How to install a "Visual Linux Basic" in Mepis Linux

Visual Basic is an interesting piece of software to easily produce applications for graphical user interfaces. Having this ease in Linux would improve the availability of end-user applications alot. Though many C++ programmers heavily disagree with me because of the many flaws VB has on Windows, it's a fact that it was one of the reasons for rapid adoption of Windows by the users. And because of the very different approach of Linux these mentioned (security)flaws will most probably never exist.

Market Overview

There are three or four active projects that work on the topic:

wxBasic
Website: http://wxbasic.sourceforge.net

wxBasic is a programming language for the wxWindows GUI toolkit. It is actively developed but lacks the development environment. I can't comment alot on this, sorry.

Gnome Basic
Website: http://gnome.org/projects/gb

Michael Meeks, a Ximian employee, works on this. His weblog doesn't say much about it and the version is 0.20. It seems it isn't very useful at this stage of development.

Gambas
Website: http://gambas.sourceforge.net

Gambas is an actively developed programming language and development environment for the QT toolkit, the one that KDE is based on and is Mepis' main desktop. The mailing list became very active in the last weeks. Version 0.7.2 was just released. It's very far in it's development and already very useful.

HBasic
Website: http://hbasic.sourceforge.net

A very ripe tool for QT (0.9.9e). The language is able to make use of C++ QT and C# (dotgnu.org - .NET) components, comes with a complete development environment and tools like a database editor. HBasic is developed by two persons but new releases appear about every two weeks.

I'm not a programmer but judging from the stage of development and discussions in the mailing lists I monitor, I decided to give HBasic a try on Mepis 2003.10.RC2.

HBasic Installtion on Mepis Linux

1. Download the freshest .rpm package from here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=9994

2. Login to a console and become root (su)

3. We must transform the rpm package to a native Debian package. alien is the tool for this task.
Change to the directory where the HBasic rpm resides.
alien -d HBasic*.rpm [Enter] is the command to execute.

4. Now installation of the generated .deb package:
dpkg -i hbasic*.deb [Enter]

5. As a normal user create a desktop shortcut to /usr/local/hbasic/bin/hbasic

It works pretty well for me, here is a screenshot: http://stibs.cc/mepis/hbasic.png

So if you BASIC programmer guys feel the urge to create something useful for Linux, give it a try :o). The documentation on the website is very complete. You can view it online or download as a separate tgz package that it is available inside the HBasic environment on click.

Cheers!
STIBS