Re: [Visualpython-users] a new Linux install solution for Visual Python

[pataphor <pat...@gm...>]

On 09/08/2013 07:01 AM, kirby urner wrote:

> Apologies if this is the wrong list to report this:

Some time ago this mailing list was supposed to be moved to google 
groups. I am no big fan of google groups, because it is a centralized 
solution, and because I hate to have to use javascript in my browser.

There's nothing wrong with javascipt, but I just don't like the idea of 
executing programs without first having a chance to vet them. I am 
afraid to be very alone in this.

Anyway, if this message comes trough, the mailing list still seems to 
work, as does the interface to gmane. I just signed up to reply to your 
message.

> I led a workshop in Chicago recently, wherein I spent some time advertising
> the many virtues of Visual Python.
>
> My "students" were DjangoCon developers and fellow travelers, some of whom
> tend to be skilled packagers of installers.
>
> When a couple of them realized there was no current installer for Linux,
> with advice to use Wine, they promptly set about making such an installer.
>
> Here's a blog post one of the wrote:
>
> http://blog.maestropublishing.com/2013/09/03/installing-vpython-visual-python-on-linux/
>
> I'm hoping the work gets integrated into the web site.  There's the option
> to pip install as well.

The pip install downloaded the code from git, claimed success and then 
it didn't work. Then I noticed the code was already merged into the main 
vpython branch, so I tried to pip from there, with the same result.

Since I already had succeeded before to download and compile a previous 
version of vpython, I think it was a 6.5, I downloaded the zipfile and 
compiled that. I assume my wxpython compilation was still valid, but I 
had to manually download and install polygon, fonttools and ttfquery and 
compile again.

It seems to work now but I always get:

"Debug: Failed to connect to session manager: SESSION_MANAGER 
environment variable not defined"

printed to my terminal before it executes the script. Maybe that is a 
side-effect of my system configuration: Ubuntu 12.04 32 bit, and using 
an lxde desktop.

There seems to be a kind of problem in that I first have to resize the 
window to get anything in the window drawn. Also, I used to use the 
faces object a lot, and the fact that there isn't an option for opacity 
yet is a problem. On windows the opacity is set to zero I think so that 
my old programs still work there, but the ubuntu vpython version I 
compiled has opacity for faces set around .5 or so which gives very 
weird effects, especially when one tries to make a faces object two sided.

So now I'm wondering whether to convert my faces objects to pyramids, 
which do have opacity, or to wait until opacity is implemented. If 
there's an option in the source code somewhere to make opacity behave as 
it does in windows, that would help me a lot.

I had to use the trick of setting "enable_shaders = False" in 
site_settings.py because my system is just too slow if I leave that as 
it is.

As the situation is now I am still undecided about whether to go back to 
the standard ubuntu install of vpython 5.12 again, which works out of 
the box and has opaque faces objects, or to modify my code so that it 
doesn't use them anymore.

P.