Compiling newest commit for Kindle3

[lemedege]

I am having trouble trying to compile the newest Zif version for my Kindle3.
I got the Linux version to compile on my computer, and I am using an old raspberry pi 1 to compile for the kindle.

First I tried the deprecated rasbian wheezy distro as described in the documentation, but the gcc compiler and cmake was to old.
Now I am trying to use buster but I am running into problems.

After cloning the Zif repo and the platform repo into the Platform folder. Then from the root of the Zif folder I run:

source Platform/scripts/BUILD_KINDLE3.sh

./BUILD Kindle3

Compilations fails with a lot of errors. Can someone give me some hints? I am not familiar with sconstruct, so maybe I am missing something important?

Thank you in advance.

[AnotherJohnH]

Hi lemedege,

Sorry to hear the difficulty you're having. Have to admit I have not built this project for Kindle3 for some time due to work commitments and sadly both my Pi's have also died since then. I had intended to find a cross build solution that could be hosted on current MacOS or Linux but have also not made much progress on that either :-(

I suspect that at least one of your issues is cmake. After I last built for Kindle3 I changed the build system for all my projects to use cmake rather than scons (need to update the document on the Zif front-page) and am reasonably certain I didn't retry a Kindle3 build of Zif.

Some options that may help you move forward...

(1) Might be fixable by installing (or building) an appropriate version of cmake (v 3.10.2 or greater) on your Pi. Which version of gcc did you have on wheezy? Maybe post any further error messages here as they will contain some clues about what has gone wrong. I think I also had difficulty building working versions on newer versions of the Pi OS.

(2) I have created a new "historical" branch of this project WorkingKindle3 and have uploaded pre-built Kindle3 binaries for that version. It's only about 20 commits behind the master branch and those changes are not at all important for the Kindle3 build of Zif. See https://github.com/AnotherJohnH/Zif/releases/tag/v0.6.0-Beta. (these binaries are what I currently run on my Kindle3)

(3) You could checkout and try building the WorkingKindle3 branch on your Pi. You will need scons (no cmake) installed on your Pi to build using that version.

(4) I may (but cannot promise) have another ago at getting a cross build from a modern Linux working in the next week or so.

[lemedege]

Ah yes! Cmake complains about a missing config file in the Platform/Source/PLT/targets/Kindle3 folder.
Thank you so much for your explanation and the binary, I will try it out asap.

The gcc version on wheezy did not support c++11, so I had a go with compiling gcc 4.9.0 which also failed :)

Thank you for your work on Zif, the Kindle 3 is an amazing device for interactive fiction with your interpreter.