FrontPanel documentation missing in the Linux release

I downloaded the new FrontPanel release for linux and was pleased that it has been greatly improved to include almost everything, however, it seems to lack the FrontPanelAPI.chm that documents the API. So it seems like I will once again have to find a windows machine on which to run the windows installer to unpack the windows FrontPanel to get at the documentation.

This claiming linux support and not really releasing everything in the linux release seems a bit contradictory. Would you claim Windows support if you made the Windows users find a linux machine to unpack all the necessary files?

This is particularly bothersome because you changed the API such that my python code no longer runs, but I cannot look up the specifics of what changed until I can find a Windows machine to get the API documentation.

Hi dirjud-

If you have a browser installed on your Linux machine, you can access the updated documentation online here (you can browse to our Support page and click on the API documentation link to get here):

http://www.opalkelly.com/library/FrontPanelAPI/index.html

Is there a way to view .chm files under Linux? If so, we could certainly include the documentation with the Linux distribution. We decided not to include the raw HTML files because they are available online. However, per your complaint, we may decide to include them in the next release.

Regarding your Python not working – please let me know the details of that when you discover the problem. Also, please note the bold type in the release topic page that mentions that ConfigureFPGA return values have changed.

My python stopped working because of the change to the ConfigureFPGA method. I saw from the changelog that it had changed, but I had no way to look up what the change was. I did not know the documentation was online. All I knew was that I saw the API had changed in the changelog but did not know where to find the documentation on what had changed. I would prefer some sort of local documentation be released with the code-- whether it is html or chm-- doesn’t matter to me.

gnochm will view chm file in linux. I think there is also a KDE/QT chm viewer as well.

You can install it as root via yum:
yum install gnochm

Lane

Thanks, Lane – good to know.

I have added a support link to the Compiled HTML file. You can download the zip and keep it locally.