Hercules Studio - a Hercules gui for Linux

Hercules Studio

News: Hercules Studio 1.6.0 is relased. See the release notes here

Hercules Studio is a GUI front-end to the Hercules mainframe Emulator on Linux.

To use Hercules Studio the hercules emulator must have previously been instaled. Hercules must be built with GUI support.

 

 

Installing Hercules Studio

On most major distributions Hercules Studio can be obtained using the distribution's package management system. Distributions that already include Hercules Studio are:

  • Ubuntu, Debian and other Debian derivatives
  • Fedora ans SUSE/OpenSUSE
  • Other distributions - see bellow

If your distribution does not yet provide Hercules Studio package you can download the appropriate package from one of the following links:

Hercules Studio 1.6.0 in Deb 64-bit format - For 64-bit DEB-based distributions (e.g. Ubuntu, Debian)

Hercules Studio 1.6.0 in RPM 64-bit format - For newer 64-bit RPM-based distributions (e.g. Redhat and derivaties, Fedora, etc.)

Hercules Studio 1.5.0 in RPM 64-bit format - For Redhat 8.0 and derivatives (like CentOS 8, etc.)

Source tarball: herculesstudio-1.6.0-src.tar.gz


NOTE:The virtual printer functionality is described on this page

Installation Details:

RPM packages:
$ sudo dnf install <filename.rpm>

Deb packages:
$ sudo apt install <filename.deb>

Operation

After installing Hercules Studio, the easiest way to start it is by navigating to Applications menu entry and selecting Hercules Studio from there.

optionally, you can start Hercules Studion from the command line.

There are two command line options that enable customizing it's behavior on startup:

-f <hercules-config-file> - will startup hercules immediately with the given configuration
-r <hercules .rc file> - will setup hercules to use the given "run-command" file

This way the entire startup of the guest operating system can be automated.

example:

HerculesStudio -f mvs38.conf -r autoipl.rc

Prerequisites

Hercules configuration

(Note: You can ignore this part if your Hercules version is 3.08 or above)

Hercules should be configured and built to support a gui (this was not the default on Linux before version 3.08):

./configure --enable-external-gui

Source repository:


There are 3 branches to the repository: Master, 1.6.0 (stable) and 1.5.0 (old stable, based on Qt5):

1. Master
     The master development branch contains the latest fixes and can only be compiled with Qt6 installed.
2. 1.6.0
     This is the last release branch, as it was on November 2022. This is also the branch which currently all distributions should use to build Hercules Studio.
3. 1.5.0 (old stable)
     This is the older branch which still used Qt5.

retrieving the source:

Master development branch (Qt6-only):
git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/hercstudio/git-code hercstudio

Stable 1.6.0 (Qt6-only):
git clone -b 1.6.0 git://git.code.sf.net/p/hercstudio/git-code hercstudio-1.6.0

older 1.5.0 branch (Qt5-only):
git clone -b 1.5.0 git://git.code.sf.net/p/hercstudio/git-code hercstudio-1.5.0

The INSTALL file located in the source root directory contains complete instructions on building and installing Hercules Studio from source.

 

 

(C) 2009-2022 Jacob Dekel
jacob -at- jacobdekel. com

Hercules is (C) copyright of Roger Bowler, Jan Jaeger, and others