Monday, February 27, 2012

On we go, toward SPOCS 2.1!

Yup.  It all started out simply enough.  We had been using the same old RealBASIC file for the GUI console for some months.  Then, we got the idea to update the system tags, as far as the various module heartbeats.  Why have the heartbeats in two places in shared memory, when we could just have all modules put them straight into the system tags?
Well...we made the changes to SPOCS itself.  Then we copied the GUI console (AKA sp2) to SPARCL10 (the current machine).  Double-clicked on it, and......blat!  No go.  Hmm.  Okay, we must have to update the RealBASIC project for Fedora 15.  So, we install RealBASIC on L10.  And...it won't run.  Oh, crud.  Back to the old text-based console, AKA spconsole.  We start the console, and...all the heartbeats are zero.
Why, yes, silly!  The old console is still looking in the old locations in shared memory.  Okay, time to edit and re-compile the old console.  We make our edits, compile, and....no go.  Compile errors.  Remember those 'gotcha's that hit SPOCS when we went to Fedora 15?  We have to stomp them here, in the console, too!
So, after some stomping, we have the text-based console going again.  It's not perfect, and we'd really rather have a GUI console.  We've looked at several possibilities, but they all seem very involved, require lots of downloads for libraries, etc.  Anybody have any ideas?  We've looked at things like GTK+, and Glade.
We're also looking at updating the web pages...that is a whole other adventure.