Linux for HotBasic application development

Are you considering developing HotBasic applications for Linux? Unsure if HotBasic appllications run on all Linux operating systems? Then this article should be of help to you.

When choosing a Linux distribution as an application development platform for HotBasic, we ideally need a platform that comes up to a certain minimum standard, otherwise it may not be up to the task in hand. The operating system will need to:

Have nice graphics and an easy to use environment.

Run console, GTK and ideally X11 programs.

Access the Windows partion on your hard disk and USB memory stick.

Run HotBasic programs from a USB memory stick.

Have PDF and image viewers.

A GUI text editor and office applications consisting of at least a word processor.

A GUI compression tool to package our finished application into an archive.

During tests, it has been found that not all distributions come up to this standard. Whilst an office suite is not an absolute must for a development platform (just a text editor may suffice), the AbiWord word processor and OpenOffice.org suite has PDF creation built-in, which is useful for the documentation stages of a project. Some developers may have reference material in PDF format, so the distro ideally needs to have a PDF reader included. All the Linux distros included in my list have a GUI text editor.

Whilst it's true that you could download any program from the distro's repositories to make up for any shortfall in our expectations of included software, I'm really looking for an operating system that's useable right out of the box. Some of the mini distros are too mimimal to be of any great use!

It should be said that not all distro's (even mainstream ones) support X11 applications. Sometimes they are prohibited from running due to the security features of an operating system. In this case you could change the rules that SELinux or AppArmor is using to allow X11 applications to run. But the big problem here is from a developer point of view, can a user be expected to spend the time making adjustments to the security rules just so your X11 application will run? I rather think not. If your application doesn't run first time - it's going to be deleted from the users PC. There doesn't seem to be any problem with console or GTK applications. So I'm going to be a little lenient in my ideal of only including in the chart distributions that are able to run all three app types.

All of the distributions mentioned in this article are available as live distributions, so you can try the OS out before attempting to install. And whilst some distros come with a USB startup disk creator, you should be able to install to a USB memory stick, rather than your hard disk. Which I think is much better because your hard disk will not have to be repartioned and there is an added advantage in that if you have Linux on a memory stick, you can run that system on any PC that supports booting from a USB. With memory sticks being reasonably cheap, so you can afford to own several USB sticks with a different operating system on each. You need to keep your current Windows operating system because Linux will quite likely encounter problems accessing the internet, as modern PC's tend to have a software modem which only works with Windows, and depending on what printer you have, Linux may not yet have the drivers for it. Hardware manufacturers are reluctant to write Linux drivers for their product, but the Linux developers are working hard to overcome the situation.

The following Linux operating systems are all considered worthy for developing HotBasic applications. The list is not definitive as there are over 300 distros, and of course only a small amount have been tested so far. Over time, there should be additions to this list.

Lubuntu 10.04 is unable to run comkeene due to a floating point exception. Lubuntu, at present, tends to shut the PC down if left running unattended for a long time, but the OS is still very useable.

Mandriva 2010 Spring is unable to run comkeene due to a floating point exception.