Page Category: Installations

1.0 Introduction

I find myself in a bit of a dilemma as far as running Giocoso on Windows 11, because I lack any hardware that is capable of running it in a supported fashion... yet, I do run it on a vintage 2012 spare laptop and Giocoso runs on it perfectly well. In fact, it is much easier to get it running on Windows 11 than it is on Windows 10, thanks to improvements in Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux on that platform.

It remains, however, a problem to offer support for doing something on a platform that remains, for me, technically unsupported! Therefore, I won't: if you want to run Giocoso on Windows 11, I'll give you instructions which have worked for me, but I cannot vouch for them in the long-run and I won't offer support for it. You're on your own, basically! Of course, if you are a well-off classical music enthusiast who loves using Windows and wants to donate Windows 11-supported hardware on which I can continue to develop Giocoso for Windows 11 in a properly supported manner, do please get in touch! [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Giocoso has been tested to work on a physical Sierra Mac Mini, a physical Catalina iMac, the same iMac with Monterey installed and a Big Sur installation on a VirtualBox. I am therefore pretty confident that Giocoso will run on any version of macOS (i.e., from 10.12 [Sierra] upwards), though I haven't tested every single one of them and I have no idea what will happen with anything Apple releases later in 2022. However, anything which claims to be macOS and isn't one of the versions I've just listed has not actually been tested and I do not have the physical resources required to provide support on those macOS versions (unless you'd like to donate hardware that's capable of running those other versions: please get in touch if you do!) For similar reasons, I cannot say whether Giocoso will run on M1 Macs: I've only ever used Intel chips.

Giocoso has several package dependencies -that is, programs which must also exist on your Apple computer for it to be able to work. The simplest way of ensuring all those dependencies are installed correctly is to install them with a package manager called 'MacPorts'. Once MacPorts exists, installing almost any other piece of software is just a matter of issuing an appropriate 'port install... ' command. [...] 

Here are the instructions on getting Giocoso running on Windows 10, distilled into their most concise form. All you get are the instructions on what to type and what to do: no screenshots, no explanations -and if there's a sequence of actions that happen as a result of typing in something, you're supposed to know how to work through those by yourself! Note that the instructions are specific to Windows 10, because you do not need to install separate X or PulseAudio servers on Windows 11. Giocoso-on-Windows-11 therefore has its own installation guide entirely.

If you want or need the long-form version that does take the time to describe things carefully, step-by-step and with pictures and explanations, click here. [...] 

1.0 Introduction

Running Giocoso on Windows is not exactly difficult, but it's not trivially to document either! The basic premise is that Giocoso is a Bash script and so Windows needs to be able to run Bash scripts for it to work on that platform. There are various ways that can be arranged, but in these days of Windows 10 and 11, the simplest is probably to install and run the Windows Subsystem for Linux, Version 2 -or 'WSL2' for short.

WSL2 is a fairly transparent way to run a real Linux distro 'within' Windows -and, in its most recent incarnations, it's fairly easy to get Linux programs that output audio and graphics to 'pipe them' onto the Windows desktop and audio hardware. All that needs to be present on Windows for that to happen is an X server and a Pulseaudio Server. [...]