Talk to the GNUWin II Team

imevil writes "GNUWin II is a collection of Free Software for Windows, and it also includes articles about Free Software and explanation pages. It is multilingual (it was born as a Swiss product). You can browse the CD online or download the ISO from one of our mirrors. The GNUWin II team is ready to answer to your questions, about GNUWin II, and also about GNU Generation, the student association at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne who gave birth to the GNUWin project."

Comments

Major problems

[kruetz]

What was the hardest aspect of producing the GNUWin II CD? Was it selecting the software? Was it making sure the software worked okay (ie, were there any major portings issues, and if so, how much work did you have to do vs. how much did the developer do). Was it something else entirely?

Also, what criteria did you use to select the software? Did you consider which applications had a UI that Windows users would find more comfortable? Did you consider any programs that you weren't able to get running under Windows?

BTW, best of luck with the project. My father has been using the Win32 port of the GIMP for about two years now and loves it! As I type, he's (ab)using his work's net connection to d/l the ISOs.

from the "making-windows-liveable" dept?

[TheReckoning]

Windows is pretty easy to live with as it is.

I guess it depends on your paradigm... command-line commandos don't like the GUI's insulation, while GUI geeks hate remembering a bunch of bizarre program names.

Unless I'm missing the point - the only real failing of Win32 is that a lot of stuff can't be scripted because of the lack of a CLI. Does GNUWIN allow for some of this? Does it have hooks into system admin programs on Win32?

Re:from the "making-windows-liveable" dept?

[stratjakt]

>> Unless I'm missing the point - the only real failing of Win32 is that a lot of stuff can't be scripted because of the lack of a CLI

If anything, Windows is even more scriptable than linux because of COM and it's progeny, ActiveX. The functionality of just about every portion of the OS is available, and that of any application that chooses to expose it's functionality. So script away in VBScript, Javascript, TCL, or any other COM-aware language - dealers choice.

Linux is great and all, but you really wind up with an incohesive jumble of software, each developed in it's own little bubble with no knowledge of the others. If your lucky you can get an integer return value to tie it all together.

The problem with most free software for windows is that it carries the *nix school of thought. No exposed interfaces, and they don't like to play nice with the rest of the system. COM is really a binary format that has nothing to do with OS's (there's no reason it couldnt be implemented in linux), so it's not about it being proprietary.

MS-bashers are quick to point out shortcomings in the OS, but never seem to notice the Good Things (tm) that make it popular.

Re:from the "making-windows-liveable" dept?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that COM makes Windows scripting quite functional given a large object model that lets you control many aspects of the system, including full CIM support. The OOPish nature of it is considerably easier to deal with than parsing stdio anyday. I also like that Windows Scripting is a plugin model that lacks a language (although it comes with VBScript and JScript.) I use Windows Scripting with ActiveStates Perl. Works wonders.

However, while I enjoy the world of scripting, I greatly dislike the standard Windows commandline. I think it was a big mistake to hold onto the DOS moniker, especially when the advent of Windows NT made it possible to provide something entirely new. Batch scripting is a horrible joke given it's syntax and shortcoming of useful commandline utilities. The latter is slowly changing with Windows XP and Windows 2003, but it's still not *ix level.

But then the question becomes do I really want it *ix level for the shortcomings in that I mentioned in the first paragraph? Why not an object-oriented moniker like Windows Scripting provides? You would spare yourself the requirement of parsing and gain the possibility for command completion and parameter information that could even get new users into the habit.

Re:from the "making-windows-liveable" dept?

[m8pple]

There is a COM implementation for linux from softwareag. Admittedly it's geared towards transparent DCOM interop with windows machines rather than ActiveX style scripting, but pretty much all of the base COM stuff is there. Can be a bitch to get things working on it sometimes though.

More interestingly, Mozilla is largely hooked up using COM (well, they call it XPCOM, but it's extremely similar in the fundamentals), and there are mappings to JavaScript and Python. Maybe more people will expose applications/components using XPCOM in the future; isn't the web browser supposed to be the operating system anyway?... or maybe I'm out of date :)

Anyway, I agree, OLE/ActiveX/COM are great, and hopefully linux (or I guess more probably KDE/Gnome) will eventually incorporate some or all of the functionality they provide. But better, with less stupid gotchas, and less bloat (as a user I love OLE, as a developer I loath it:)

Popularity

[bfree]

Do you have, or would you consider adding, a voluntary popularity rating system for the programs on your CD? I'm thinking of the likes of the debian popularity-contest which tracks which programs are installed (and how often they're used I think) to decide what programs should be included on which CD of their release. It would also help for the Linux (BSD, any other FreeOS you care to name) community as they could see which programs Windows people like and therefore can help most in bringing them across from Win to Lin.

Re:Why Bother?

[The_Dougster]

I use Cygwin all the time at work because I don't have the option of installing Linux. It is pretty dang convenient for a lot of things, especially little bash 1-liners for doing bulk file renaming and such. Consider:

$ for i in *.ps; do ps2pdf.bat $i; done
$ for i in *.pdf; do mv $i form_${i%.pdf}-031015.pdf; done

If you have a hundred or so files which you want to rename or prepend things or change the suffix, for instance, it is a slick way to do it rather than clicking away for hours.

Likewise, you can use awk to do some pretty nifty tricks with large text files.

And finally, I don't rate to get a copy of Visual Studio, so if I want to write a little program for some reason then Cygwin's g++ is my only option, or the GNAT Ada95 compiler in GNUWin (I have it installed as well). These GNUWinII programs are more GUI-style programs which really Cygwin is mainly command-line based. I can't get by without Gimp and I have been using the GNUWin version for a couple years at work now.