No worries. Happy to help. It's good that the Ubuntu appliances are officially supported by the project too. One reason I don't like using VMware Player is that the library of community-provided OS images are often customised more than I'd like. I prefer a clean install ...

Sam.

Last time I installed Ubuntu into VMWare I did a clean install, all went well from what I remember, in fact I didn't know of any other way till now !

There is a library of appliance images which users can upload and download to ... unfortunately, they're not usually sanctioned by the original OS team, so they're often put up their by fans (tho there's no real way to tell). Sometimes that's OK, but sometimes they're customised ... and it's an awful lot to download before you find out!

Sam.

I've ended uo doing a fresh install from the iso iamge. Couldn't get that ready built one to go at all. VMWare just moaned about it. So installing nice clean Ubuntu now

Weird. As long as you're using VMWare server, installing from scratch is OK - shame you don't have that option in Player.

That's why I prefer VirtualBox - that and it's neat seamless desktop feature.

Sam.

For vmware there are some nice images by "bagside" around that have Ubuntu Hardy Heron on them.

If porting, it could be worth using a higher level language like python thats on all the plaforms - the amount of code in the end would probably be less than the 16k lines of pascal in the current version, and if pgtk is used it should "just work" on multiple platforms.

I've actually now dumped my Workstation version of VM as I just couldn't get the VMWare tools correctly installed as they needed tweaking for the distro I had and I'm no Linux expert. So I've installed VMWare Player instead and a Ubuntu Distro. I've had some playing with it, and again next year will look at doing a conversion. Well.... after my game is complete and I'm happy enough with the current PC version of Swift.

Sounds great, Steve. If you need any Linux assistance, feel free to ask - Debian has been my main OS for quite a while now ...

Sam.

Cheers Sam, know I can rely on you for Linux help

I'll also support the development of this on Linux. I understand the DEB and RPM formats quite well, so I should be able to package it up, and have access to 64-bit and 32-bit OSes.

The only think I'll have to research is static linking (I've never needed a reason to do it before) if this is going to stay closed source, but it shouldn't be too hard. Not sure whether it'll be similar in pascal though.

Thanks for the Offer When I've got 4.2 post Beta then perhaps the next thing is to get it compiling under Lazarus/Free Pascal. Once this is done I'll be pulling in the offers of help