It’s been a while since I talked about getting DDRescue-GUI running on Windows, but I have made some progress on this recently, and I thought it would be good to share the news. There are still quite a lot of hurdles I have to get over before it’s all done, but I’m getting there now.
wxPython 4 is now available for Cygwin
It took some time to get this working, but wxPython 4.x is now available as a Cygwin package. This is a major milestone, as wxPython is the GUI toolkit that DDRescue-GUI uses to run. wxPython 3.x has been available on Cygwin for a while, but this version only supports Python 2.x, and I recently dropped support for that version of Python, so it’s been a longstanding goal to get wxPython 4.x working well.
I now maintain wxPython in Cygwin, as the original package maintainer no longer has enough time to keep the packages up to date, so I have also rebuilt wxPython 3, fixing some issues relating to lock-ups and freezing that have plagued my initial version of DDRescue-GUI for Windows.
Current Status and Future Plans
As I write this, the current development version of DDRescue-GUI will run in Cygwin and can successfully perform a recovery. There are still some issues to sort out, and some missing functionality. I aim (but don’t promise!) to have this released before the start of the next academic year, so that it’s all done before I start my final year at university.
In order to get there, there are sadly still a few problems to resolve:
- The wxPython packages need a quick rebuild to fix some dependency issues (won’t take long).
- Fix remaining small issues in DDRescue-GUI when running on Cygwin (uncertain of the amount of time this will take). After this is done, I may provide another prerelease/initial version.
- I need to support Cygwin/Windows in GetDevInfo to collect device information (might take a significant amount of time).
- Ideally, provide output file mounting support on Cygwin/Windows, as I do on macOS and Linux (might take a significant amount of time).
- Provide an installation package so Windows users do not have to install Cygwin first before running DDRescue-GUI (might take a significant amount of time).
So you can see the tasks ahead of me might be quite difficult to tackle, but I have confidence that I can complete them. I intend to provide little status updates on here from time to time when I make progress. It will depend on various other commitments and factors, hopefully these updates will be regular as things move along.
Conclusion aka TL;DR
I’ve made some solid progress towards getting DDRescue-GUI running on Windows, but there are still a fairly large number of hurdles to get over before I can declare it finished. As progress is made, I’ll provide status updates on here and I will do my best to have this done before the start of the next academic year.
That’s it for now, but stay tuned for more posts coming soon!