A simple petition

he_man · Post by **he_man** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 10:39 am

Hello. I'm usually a linux user, and not so much a windows one. so I'd like to make a very little petition. Since Irrlicht 0.9 crashes on linux (not the 0.8 one), I'd like this to be corrected and a 0.9.1 release be done in order to be able to use it. It's a little change, and making it official (instead of changing code by ourselves) would be a good idea to support well us people who don't use windows very frequently. Thanks.

mike · Post by **mike** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 7:54 pm

You get the source so you can always try to fix the crashes.

Also, posting details of errors is more useful than just asking for things to be fixed.

he_man · Post by **he_man** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 10:28 pm

The error is already known. It's about a call to GLX, it's been said in another post. That's the reason why I asked this little thing, because it wouldn't be much time to fix this, and I think that there are some people who don't use just Windows out there. I haven't any access to the official release code repository for fixing that problem "officially", so that's the reason for my petition.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 10:33 pm

As mike already said this is really not the best way to ask for help. But anyway:
Please send the us exact informations about your problems. Did you try to compile the examples from Irrlicht? Do you use the library from the distribution or do you compile it on your own? Send the output from Irrlicht setup.
Maybe you know how to use gdb, then try to find the function the program crashes in.
There are some known bugs with Linux. So try to search the forums for that, check available patches. Did the problem exist before 0.9 or was the problem introduced with this version?

Mike · Post by **Mike** » Fri Apr 15, 2005 12:19 am

I didn't realise you were referring to that. Still petitioning Irrlicht to make it work on Linux is a tad unfair - there are probably only a few people working on the engine and probably minimal time is spent developing for linux. This is open source software so rather than petition others to fix things, you could pitch in - debug your problems, offer solutions, provide patches.

saigumi · Post by **saigumi** » Fri Apr 15, 2005 1:08 am

Actually, the only person working on Irrlicht is Niko. However, he integrates patches from other people. If you have a fix, post in in the Bugs forum.

Also, there is NX++ which has quite a few developers.

All of this is answered in several posts as well as the Wiki.
http://irrforge.org/index.php/Irrlicht_ ... X.2B.2B.3F

That's whats great about open source and wiki's. If you have a some information or code, you can share it.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Fri Apr 15, 2005 7:39 am

he_man wrote:The error is already known. It's about a call to GLX, it's been said in another post. That's the reason why I asked this little thing, because it wouldn't be much time to fix this, and I think that there are some people who don't use just Windows out there. I haven't any access to the official release code repository for fixing that problem "officially", so that's the reason for my petition.

Could you provide a link to the thread you refer to? A call to GLX is not the information needed to track down the error. Most of the graphics calls on Linux are GLX calls. And obviously even not everybody using Linux encounters problems. I am using Irrlicht with Linux without these problems so there are also problems related to Linux distributions. Maybe you got too old or too recent versions of OpenGL not working with the current state of Irrlicht.
The statement that you don't have access to the release code is not true by the way. The only repository available for the moment is the zip file contained in every distribution of Irrlicht. The official way of fixing such probelsm is to post the changes to the forum such that everybody else can integrate them into his own code. And if you did a good job in fixing something your code has chances to become part of the next release as well. But that's up to Niko.

Mike · Post by **Mike** » Fri Apr 15, 2005 11:52 am

I think the GLX problem he is referring to is where the glx.h installed by default doesn't include a number of extensions that are included in NVIDIA's header file. I fell foul of the same thing. If it is this, it's not a bug in Irrlicht, but a development environment issue.

I *think* that's what he's talking about.

he_man · Post by **he_man** » Fri Apr 15, 2005 11:57 am

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... php?t=6130

Here's the exact problem. If I fix it myself, just me or people doing it by hand will have it corrected. But if Niko puts this into the code we all download, I think that life for many people (I don't mind, afterall, but other people do) will be easier.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Fri Apr 15, 2005 1:08 pm

If you read the whole thread there are lots of solutions available to solve the problem. I think that my solution fixes the problem in a very upwards and downwards compatible way. If you download my patch from http://parsys.informatik.uni-oldenburg. ... d/irrlicht you will see that it reuses the windows code, thus it is not just fixing the problem, but also removing some redundancy in the code with the hope that such problems will reduce if all versions are working with the same code.
But there is also the important note from mike that this is not an irrlicht problem by itself, but a version problem. And such problems are hard to track as Niko won't be able to test different platforms (as he already does) with also lots of different library versions installed. This is infeasible and thus community has to help as we did in the thread you mentioned. Of course life could be easier, but that's like it is for now

BTW: kostas had some severe problems with compiling Irrlicht under Linux (see http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... php?t=6169). Does anyone know how to solve that problem? I could not reproduce it, and I don't know what to change anymore.