Exception when starting Nomad Network on Windows

[fatman45]

I just installed nomad on Windows 10 with Python 3.10. Everything installed correctly (after a couple of tries), but I get no GUI when I run nomadnet. This is the error message in the logfile:

[2022-04-07 19:12:32] [Info] Starting user interface...
[2022-04-07 19:12:32] [Error] An unhandled exception occurred, the details of which will be dumped below
[2022-04-07 19:12:32] [Error] Type : <class 'NameError'>
[2022-04-07 19:12:32] [Error] Value : name 'fcntl' is not defined
[2022-04-07 19:12:32] [Error] Trace :
File "D:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\lib\runpy.py", line 196, in _run_module_as_main
return run_code(code, main_globals, None,
File "D:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\lib\runpy.py", line 86, in run_code
exec(code, run_globals)
File "D:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\Scripts\nomadnet.exe_main.py", line 7, in
sys.exit(main())
File "D:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\lib\site-packages\nomadnet\nomadnet.py", line 32, in main
program_setup(configarg, rnsconfigarg)
File "D:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\lib\site-packages\nomadnet\nomadnet.py", line 11, in program_setup
app = nomadnet.NomadNetworkApp(configdir = configdir, rnsconfigdir = rnsconfigdir)
File "D:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\lib\site-packages\nomadnet\NomadNetworkApp.py", line 232, in init
nomadnet.ui.spawn(self.uimode)
File "D:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\lib\site-packages\nomadnet\ui_init.py", line 25, in spawn
return TextUI()
File "D:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\lib\site-packages\nomadnet\ui\TextUI.py", line 156, in init
self.screen = urwid.raw_display.Screen()
File "D:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\lib\site-packages\urwid\raw_display.py", line 92, in init
fcntl.fcntl(self._resize_pipe_rd, fcntl.F_SETFL, os.O_NONBLOCK)

[markqvist]

Unfortunately, Windows cannot run the Urwid library, which NomadNet uses for text user interface rendering. It is currently not possible to run the text UI of NomadNet on Windows, at least not "out of the box".

It might be possible to do this using WSL2 or even CygWin, but it is not something I am going to explore myself at this point.

If you do get it working though, I would be very interested to hear about it.

I have taken the liberty of renaming this thread, so others with the same problem can more easily find info on it.

[markqvist]

Also just adding, that as far as I am aware, this is solely a problem regarding the user interface rendering, due to the very different way that the Windows command prompt and terminal are structured. The rest of the software stack, including Reticulum itself runs fine on Windows.

[fatman45]

Thank you, Mark. I will do some experimentation and I will definitely let you know the results.

[markqvist]

Awesome, thanks for that. It would be nice if there is an easy way to get it running on Windows. If you figure something out I'll add it to the readme so others can replicate it.