LAP - E-UAE (Graphics Test)

Now that we have a GUI, we can try E-UAE again, this time without the highly amusing curses text mode. Actually, what we achieved in the last step was pretty significant. We now have a graphical user interface for our operating system. If we run the command:

xterm & 

In the xterm window, we can open another xterm window. We can also do this by left clicking anywhere on the desktop background and selecting xterm from the menu that pops up. This means that we can copy and paste commands to the command line again, which in turn means no more stupid scripts. Ideally, what you can do now is fire up the Lynx browser in a separate xterm window, and copy and paste directly from the blog posts:

lynx http://justbloodywork.blogspot.com

If you haven't bothered, or been able, to configure networking what you probably want to do is copy and paste this blog post (and the other ones coming up) and save them as text files in the /root folder on the Amiga Key. You then use two xterm windows, one with 'nano' viewing the text file, and the other to paste the commands.

Copying and pasting using xterm is a bit tricky. You highlight the text in the 'nano' window. There is no 'copy' key - as soon as the text is highlighted, it is good to go. You then move the mouse pointer over to the other xterm window and press the middle mouse button (simulated on a track pad by pressing the left and right mouse buttons at the same time) to paste. Note, it pastes at the position of the text entry cursor - NOT the mouse pointer.

So, from the Amiga Key, switch into the amiga source code directory and unpack the code again. Technically, back when we cleaned up after the text test E-UAE we could have just [make clean]ed the source directory. To avoid any possibility of contamination though, I prefer to delete the folder and unpack from scratch.

cd /sources/amiga
tar -xjvf e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4.tar.bz2
cd e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4
./configure --enable-autoconfig | tee config_report.txt 

Note, we have removed the curses option. Next, compile:

make $CORES_TO_USE 

Again, lets not install the software immediately. We are still in the testing phase. Lets try the rom first:

./src/uae -r ~/1.3.rom 

Woo, hoo. It popped up and asked me where to put the window first of all (just like I was running a new xterm), it then fired up the graphical window displaying the Amiga screen looking for a floppy. Lets give it one. According to the documentation for E-UAE you hit [F12 + F1] to insert a disk in drive df0: Did that. Nothing happened. No menu popped up asking for a disk. Also, you are supposed to be able to make it go fullscreen by hitting [F12 + S], which does nothing. Hmm. I quit by clicking in the xterm that I ran the program from, and used [CTRL + C] followed by [quit]. I then ran:

./src/uae -r ~/1.3.rom -0 ~/1.3.adf 

And it actually booted Workbench! Still can't switch disks or go fullscreen though. Lets have a look at the compile log:

nano /sources/amiga/e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4/config_report.txt

I spotted the following text:

checking for sdl-config... no 
checking for SDL - version >= 1.2.0... no 
*** The sdl-config script installed by SDL could not be found 
*** If SDL was installed in PREFIX, make sure PREFIX/bin is in 
*** your path, or set the SDL_CONFIG environment variable to the 
*** full path to sdl-config. 

and

checking for GTK+ - version >= 2.0.0... no 
*** Could not run GTK+ test program, checking why... 
*** The test program failed to compile or link. See the file config.log 
for the 
*** exact error that occured. This usually means GTK+ is incorrectly 
installed. 
checking for gtk-config... no 
checking for GTK - version >= 1.0.0... no 
*** The gtk-config script installed by GTK could not be found 
*** If GTK was installed in PREFIX, make sure PREFIX/bin is in 
*** your path, or set the GTK_CONFIG environment variable to the 
*** full path to gtk-config. 

This suggests that we do not have some things called GTK and SDL. GTK is a toolkit which allows buttons, menus, etc etc to be created. Like menus that let us switch disks while the emulator is running. SDL lets us run in fullscreen, which we also want. So we obviously want those two packages.

Part of my goal is also to boot straight to the Amiga, which requires me to boot straight to the graphical interface. This will require an auto login function. This last requirement simplest, relatively speaking, to fix. So lets do that first. Clean up first:

cd /sources/amiga/
rm -rvf e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4