@silas
@fe50
After over a week of googling around and trial & error on my Vista laptop, i must admit your right, silas. What's worse
is that i haven't been able to find a solution. My findings so far:
1. the 'sh.exe' in both the GCC3 and GCC4 devkit (as found on fe50's drop.io) actually is a renamed 'zsh.exe' , you
can verify by starting it and typing 'echo $ZSH_VERSION'
2. The CHDK Makefile somehow only works with zsh, any other shell makes it barf (talking XP here)
3. ZSH uses various windows dll's, and one of them in Vista has been made more rigid in it's error checking, which leads
to the 'can't fork' error ... and even though i found 2 newer versions on the Web, neither of them behaves better than
'our' well-known sh.exe on Vista.
Incidentally, it seems that My Crosoft had the clever idea to build it's own cygwin-like Unix emulation layer ("SUA"),
except a) they don't advertise or activate it out-of-the-box and b)
it only works on Vista Ultimate/Enterprise ! So I guess (until some of the above changes) i must give up on making the GCC4 mentioned above Vista compatible.
That leaves Vista owners with 2 options:
1. Create a Virtual Machine hosting Win 2000/XP/Linux and install appropiate devkit on that
2. Use cygwin to compile a 4.3.2 devkit:
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/User:Geekmug/Compiling_CHDK_under_Windows (warning: this took several
hours on my netbook !)
I'm currently working on selectable devkit paths in CHDK-Shell, to help making method 2 less painfull.
On a more positive note, i played a bit with the 7-zip to create a selfextracting all in 1 kit; amazingly (due to large portions
of GCC3 and GCC4 devkits being identical) the self-extractor is only 22 Mb, for a payload of ~250 Mb. Expanding this to an
empty folder (with no spaces in the path, as usual !) gives you a ready-to-run CHDK-Shell+GCC3+GCC4+trunk676.
Testing appreciated, it's here:
http://drop.io/gcc_for_chdkshellwim
PS Interesting tidbit: the gmake in the devkit supports a switch for multi-threading ( '-j 2', '-j 4' etc.) I tried this with GCC4
and got an (estimated) 25% compilation speedup on a single core machine with '-j 2' ...
edit: speedup only for devkits installed on FAT32 partitions
