First remove Flutter

sudo snap remove flutter

Then install it manually

cd ~

git clone https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git -b stable

Now modify .bashrc  (I prefer gedit but nano will do)

nano ~/.bashrc

Add this line at the end:

export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/flutter/bin"

Save it then do

source ~/.bashrc

Test the installation

flutter doctor

There may be some missing bits but this should fix them

sudo apt-get install clang cmake ninja-build pkg-config libgtk-3-dev

and repeat flutter doctor until things are ok.

Now I still had some issues

Flutter doctor told me I had a different Dart installed.

So first remove the old one

sudo snap remove dart

Check with

which dart

My configuration still had the wrong dart in it. I searched these

cat /etc/environment 
cat ~/.profile 
cat ~/.bash_profile 
cat /etc/bash.bashrc 
grep -r "dart" ~/.bashrc ~/.bash_profile ~/.profile /etc/environment /etc/bash.bashrc 2

then did

echo $PATH

Which showed no dart references so

ls -la /usr/bin/dart
which dart
sudo apt remove dart

which dart
dart --version
flutter doctor

I then found that it was trying to use a snap version of cmake

cd your_project
flutter clean
rm -rf build/
rm -rf linux/build/

and removed Cmake cache files

rm -rf linux/flutter/ephemeral/
rm linux/CMakeCache.txt 2>/dev/null

Finally I regenerated the build configuration

flutter pub get
flutter config --enable-linux-desktop
flutter create

and all was well and after adding the correct SDK path into the project files, it finally compiled on Linux again. Phew!

The architecture of this is all Flutter and Dart running on a Ubuntu Linux box. There are two pure Dart programs- one to create the game setup and one to do the processing. The first is run manually, the second by crontab. Then there’s the Flutter web app.

The Flutter web app has to read and write files from the file system which of course it can’t do directly. I’ve created a backend of sorts using PHP.  There’s an API; it works but not without issues. If you’re calling a PHP script from a Flutter app, what is the URL?  It depends.

Say the URL is /file?params where I’ve modified .htaccess to pass /file urls onto a PHP script.

If I want to test this on the box in a browser I have to call localhost/file?params but in a Dart program running on the box it just calls /file?params.

The next problem is where are the game files stored. The setup program doesn’t really care. Any location will do so long as it doesn’t need to run elevated.  But the web app is limited to /var/www/html – it’s running under Apache on a linux box. In the end I created a folder under /var/www/game and each game is stored under there. PHP can read mostly anywhere, not just in /var/www/html and this provide a little extra security.

However there’s the not-so slight issue of permissions. The setup program runs under my login – call it user. So files are created owned by user user. The web app runs under www-data so to keep things simple, I’ve set permissions to user:www-data so both can access it. It’s a bit of a faff.

Here’s a tip. If you are developing a Flutter web app, develop it on Linux and do development as a Linux app. It’s far quicker building and launching a Linux app than it is the web app.

This is what you need in the dependencies section in cargo.toml

[dependencies]
sdl2-sys = "*"
sdl2 = { version = "0.37", features = ["image","ttf"] }

It compiled with no problems after saving that.

I’m quite keen on meta-sites. Those are sites that don’t provide information about sites, applications etc. but they provide ways to find it. I suppose another way to describe this would be to say a categorised search engine for open source.

A case in question is libhunt.com. It tracks mentions of open-source projects and software libraries. So for instance you might want to see the most popular C libraries in the last month or even games in C,

Of course you aren’t limited to C or games; there are other open source libraries to look for, or even by the number of GitHub stars.

Libhunt uses the mention of the project on Reddit as it’s source for finding things. So things can change from day to day or week to week.

Only this time because I was doing other stuff I decided to create a Projects folder which contained the Asteroids folder and some other stuff and opened Projects as the Folder.  I copied the hidden .vscode folder into Projects/Asteroids and tried to compile. Errors. Lots of compile errors. I repeatedly edited the tasks.json file with altered paths but no joy. I spent an hour trying before closing the Folder and reopening it with Asteroids as the Folder and with the original tasks.json. It compiled perfectly.

So the moral of the tale is just keep the level of folders down to one when you open the Folder on the files you are compiling. Do not have subfolders.

The tutorials from About.com continue with the 7th one (of about 30) published. This is about C strings which are really just pointers to an array of characters.  Once you understand pointers strings are easy enough to understand.

C is not a great programming language for string handling. To do a lot of manipulation is tedious and error prone. You’ll find safe versions of many of the standard functions for things like string copying and appending. The difference between the safe functions and the non-safe functions is that the safe functions include a maximum length.

For example strcpy() is used to copy a string. It’s definition is this:

char *strcpy(char *dest, const char *src)

That is, it copies a string pointed to by src to a string pointed by dest and confusing also returns a pointer to dest.  What a waste of a function. It could have returned an int saying how many characters were copied instead. Because it relies on src pointing to a string (char *) that terminates with a null (or 0). If the null is missing it can copy a lot more characters and that’s how buffer overflow bugs happen. So you have strncpy which is defined as this:

char *strncpy(char *dest, const char *src, size_t n)

The extra parameter is how many characters are to be copied. That way if it goes wrong, it is limited to n.

The picture? That’s a different kind of sea string…<groan>

If you have Ms Office then you’ll have probably have OneNote. Take the image and paste it into OneNote. Now right click on the image (in OneNote and in the popup menu) you should see Copy Text from Picture as the third item in the menu.

Just click that then paste the text in to notepad, a text editor, whatever. There’s your text.

Here’s the text pasted directly from the clipboard. 100% accurate apart from a ! that it found from somewhere near the edge (just after wain)!

Solution to Puzzle 1
ain, alb, albs, als, ani, ard, ards, arid, ars, awn, blah, blain, dhal
dhals, dirl, dirls, drain, draw, drawn, fah, fain, fan, far, fard, tards,
farl, farls, fars, faw, fawn, flan, flaw, flawn, fra, hain, half, halts, han,
hard, hards, harl, harls, harn, harns, haw, hid, ids, infra, inward,
inwards, lah, lain, lar, lard, lards, larn, larns, law, lawin, lawn, nard,
nards, rah, rai, rain, ran, rani, raw, rawn, rid, rids, slain, slaw, wain, !
wald, walds, wan, war, ward, wards, warn, warns, wars, wha, wharf,
wharfs, whid, whids, whir, whirl, whirls, whirs, Win

One of C’s not so brilliant features is the range of Undefined Behaviour (UB). Things like using an uninitialised variable or having an int variable overflow don’t have behaviour defined; thus it is UB and you cannot accurately predict what will happen. Likewise accessing a NULL pointer can cause odd behaviour. It gets more sophisticated than that. What if you type cast an int to a float?

The LLVM blog have an interesting set of posts on UB and it’s definitely worth reading. I’ve done a lot of C programming, so I’m rarely surprised by my programs but its useful to know about these things. In my case, I started with assembler programming and then learnt C++ and C in that order so my perspective has always been to try and understand whats going on deep down.

I won’t be buying one for the moment but I mention it for another reason. 4 GB is the maximum RAM that a 32-bit OS can use, and on the PI like on Windows it’s actually 3 GB. To be fair you can have two processes each with 3 GB on the 8 GB Pi.

The announcement did mention that a beta 64-bit Raspbian OS is available for download and it’s here. This article shows that the 64-bit Os they tested is faster on the Pi than 32-bit.  This link to the DietPi forum tells you how to boot dietpi into 64-bit.

It’s to be hoped that 64-bit ARM development software will become available. Clang and gcc should be but I’m thinking of the code.headmelted.com version of Visual Studio Code.

As always if you are buying a Raspberry Pi 4B, I strongly suggest you get a case with a fan. They are not expensive and do make a difference. Despite running the Asteroids game, which is pretty intense, I have never got my 4B temperature above 51C. THat said I’ve ordered a touchscreen with a case for a 4B on the back and it doesn’t seem to take a fan. So it will be interesting to see what its like fanless. More on that when the touchscreen arrives.

This is the command you use to update your system, fetch and install software. Some people use apt-get, others plain apt and the two appear interchangeable but they are NOT the same. As it’s making a change to the system, you almost always have to run it via sudo.

They are different?

Well yes. Try these.

apt --help

apt-get --help

Those give different help messages. And as for these:

apt check

apt-get check

It’s curious that apt-get check works, but apt check gives an invalid operation! I’m not sure why they are so similar yet subtly different. If anyone knows, drop me a line.

Having created this post, I subsequently did find out the differences- explained on this page. The simplified version is the apt is a simpler subset and also shows a progress bar when you do sudo apt upgrade. Try sudo apt-get upgrade next time to see it without the progress bar!