillsoftware.com and go to the download section and look in the Jaguar category. Also I did two videos showing both CD's in action.. The links are at my website , but I will link to them below also.

 

I have had a couple people inquire about paying me to make these CD's and while I appreciate the offer, it is not needed. If you wish and you find these live cd's useful you can click on the donate button on my website and give whatever you want that will be used towards my web hosting fees. But that is not required.

 

Video demoing text based live linux cd http://www.vimeo.com/7266294

 

Video demoing GUI based live linux cd http://www.vimeo.com/7270758

 

You can view the videos full screen to get a better view of them. I like vimeo because you can also download the video with a link on the bottom right of the page. If you like to download videos for offline viewing I recommend getting it within a week of this post. Vimeo keeps my original version on their server for 1 week. After that the download option downloads the slightly lower quality version you see in your browser.

 

The videos are nothing fancy, and I didn't prepare a script or anything. They are pretty much off the cuff, and my microphone kept getting lose and sliding down (but you get to hear me breathing some that way!).

 

If you play with these CD's or just liked the videos, let me know.

 

Enjoy!

 

 

[Zerosquare 10]

Congratulations on this fine work !

[belboz 0]

Also I just released an archive for existing linux users. It contains all the tools, examples, docs etc that are contained on the live cd's. So if you are already using Linux this is a nice archive.

 

If you already have the dev tools setup on your Linux box, you can still grab this archive for the VBCC compiler contained in it.

 

Enjoy.

[SebRmv 2]

Great contribution belboz

[belboz 0]

Thanks guys!

 

Also since I am on a roll I have just released an archive for OS X users (x86 only for now).

 

The archive contains the VBCC compiler suite, smac, sln, jcp , a sample you can compile and download to your Jaguar, and various Atari samples and documentation.

 

So now OS X users can get going on Jag development!

 

If there is any interest in PPC binaries I can look into it. But for now you need an x86 OS X machine.

 

 

[Fredifredo 0]

Hello !

Sorry if I am too bad to understand but , I try to use the live CD but I can't open SciTE ... On the video it's a 5:30 , I can't see what are you doing in Konsole just before opening SciTE...

[belboz 0]

To load scite you don't need the Konsole.

 

Just click on the K icon at the bottom left, go to the "development" group and select SciTE

 

If that doesn't bring it up, how much memory does the PC have? Maybe your running out of memory?

 

If you wish you can launch it from the Konsole too. Just type "scite" and hit enter. If there are any errors during the loading of it, they might be displayed on the konsole and I might be able to help troubleshoot better.

 

Also if it is a memory issue, there are a few things we can take out of the GUI cd and rebuild and burn to shrink it down size wise.

 

Also (you probably already know this) but the text based smalled live CD doesn't support scite. You have to have the GUI live CD version.

 

Let me know how it goes.

 

 

[Fredifredo 0]

640 MB of SDram with P3 1GHZ and a poor graphic card TnT 32 MB

[belboz 0]

So did you try clicking on the K menu button bottom left of desktop, then go to development group, and then select scite? Does anything happen when you do that?

 

Also try launching a konsole and then type "scite" and hit enter. Does it come up then?

 

 

[Fredifredo 0]

Sorry ! It seems to work fine tonight oO ...