Run Gnome -- On Windows

Charles Northrup (followed by many others) writes: "After a long battle with the POSIX.DLL from AT&T's U/WIN, we finally have recompiled over 4 million lines of code for the Gnome Desktop running on Windows. We had to change just under 100 lines to do this. Amazingly, the recompilation of Gnome only took 1.5 weeks. Then we had to spend the next 3 months working on the 47,000 line POSIX.DLL to get Gnome working." Here are some screenshots of this odd hybrid, pointed to by reader dimator. (Northrup invites e-mailed comments and questions, too.) And jumbolo points out the discussion about this at The GNOME Project's Gnotices site.

Comments

Not a native port

[Pete Bevin]

Remember, this isn't a native port to the win32 platform. You'll need an X11 server on your Windows machine - and that's what does all the hard work.

Why UWIN rather than Cygwin?

[Per Abrahamsen]

Cygwin being GPL'ed and comming from one of large Gnome supporters would seem to be more "politically correct". Is UWIN techincally superior?

Re:Why UWIN rather than Cygwin?

[ca1v1n]

If I had my guess, I'd say that the author is already familiar with U/WIN. It does say that Cygwin should work in the long run.

X11 performance

[Per Abrahamsen]

> If you come from NT, the graphics performance of
> X is scary.

When NT was nerd, a fellow nerd tried to show me how much faster it was than X. He took an NT application, moved the cursor back and forward over the menubar, and noticed how NT had no trouble drawing and removing the menus as fast as he could move the mouse. He then took an X11/Motif application, and moved the mouse over the menu bar. You could actually *see* the application draw the menus.

I was confused, because I had never seen X be that slow, but then again, I mostly uses xterm and Emacs. So I took Emacs, moved the mouse back and forward over the menubar (which I rarely use) and Emacs had no trouble at all drawing and removing the menus as fast as I could move the mouse.

The difference was that Emacs by default uses its own Xt based toolkit, rather than using Motif.

The morale is, despite being network transparant, X11 itself is not slow. However some of the toolkits are pure disasters.

Unless Gtk+ is as bad as Motif, it is unlikely that the performance alone will scare users away. The difference in Look&Feel are much more likely sources for nebie angst.

Of course, the issue is somewhat convoluted by the fact that X11 servers under Win often are much slower than "bare metal" X11 servers. I use an old version of Exceed, which is acceptable for text and GUI controls, but very slow for displaying images.

It's a migration path

[maynard]

Look, as soon as the CYGWIN folks release XFree 4.0 for Windows (which they're about to do), Windows folks will have a high quality free X server available. From there it's a simple jump to Gnome and KDE applications on Windows. That's the migration path.

A large IT shop can't afford to simply dump Windows and move their entire userbase to Linux in one fell swoop. There's training costs to consider, application testing for internal conformity within the organization, plus security and productivity issues. If you're managing several hundred to a thousand desktops you can't afford to segment off a department just to try out a new OS, nor can you afford to just move everyone in enmasse given the potential risks involved; what if it doesn't work? You need a migration path whereby both systems can be tested and either junked in case of failure. Successful IT shops plan for failure otherwise they experience failure.

Microsoft has done a good job at killing off potential migration paths away from Windows by either buying up competitors or squashing them with anti-competitive means. See: Netscape. This is a major threat to Windows because within a year or two it will allow an IT manager the possibility to deploy GNOME and its applications on the desktop and test them without being dependent on their success. Combine this with OpenOffice and Gnome-1.4/2.0 and the Free Software community will have provided a safe migration path off of Windows. Most IT organizations are risk averse, but they're not stupid about unnecessary expense. If they can get away from the Windows tax without affecting productivity, watch the world dump Windows.

Cheers,
J. Maynard Gelinas

Re:Blasphemy

[Dr. Evil]

If you teach people Gnome applications on Windows, you can then slip the OS out from under them without complaint.

Personally, I think the requirement to have an X server is terribly flawed... but then I hate this "desktop war" too. I bet they'll eventually be able to do it without relying on Exceed. Ethereal is a Gnome app and it works o.k. on Win32 without one. (http://www.ethereal.com/)

If you're using an X server why not just run X over the network?

Alternative WMs for Windows

[Flavio]

This may be successful with people who are interested in WMs like Litestep, Darkstep and other less known ones.

Having tried most of them, I'd say that they're usually buggy and quite beta. Usability is limited, mostly because you lose most of Windows' native functions (which are dependent on explorer.exe, the WM) and only implement a limited number of new ones.

This feature implementation is usually done by using plugins and modules, which are in theory a good thing. In practice it means that you usually get a slow manager that can crash or behave badly just because of one buggy plugin.

I've managed to use Litestep for a few days, but eventually went back to explorer.exe because features like file managing and printing were still tied to the latter, making the whole idea somewhat flawed.

I hope Gnome works as one would expect. If it does, I'll probably change for good.

Flavio

Re:Alternative WMs for Windows

[rabtech]

Explorer.exe isn't the window manager -- its the shell.

GDI32 is the window manager. On a Win9x system, it can be found mostly inside of GDI.EXE. The 32-bit GDI32.DLL just thunks most of its calls across to the 16-version, because its just faster drawing for most things.

On an NT system, The kernel provides only ~200 native APIs (called the Executive), upon which various subsystems run (Including POSIX and OS/2 ones, among Win32, Win16, and DOS.) One of the subsystems is Win32, which provides a version of GDI which is compatible with the Win9x implementation, but its fully re-entrant and 32-bit.

I think it would be more effective in terms of resource usage and functionality if someone were to whip up a X-window server that communicated with the kernel directly via the Executive. In that regard, it would be a completely separate system from Win32 and could provide its own services any way it pleases. As a matter of fact, if you set a callback in the keyboard kernel module, you could intercept your favorite Key Combo (let's say ALT+1, 2, etc...) and use that to switch control of the display output to a different subsystem. Of course, the video mini-driver interface should be fully re-entrant as well, so having multiple subsystems display their interface on the screen at the same time would be no problem.

There is a lot of unexplored functionality in Windows NT/2000 .... people assume that because Microsoft doesn't do it, it can't be done, which is pretty self-limiting IMHO.


* its been a bit since I reviewed the docs, so if I made a mistake I apologize :)


-- russ -- Senior Forum Admin, Ihateapple.com


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Re:Alternative WMs for Windows

[dasunt]

Here is a link to a guide that explains the major ones : http://www.filemine.com/showDig?id=37

Litestep crashes on me and conflicted with a program or two I had, it looks good, but it didn't work in practice, and I went fleeing back to explorer. Although, I recommend all windows users who are interested to try it, it might work for you. Geoshell is the nicest shell I've tried, and, with a few more features, would be my shell of choice. I haven't tried darkstep, but I'm told its supposed to be good. The problem with most shells is that they look better at higher resolution then lower, unfortunately, I'm trapped at 640x480. :(

Re:requirements

[Mr. Piccolo]

There's a Java one:

WeirdX
It's monochrome, last I tried it, but it's better than nothing :-)

The "best" of both worlds!

[Mike Schiraldi]

Finally: The stability of Windows meets the application base of Gnome!

--

requirements

[Muggins the Mad]

I thought that their claim of how easy it was to change the gnome source to get it to work was a sure sign of a hoax until I saw the list of requirements...

An X server...

:)

- Muggins the Mad

This was hard?

[QuantumG]

I don't get it, I've written a lot of programs using GTK+ and they recompile flawlessly on windoze using VC++. Occasionally I've had to do a #ifdef WIN32 here and there, but really it's about coding the thing portably in the first place. Hell, you can even get precompiled dll's for GTK from the web site! I guess GNOME has a lot of posix specific stuff in it. Whenever the requirements state that the program must run identically on windoze and *nix I always use GTK. Sometimes I'll do the actual development on the windoze box using VC++, sometimes I'll do it on linux, but I'll always make it a habit to do a compile on the other OS after I add each feature (every day or two). I mean really, that's the idea of the toolkit isn't it?

Outsider99

[1010011010]

Interestingly, you can just make windows look like it's running gnome:

http://www.dtop.org/outsider99/img/sshots/gnomesid erbig.gif


________________________________________

1.5 weeks for a recompile????

[JFMulder]

What I don't really get, is how come it takes 1.5 weeks to recompile à 4 million code program. Where I worked we had about 1 million or so line of code and the thing compiled in about 2 hours.

What is the "value"

[garoush]

OK folks. While the end result of this project is "cool" I fail to see the "value" that the end user will get from it.

I mean, do you think the Windows user is willing to learn yet-another-UI that sits next to the Windows UI?!!! Yes the technical group will be excited about this (as I am) but we make up only the very small % of the users at large.

Folks, call me crazy, but as long as Linux and the Open Source community keep there focus ENTIRELY on "cool" and technical-only-oriented projects, we will never be able to convince the Windows user to switch nor are we going to win new users.

Beside, the war is no longer againts MS's OS, it is now with MS's application as well as AOL's content offering.

-- George

There's already a Galeon clone for Windows

[yerricde]

The Windows equivalent of Galeon (i.e. a stripped-down web browser using the Gecko engine from Mozilla) is k-meleon (no, despite the K, it has nothing to do with KDE).

Problems with time?

[ca1v1n]

I noticed that in all the screenshots it reads 12:00 a.m. or 0:00:00 anywhere that time is displayed. Window names also appear to be replaced with 5 asterisks. Doesn't really look polished yet.

I also find it funny that they had issues with GIMP. I have no problem running GIMP native on my windows machine.

Folgers coffee commercial?

[Alien54]

I could enjoy this. It reminds me of the fogers coffee commercial:

"we have secretly replaced this computer users shell program with Gnome. Will they be able to tell the differance?"

(user calls up MS Tech Support ....)

[user] - "Hello, MS? Something is very wrong with my system ..."

[MSTS] - "sounds normal to us, sir"

[user] - "oh, okay ..."

but maybe it is just me ...

woohoo!

[djocyko]

Now I don't need to reboot to linux just to play Gnibbles! Say buhbye linux.

er..no.