[wxruby-users] wxRuby 1.9.9 apps don't work (gNewSense 2.1)

[Alex Fenton]

Luis Felipe Lopez Acevedo wrote:
> Excuse my ignorance but does that mean that wxRuby depends on OpenGL? 
> Because if it does, I won't be able to use it since my libre system 
> has no support for OpenGL due to licensing issues 
> (http://www.fsf.org/news/thank-you-sgi).

wxRuby doesn't depend overall on OpenGL. It does include a GLCanvas 
widget, and this specific widget depends on the system's GL library. In 
the case of Ubuntu this is libmesa (http://www.mesa3d.org/), and from 
the link you posted it looks like after re-licensing, this is acceptable 
under a strict definition of 'free'/'libre'.

> I was hopping to run wxRuby apps like I do with wxPython :(

No reason you can't :). But if there isn't a system GL library available 
to you because of licensing, you will have to compile your own wxRuby 
without GL support. On Linux with a wxWidgets library installed, this is 
pretty simple - the only extra needed is SWIG. It should pick up that GL 
is not supported and not attempt to compile that - if not, you can force 
it to skip that widget by doing:

rake WXRUBY_EXCLUDED=GLCanvas

> But I'll check if I'm able to install libgl1-mesa.

I would definitely try this first. The precompiled gems for all 
platforms are built with a maximum set of features, and so in some cases 
(mostly on Linux) some additional libraries are needed. On Linux in 
particular, the binary builds are more of a convenience, rather than 
something we expect to be right for all users on every possible distro.

hth
alex