gladevcp catalog, and other questions

Hah. I'd like to work on this right now; I don't have a spare SSD around to try. I'll see if I can't make an image of my drive before I go too crazy.

But you say you prefer RIP, I can do that, but since I have this older installed version currently installed, what steps should I take before trying a RIP build? BTW, apt is offering to update to:

Is that substantially different, or should my current config work fine (same question applies to building RIP)?

In any case, is there a basic example of what a VCP should look like for GTK+3?

installed version numbers don't mean a lot to me - I don't use them.
If your system works fine (and you need it to work) then don't update.

I'm not sure what you mean by what should a vcp look like in gtk3?
basically the same as gtk2. The widgets were ported from gtk2 to gtk3.
Themes are completely different in GTK3 though, they use CSS now.
I'm a lot out of the loop now though as I have concentrated on QT.

I thought you said you already have a RIP ?
Anyways enough for me tonight - have a good one.

Sorry, this thread has expanded. I have two systems. One is a working x86 PC running Debian 10 using a package-installed version of 2.9pre0. I have built a VCP for Axis on that system, but the .ui file calls for a GTK version 2.x.

I also have a Debian 11 non-realtime system running in a VM on my M1 Mac (ARM processor) that I was hoping to be able to use for VCP development purposes. That's the machine that started this thread.

I don't need the working machine to stay working, so long as I can eventually get it working again (which I should be able to do). I just didn't want to create a ton of extra work for myself.

As to the VCP development, I don't much care if it's GTK or Qt, but is it possible to develop VCPs in Qt? I actually spent a couple hours yesterday trying to understand what it would take to develop a GUI from scratch in Qt, thinking VCPs had to be GTK+2. I came to the conclusion that the Qt ecosystem was very large and confusing and I wasn't sure I could even get a basic standalone Qt 6 environment installed on my Debian 11 ARM VM. Hearing you say you're working on Qt now…is that for LinuxCNC? If so, I'd be willing to go that route.

SOME SUCCESS!

After re-reading some of this thread I discovered the need to run rip-environment whenever I plan to do linuxcnc stuff. Now glade3 seems to find what it needs to find. Hopefully I can make some Glade 3 VCPs now.

Perhaps the build instructions could make this need more explicit?

yes, you can have multiple RIP builds in different folders and activate them with the rip-environment script
You can also still have a deb install and call it from the menus
If you are building from scratch, maybe have a quick look at qtvcp and qtpyvcp before you start. I think Glade is probably easier. I have not used it for years but have not done any gui stuff since then either!

But I looked at a number of guis over the weekend as axis scales poorly on my display. I ended up choosing a non-mainstream qtpyvcp config but I knew the develper who kindly spent a few hours with me to get me going yesterday! I just need to fold in a 12 speed belt drive and a VFD somewhere.




 

Thanks for that confirmation. It gives me the courage to build it on my real machine. Fortunately I'm making progress on my simulator setup in the VM, so long as I can figure out some of the issues that I made new posts for. But it’s 0440 now, so I’m gonna head home and try to sleep.

There are basically three flavours to create VCP's:
- pyVCP (very basic ones without graphical editor)
- GladeVCP
- QtVCP

and also QtPyVCP but cannot say much about that.

Perhaps the build instructions could make this need more explicit?

In what point exactly? How a RIP behaves, or... ?

I'm having a a problem with this myself with this, I used the glade-gtk2 version quite a bit but I can't get this running.

I use Manjaro on the desktop and built 2.9 RIP, and exported the paths. I get mesa errors trying to run any UI other than latency-test but I figure that should be good enough to get the widgets to pop up in Glade. I just get errors about each widget but it's obviously trying to load them since the errors are naming them. I know somebody's gonna say "ya gotta use Debian", so..

I installed Debian Bookworm in Virtualbox. The widgets themselves seem to be in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gladevcp, and the hal_python.xml is in /usr/share/glade3/catalogs. With LinuxCNC running, I get the exact same thing trying to tun Glade, no HAL widgets just:


@debian:~$ export GLADE_CATALOG_SEARCH_PATH='/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gladevcp'
@debian:~$ glade
GladeUI-Message: 00:22:11.122: 1 missing displayable value for GtkWidget::AtkObject::accessible-role
GladeUI-Message: 00:22:11.381: 5 missing displayable value for GtkCellRendererText::variant
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gladevcp/__init__.py", line 1, in <module>
    from .hal_pythonplugin import *
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gladevcp/hal_pythonplugin.py", line 1, in <module>
    from .hal_widgets import HAL_HideTable
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gladevcp/hal_widgets.py", line 21, in <module>
    import hal
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/hal.py", line 30, in <module>
    import _hal
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named '_hal'

(glade:2641): GladeUI-WARNING **: 00:22:11.516: We could not find the symbol "h_al__hide_table_get_type"

(glade:2641): GladeUI-WARNING **: 00:22:11.516: Could not get the type from "HAL_HideTable"

(glade:2641): GladeUI-WARNING **: 00:22:11.516: Failed to load the GType for 'HAL_HideTable'

(glade:2641): GladeUI-WARNING **: 00:22:11.516: We could not find the symbol "h_al__hbox_get_type"

That goes on......what am I missing?