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Windows Support #55
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@XECDesign maybe just add the list of Windows OS support to the downloads page? @maxnet Do you have the minimum requirements? I'm guessing it requires Windows 10 to run? |
The requirement is that you have a graphic card with some form of hardware acceleration. Other than that we require at least Windows 7 because of some power management function called (to prevent laptops going to power savings sleep mode while writing). |
Yeah, I saw that on a Windows 7 install running in VirtualBox. @mbernardi1961, were you running Win7 in a VM or not? |
Ideally the installer should display a warning if the user attempt to install on a version of Windows before Windows 7, or just refuse to install. The minimum OS requirements should be listed somewhere on the website as well though - probably on a separate page, as to list all the requirements for each platform is probably going to be quite a lot of information. I think expecting new software released in 2020 to work on Windows XP is a bit unrealistic - it's been EOL for six years. |
Just tried this in a Windows 7 Pro VM under VMWare Workstation on a Windows 10 Pro host. With "Accelerate 3D graphics" enabled (which is the default) Imager works fine. If I disable this option, I get the error about OpenGL show above. A quick Google reveals that Windows only has software emulation for OpenGL 1.1 - it needs hardware acceleration for 2.0 and higher. Imager should probably bail out more gracefully, but a note on the "system requirements" page would also be useful. |
With the configuration we use, it is supposed to use DirectX instead of desktop OpenGL. (Qt uses OpenGL ES internally, but it gets translated to DirectX calls by ANGLE) A GPU that has DirectX 9 support has been a hardware requirement since Windows Vista. I do suspect that DirectX may have better software emulation support in later Windows versions. As Windows 10 does work under Virtualbox. |
You're right - Windows 8.0 onwards seems to have ANGLE, which provides OpenGLES 2.0 as a minimum. (VMWare Workstation seems to have OpenGL acceleration, as well as DirectX, or they're using their own build of ANGLE running on Win7). |
We also bundle ANGLE. It is the libEGL.dll/libGLESv2.dll/D3DCompiler.dll in the imager direcotry. Not sure if this is a problem that exists for real users on real hardware though. |
Agreed. I don't think this really matters for Imager, but it should probably be mentioned somewhere in the system requirements since someone has already come across it. |
What Ubuntu repository did you use? Did you download the .deb from the Raspberry Pi website, or is this an Appstream or other third-party packaged thing? |
I, of course, did not "expect" it to work, but I did expect it to warn me somewhere (either in the download page or the installer) of the reasons it would not. I'm glad you agree that it'd be helpful to list the minimum requirements on the website (perhaps a side link to "(Requirements)" would avoid cluttering the download page). That would be plenty sufficient and save updating the code. (On a side note: to be honest, it doesn't seem like an image-writer should require such complex software/hardware [a graphics card with hardware acceleration??] as to render legacy OSes obsolete, but I fully admit that my lack of experience in maintaining software could be biasing my opinion. Fortunately, as I mentioned in the original post, and want to reiterate here to help anyone struggling: Rufus v2.18 still works to write the image using Windows XP.) Thanks to the community for looking into this issue. |
It is not the graphics acceleration that renders legacy operating systems obsolete. The problem is that we use third-party components, and none of those support XP anymore. |
It may also be worth noting that Rufus doesn't seem to support Linux or MacOS. If you don't want to write three different native frontends, you use a toolkit like GTK or, in this case, Qt. As a result, you end up dragging in their system requirements. Cross-platform UIs are still a bit tricky so you end up with things like Electron. |
I had the same error when trying to use the imager on Win 10 Pro. |
Regarding: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/
The link to the imager has no information about which operating systems it supports. Is Windows XP still supported? Personally, I receive an error when launching "rpi-imager.exe": "Entry Point Not Found \n The procedure entry point CancelIoEx could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll".
This could be due to a need to update Qt--or perhaps my operating system is simply no longer compatible. In either case, it would be nice if it stated this somewhere since the installation otherwise went smoothly.
I don't need help personally (I wound up successfully writing the Raspbian image using Rufus v2.18 which was the last version to support Windows XP), but I'd like to save others the time/frustration of trying methods that won't work or being uncertain how to proceed (I've had to bug the folks on IRC more than a couple times).
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