Running Sweet Home 3D on FreeBSD

[mpeterma]

Hello, my name is Matthias and I am a happy Sweet Home 3D user We are currently planning our new home and this great program helped a lot to get a actual impression how it would look like. So at first, thanks for this nice piece of software!

Since I am a happy FreeBSD user too, I wanted to use it on my favourite OS. Thats why I started to investigate some issues I had on this plan. Most of the trouble was related to the Java 3D native libs and a conflict with FreeBSDs Linux emulation. At the end I created a native FreeBSD port which is currently waiting for beeing committed to the ports tree.

For those of you who may be interested, I want to share my findings:

http://bsd-crew.de/~mpeterma/?p=277 (blog article)
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/171760 (PR containing shar archive of FreeBSD port)

I'm also looking forward for feedback. The port is the first version and I am sure there is some potential for optimization.

Kind regards,
Matthias

[Puybaret]

Welcome Matthias. Thanks for trying this port. [:)]
From your post, it seems you just have to use FreeBSD Java 3D DLLs, right?
If you want a portable Jar executable file able to run under Linux and FreeBSD, you could add the FreeBSD DLLs in some freebsd/i386 and freebsd/x64 subdirectories of the archive and test the operating system in SweetHome3DBootstrap.java to select the right directory with System.getProperty("os.name") which should start with "freebsd" in lower case.

By the way, note that I should use Java 3D 1.6 in future releases of Sweet Home 3D, based on JOGL. Do you know if there's a port of the latest versions of JOGL under FreeBSD or if it's difficult to achieve?

[mpeterma]

Hi Emmanuel, thanks for you reply. Yes, it's all about the FreeBSD Java 3D DLL (.so). With you idea of letting SweetHome3DBootstrap.java decide on operation system name (and architecture) the problem likely could be solved.

At the moment I am still waiting for feedback for my port from the FreeBSD developers community. I did hard-code the path to libj3dcore-ogl.so in my patch, only deciding between 32 and 64 bit but assuming the user has the respective OpenJDK 6 installed:

/usr/local/openjdk6/jre/lib/amd64/libj3dcore-ogl.so
or
/usr/local/openjdk6/jre/lib/i386/libj3dcore-ogl.so

I likely should try to find a more generic way to determine the jre lib directory. Do you know a way to do this from Java?

Regarding your question on Java 3D 1.6 - I asked the maintainer of this package for his plans. I guess he could create a version for 1.6 too - should not be a big issue.

Kind regards,
Matthias

[mpeterma]

Hi, in between I checked http://java3d.java.net/ - they still list Java 3D 1.5.2 as their current version. The Java 3D 1.6 link in your post refers to a 1.6 pre-release but I did not find much official stuff. Do you know what the state of Java 3D 1.6 is and if they have an official site to get more information?

Thanks,
Matthias