Will Vista Home x86 systems be supported ?

[Mike Feature]

Just one of the several 0.17 builds I downloaded, worked.

And at the same time : Will the team agree on building only versions tha can ... just allow a very basic operation on Vista ? Since 6726 ... none allowed even to load Part or Sketcher or Part Design WBs

[DeepSOIC]

There is a bit of a problem here, because Vista is very unpopular.
I have no PC around with Vista on it (the one I had died about a year ago). And since I can't test it, I can't fix it.

You can help!
Try finding out, what exact DLL fail to load. Use file system monitoring program, like Process Explorer.

[NormandC]

Vista is a 10 year old OS that Microsoft officially stopped supporting on April 11, 2017.

Why should an open source project with scarce resources continue to support it when its publisher won't?

It is imprudent to continue using an OS that won't have anymore security updates.

[Mike Feature]

DeepSOIC -> I am absolutely open for helping by testing, but, you might have read NormandC's opinion and while I am not guaranteed to be using future versions of Freecad ... what would be the pourpose of testing something that is not designed to work in my comp ?

There are thousands of guys in the world, with a modem or very very slow internet connection and an XP system with a hardware powerful enough to move a CAD program for not too large projects. Unfortunately they cannot write here how elitist and excluding and commercial is to forget about them (again and again), sharing M$ opinion and joinning elites and excluding people and pushing people to spend money on new systems, although their hardware is powerful enough.

Why to suggest how ... short .... is to reduce "center" snapping to circles. Apparently it requires a lot of code to make it operate for squares or almost impossible to make it work for rectangles. And such an improvement requires Windows 700billonplus and 44 processors.


One can move to Linux but you would still support new M$ and APPLE OS ... rare move, truly rare. Stop supporting any M$ or Apple, that would be coherent but pushing away people based on such a rare principle .... I cannot understand it .

[NormandC]

You are really something else. Totally obsessed with your snapping...

As I already wrote, continuing to use Vista puts you at risk, and it's not elitist to say that but plain common sense!!! Blaming FreeCAD for that is asinine.

[Sawfish]

.... I cannot understand it .

I am afraid I cannot understand you.
You should be thankful, that such a powerful software is available for free. Instead of insisting that your suggestion should be prioritised, try to use what is already there, and try to get it to work on Vista. You could properly buy a commercial CAD solution for Vista, but don’t be surprised if it would be much, much cheaper to buy a new computer with Win 10.

Best regards
ZF

[wmayer]

IMO, if it doesn't require too much efforts from our side we should still try to support Windows OSes which are not supported by MS any more.

Fact is that Windows XP according to some statistics is still the third most used system. And the fact that XP doesn't get any security updates any more doesn't necessarily mean that's insecure to use. It only might be a problem if the computer where it is used on has a connection to the internet.

Unfortunately, today I tried the 0.17 version built with VC12 on an XP system and it stopped with the error that it's not a valid Win32 application. The problem is that the binaries created with this compiler version cannot be executed on XP. According to there is a solution but I guess we also have to rebuild all the 3rd party libraries.
So, for XP it's now really the question to stop its support or not. Version 0.16 can still be offered when using VC9 but for 0.17 we need at least VC12 due to the new C++ standard.

@Mike Fearure according to your error description you are still able to run FreeCAD on Vista, the only problem is that some modules don't load. Here you should try to find out what the problem is. In many cases it's just an additional dll that is missing.
Therefore you can e.g. use dependency walker. Download the utility and extract it e.g. to C:/Temp.

Now start FreeCAD and enter this into its Python console:

Code: Select all

import os
os.system("C:/Temp/depends.exe")

On the up coming window load the .pyd files of the modules that don't load. Look at the dependent dlls if there are any errors or missing dlls.

[sgrogan]

In addition to what wmayer has said. The used compiler targets Vista SP2. So make sure also that your OS is up to date.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... pack-2-sp2

[Mike Feature]

wmayer , your post shows that you got my point.

I hope you understand that with posts like NormandC or jmaustpc one tends to take for granted some things that your post says are not.

Posts and attituds like wmayer and sgrogan move me to try to help. I will download from time to time a build and I will try to report its behaviour, particularly if it fails to load standard basic modules.

Thank you again.
For me the post is closed.

[NormandC]

And the fact that XP doesn't get any security updates any more doesn't necessarily mean that's insecure to use. It only might be a problem if the computer where it is used on has a connection to the internet.

Come on, nowadays a computer that is not connected to Internet is mostly useless.

excluding people and pushing people to spend money on new systems

You are so over the top it's ridiculous. After that you wonder why some of us react the way they do to your ramblings.