Strawberry Perl Install for Buddy and fileClient

For the hardcore programmers out there that might want to try to run Buddy or the fileClient with a somewhat modern available Perl Distro, I provide this repo and these instructions on how to install a WX Enabled version of Strawberry Perl with the bare minimum number of Perl Modules needed to run the two programs.

1. Install strawberry-perl-5.32.1.1-32bit.msi

• Obtain the most recent release of Strawberry Perl
• install to /Strawberry on your Windows machine
• later you may want to move the Strawberry Paths to the top in your ENV, but for now this document does not require that.

2. Open a DOS box

Open a DOS Box on your Windows machine and set the following minimal PATH environment variable.

set PATH=C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\StrawBerry\c\bin;C:\StrawBerry\perl\site\bin;C:\StrawBerry\perl\bin

3. Install cpan Perl Modules

These are installed by merly typing cpan XXXX from the DOS Box command line

• cpan Error
• cpan Date::Calc
• cpan Win32::Mutex
• cpan Win32::DriveInfo
• cpan Win32::Process
• cpan Win32::Process::List
• cpan Alien::wxWidgets - takes a 30+ minutes, compiles entire library
• cpan Wx - will fail after about 1 minute

The installation of Wx (wxPerl == wxWidgets) will fail. Don't remove anything and proceed to the next step.

4.. Building Wx

After the above fails, you will find a folder like the following on your machine:

C:\StrawBerry\cpan\build\Wx-0.9932-0

Using any available text editor, modify C:\StrawBerry\cpan\build\Wx-0.9932-0\cpp\wxapi.h and add the following around line 136.

#undef calloc	// prh - added for Wx build

Then change to the build directory, and execute the WX build/install by typing the following:

> cd C:\StrawBerry\cpan\build\Wx-0.9932-0 and
> gmake test install

This build takes around 10 minutes and should pop up a bunch of little Windows during the test stage.

5. Manual Changes

The following changes must be made manually.

5a. Manually add site/lib/Cava::Packager

Download this repo someplace and copy the subfolder /Strawberry/perl/site/lib/Cava into your Perl installation.

5b. Minor modification to Console.pm

Open /Strawberry/perl/vendor/lib/Win32/Console.pm in a text editor and comment out the line where the Console closes itself in DESTROY. This is around line 603 in the file.

	# prh - magic solution to my thread/fork problems
	# comment out the following line
	# _CloseHandle($self->{'handle'});

This solved many problems when using Win32::Console with threads and forks, as otherwise, exiting a thread/fork will close the Console stopping all further output to STDOUT.

5c. Minor modification to ComPort.pm.

I'm not sure this is abolutely necessary, but from my legacy code, I modified /Strawberry/perl/vendor/lib/Win32Api/ComPort.pm to increase the buffer buffer size around line 54

	# prh - increase buffer size
	# our $RBUF_Size = 4096;
	our $RBUF_Size = 16384;

6. Install and test the WX Perl

Download (or clone) my Pub repository somewhere on your machine. You could clone it directly into /Strawbery/perl/site/lib but I prefer to keep my source code out of the Perl distro folders, so I put it in a folder called base at the root of my Windows C: drive, and set a PERLLIB environment variable to allow Perl to find it.

C> mkdir \base
C> cd \base
C> git clone https://github.com/phorton1/base-Pub Pub
C> set PERLLIB=/base

At this point you should be able to test the mimimum application included in Pub::WX.

C> cd \base\Pub\WX\examples\minimum
C> Perl minimum.pm

A small example WX Gui application should pop up, showing that the Perl and WxPerl (wxWidgets) are working.

7. Install and test Buddy and fileClient

You may now clone or download the Buddy and/or fileClient Perl source code into the Pub folder

C> cd \base\Pub
C> git clone https://github.com/phorton1/base-Pub-buddy buddy
C> git clone https://github.com/phorton1/base-Pub-fileClient fileClient

Assuming you have an Arduino or something else connected to COM3 you can test Buddy by typing the following

C> cd \base\Pub\buddy
C> perl buddy.pm 3 115200 -arduino -file_server

And you can test fileClient by either hitting CTRL-E from the Buddy window, or by explicitly invoking it as follows

C> cd \base\Pub\fileClient
C> perl fileClient.pm

8. Summary

Please see the following repos for more information

• Pub - My Pub repository, which includes Pub::WX and Pub::FS Perl classes.
• Buddy - the source code for Buddy
• fileClient - the source code for the fileClient

If you are going to seriously continue using this Strawberry Perl installation, you will probably want to go to the ENV variables in Windows, and move the following paths towards the top of the list of PATHS on your machine

• C:\StrawBerry\c\bin;
• C:\StrawBerry\perl\site\bin;
• C:\StrawBerry\perl\bin

9. Notes

The ONLY Cava::Packager v2.0.80.693 will NOT WORK with strawberry-perl-5.32.1.1-32bit.msi, which reports: perl -v

   This is perl 5, version 32, subversion 1 (v5.32.1) built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread-64int

Hence, I could not effectively publish how I build and release the Windows installer for Buddy

Someday I might write a Perl Packager to replace Cava. It would be hard.

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