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Will Linux For Windows Change The World?
An anonymous reader writes "A month ago, a trial version of a little-known Linux application called 'CoLinux' was released that is the first working free and open source method for optimally running Linux on Microsoft Windows natively. It's the work of a 21-year-old Israeli computer science student and some Japanese open source programmers; in Israel, analysts are already saying it could help transform the software world." (CoLinux is short for Cooperative Linux; we mentioned this project in January as well.)
All the ease of use of Unix running on the stability of Windows.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
So would this be: In Soviet Israel, Windows Runs Linux?
Whats the difference between this and Cygwin? Or (though I haven't tried it, MS SFU). Cygwin seems to run extremely fast and reliably already. Of course, Cygwin doesn't run executables other than standard Windows EXEs, but what isn't available for Cygwin (or natively on Windows) already? This seems like a project to run Linux for the sake of Linux
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
It's about time someone thought of doing this.
The NT(2000/XP) kernel has had the ability to run other native applications for a while.
It sounds like they are going the same way that Win16/WOW, OS/2 and Posix apps currently get run in Windows. There's no reason not to add Linux to this list.
but how would it make linux more popular when they dont have to get rid of windows to run linux easily?
Whatever you do, don't run 'X -configure' in it! It hard locks the system.
PS: There is a bug in the libpam-runtime, so have fun doing any sort of apt-get upgrade action.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)... oops
Seems Like what apple has done with Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X
I'd be interested to know the technical aspect of this 'program'. The article is pretty vague on what exactly it does. I wonder how windows handles it, like as a separate process or group of processes, what kind of filesystem it uses, whether it's emulated or not, and how in god's name he got linux kernel code such as virtual memory management and scheduling to work within the windows environment. Very interesting.
So, the next time your manager is afraid of having a Linux server on the production network, use CoLinux instead?
I'm not one to fawn over eyecandy, but seeing the WinXP interface side by side with the twm GUI (actually twm inside of XP!), I really see a major lack of user interface design effort on the Linux side.
Even with the KDE shell (via Knoppix), the XP UI is much more polished and 'consumer friendly' than the KDE shell.
Not that the UI is the most important part of Linux, of course. Linux has many more benefits that makes the lack of a polished UI relatively minor, IMO.
I have been pwned because my
Using Wine to emulate Windows to emulate Linux...
This comment was thought up very late at night and does not necessarily reflect my views at a more reasonable hour.
This kind of makes the "But does it run Linux?" joke a bit deprecated, wouldn't you say? Oh well, there's still Soviet Russia, Hot Grits, and Overlords.
Why? and How?
Hardware is so cheap, I would just get two boxes.
Landrew, guide me!
the lamb will lay down with the lion and there shall be peace. And the earth will shake with unrest, and stars will fall from the sky. ick.
-- the only good thing the French ever did was two chicks at one time
why would i wanna do that? i am unable to comprehend of a case scenario, where I would wanna do that. If I need to use Linux Compiler while sitting on a Windows box, I would rather use vmWare. Also vmWare has made great progress in their GSX and ESX, to make all this very easy.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
This could be neat, and potentially allow for a speed up in cross platform development. It would be nice to hop back and forth from one OS to the next.
Jeoin
It's already becoming a bit slow... Looks like the Israel Defence Force may have done it again. Already famous for spawning an entire generation of software geniuses now active in the world of wireless technologies, the IDF has now apparently incubated the technical talent capable of creating a project that could change the world: the ability to run Linux on Windows 2000/XP. 21 year-old Dan Aloni, a graduate of an IDF computer unit, has developed a Linux application - called Cooperative Linux ("CoLinux" for short) - that is a port of the Linux kernel that allows it to run cooperatively alongside another operating system on a single machine. For instance, it allows one to freely run Linux on Windows without using a commercial PC virtualization software such as VMware, in a way which is much more optimal than using any general purpose PC virtualization software. A member of the international open source community, Aloni developed CoLinux along with several Japanese programmers, collaborating over the Net. According to the Web site, they've written special core drivers for the host OS which modify the way the host OS receives notifications from the hardware - thus allowing both OSes to coexist peacefully - and run at a decent speed as well. In Israel, acclaim for a system potentially capable of allowing organizations to run Linux and Windows in parallel on the same computer or server has been immediate. Organizations would make great savings if they didn't any longer have to have separate machines for each OS, says Shahar Shemesh, a member of the Israeli open source forum. And Pini Cohen, a senior informations systems analyst at computer research company Meta Group Israel has called the development "an important stage in breaking Microsoft's monopoly." "As the trend is for Linux to take a more important role in organizations," Shemesh continues, "Aloni's development is extremely interesting. The question is how Microsoft will react and whether it will allow support for Windows systems if they have Linux systems installed on them." According to Haaretz.com that is carrying details of this story, Microsoft has so far made no comment on Aloni's development.
With Cygwin, you aren't running a full blown Linux environment. Here is the Cygwin FAQ. I can't read the article (Slashdotted), but judging from the snippet here, it seems like coLinux will run an actual Linux image, which would be a big difference.
Sigs are dangerous coy things
- Dunno, seems like the original article missed the actual link.
1)Run Windows XP.
2)Install CoLinux
3)Install Wine in CoLinux
4)Run windows applications in Wine
Well, if you have nothing else to do on a weekend.........
...so users don't have a choice when they buy Dell, Compaq/HP or other brand names.
:0>
Thats how you change the world.
Worked well for Microsoft.
"As the trend is for Linux to take a more important role in organizations," Shemesh continues, "Aloni's development is extremely interesting. The question is how Microsoft will react and whether it will allow support for Windows systems if they have Linux systems installed on them."
Hmm.. there's an interesting question. Can Microsoft really refuse to support your windows installation if you're running Linux (as an application, even?) Or is this guy just trolling?
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
Either OS can now crash the machine, so the MTBF gets worse. You get to pay both Microsoft and Red Hat. And few people run Linux because they like the desktop applications.
This sounds like one of those "I'm l33t" toys.
The ability to run Windows apps on Linux is far more useful.
Mandrake had an option to install to run within Windows *years* back. Then there's all the emulators and virtual servers, besides the likes of Knoppix.
Running from within Windows is only of use to developers - Joe AverageUser doesn't care. What's the point to run Linux from within Windows? Wow, pay money for WinOS to be able to run a free OS that you have installed without WinOS in the first place.
Cygwin is dying. Netcraft confirmed it, Cygwin is dying. The beleaguered Cygwin community... ;P
Un-news
it allows you to not have to set up a dual boot and let users keep their solitaire while you slowly migrate over. If there's something that will only work on Linux (or that you want users using on Linux) you can force them to use just that app in Linux so they don't freak out from being dumped in the lake and expected to swim.
I also would rather see how Linux is progressing by installing it like another application in Windows than having to set up a dual boot or dedicate an entire PC to it. It's far less of a hassle.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
CoLinux is apparently somewhat similar to Plex86, but additionally requires admin access whereas Plex86 wasn't supposed to. Anyone know more?
I think it's just another false roadblock they've constructed. People have easily been able to use Linux for years, in one way or the other, and it's still not taking off on the desktop. The OSS community have (once again, for the millionth time) solved a problem that doesn't really exist. Kudos.
No, it won't change anything. Interesting and geeky, but nothing that will have an 0.00001% impact on market share.
Hmmm. This whole OSS business is supposed to engender, among other things, choice.
Now, for various reasons, some geek, some pragmatic, some even business-like, I - a die-hard Windows user/programmer of over 10 years - am interested in Linux. Not to the exclusion of Windows, hoever.
It's not necessary to call us whores. Not all of us. At worst, there are the vast majority who think there is no choice, and they certainly need to be educated. But, having educated myself on the alternatives, I still choose to use Windows, and damned if I will apologize for it. If you want to convert the intelligent Windows geeks, (we're out there, lost in a sea of clue-bies) you might want to consider that we're worth a little respect.
By the way, I'm loading Mandrake on a virtual as I type this.
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
There are three approaches to this problem (aside from virtual machines, like VMWare, or emulation).
The Cygwin approach is to provide basically a windows library that implements the Linux API. You can then recompile Linux programs using that library to run on Windows.
The CoLinux approach is to basically run the Linux kernel as a process on Windows, and then you can run Linux binaries under Windows. Think of it as conceptually like User Mode Linux, but running on Windows instead of Linux.
The third approach is what my employer is doing, in a product that we have in beta right now, which I won't name since I'm not sure if we have announced this yet. It's kind of in between Cygwin and CoLinux--it provides an implementation of the Linux API on Windows, so you can run Linux binaries, but it has no Linux code in it. Basically the same way WINE lets you run Win32 binaries on Linux.
I just wish that the emulation programeslike VMWare/VirtualPC could 100% emulate the environments. Using Virtual PC on OS X is amazingly useful. I'd rather run windows on top of Linux if I needed to use windows, but I would need 100% capability for games and such. Maybe when we have immediate booting ability we can have both OSes loaded into memory at once??
Just some thoughts.
-------
artlu.net
it would seem more productive to do this in reverse... that is to say, windows running under linux... not simply a compatability layer [wine] or an emulated system [vmware] -- it would be cool to see the NT kernel running as a process under linux (just as linux ran under mach in MkLinux, or OS9 runs under OS X)... it would probably be a lot faster to reboot that way... ;-)
-m
>Cygwin was a nice placeholder until Linux arrived for Windows. Now it is irrelevent. I wouldn't be surprised to see reports of its death shortly.
Not so fast, hombré.
CoLinux doesn't even have X yet.
You actually NEED Cygwin/X to be able to display any graphics, unless you want to run text-only... Which is reliable and all, but visually underwhelming for what Linux can actually do.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
4.) ???
5.) Users
cleartype fonts? You mean sub-pixel hinting? That's been available for a long time.
How long before MS issues a service pack that "breaks" CoLinux?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
How about... Using Wine to emulate Windows to emulate Linux...
Probably wouldn't work. I doubt Wine (not)emulates that part of Windows.
But you should be able to do it the other way around: Run Windows apps in Wine in Linux in CoLinux in Windows.
Wouldn't be totally silly either: You could more ealisy compare the apps behavior under Wine and under Windows. (Though if it was sluggish or flakey on the Wine/Linux/CoLinux/Windows stack you'd have to confirm with Wine on native Linux to be sure it wasn't an artifact of running Linux under Windows.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Sorry, but this sort of thing IS NOT going to draw more people to Linux, if that's what you're thinking. This "try it befor you buy" shit is nonsence (the same reason I have nothing good to say about these bootable Foux-Linux distros). Pick one per box. Have two boxes if you must. But the reality is that Linux is not Windows, Windows is not Linux, the two do not meet except by Wine and Samba. If you need both, you need two boxes.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
a dedicated server sitting at the ISP, a laptop, a home server, and a home work station and a system sitting up in the closet.
I used to think it was nice having lots of computers. But once I hit three systems it was getting ugly. One work station, one test system and a dedicated server. Getting rid of the dedicated server and going to two systems at home was very nice.
It's definitly not worth it to fork out several hundred minimum to assemble a system just to try a "free" OS. I have an extra computer to try out Linux's latest offering every once in awhile. If you have an extra system lying around then it may be worth it to just use it to try Linux.
In my case, I really don't care to have three systems junking up my room. My home server runs WindowsXP and Linux didn't wow me enough to take it's place. Now that I got Server 2003 for free from the Uni it's highly unlikely that Linux will replace it once 2003 replaces XP.
And when I buy my new system to get back into the upper range of systems, it'll get 2K on it and replace the current 2K system which will be relegated to the attic.
Next time I try Linux, I'll definitly be checking out this offering so I don't have to pull down a third system into my room.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
In short: get companies to develop for Linux. Give them as incentive all the LGPL libraries already available and not ported or better maintained.
Then convince them that the 95% market share of Windows is not a problem, since the app will run in Windows anyway.
Much like X can run on Mac OS X?
Yes, OpenGL/SDL isn't good enough, Linux needs to implement an inferior, proprietary API.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Perhaps if DirectX actually was inferior, and if it wasn't the primary or only API for 90% of the games out there, you'd have a point.
With the tiny micro ATX computers available today, you could have two or three machines and a keyboard/video/monitor switch in the space of a standard desktop case. Then you really /can/ run all the OSes you need to, without them comingling. Now that I'm used to having 4 PCs with different OSes handy (FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris x86, Windows), I couldn't imagine running only one computer. What happens when one of them goes down, anyway? It's nice to have backups.
How about a list of things wrong with your post instead?
1.) Linux has plenty of great fonts, it just depends what distro you pick and if you install more than just the base packages.
2.) DirectX is a MICROSOFT ONLY format. It will never, ever, be in any linux distro except in emulation form. And for second, why should it be? OpenGL is fine and great, and with 2.0 coming out you can stuff DirectX where the sun don't shine.
3.) Great, so linux gets to turn into Windows by taking away the free choice of picking your own gui? I don't think so! MORON.
Maybe this project doesnt "Fill the gap" but there's enough decent distro's out there to make using windows a pain in the a$$
~~ Please keep your arms, legs, and outright stupidity inside the ride at all times. Thank You ~~
Tyler Hamilton has things to say about Linux zealots. Ahem.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
For the moment, my only computer is an XP box. I'd rather have a Mac, but can't afford one at the moment. I'd also rather run Linux than XP, but there's a couple XP only apps I don't want to give up. Which means that my Dell 4600 is running XP exclusively, even though it has a second drive and even though I'd rather boot in Linux 95% of the time.
After playing around with Mepis, I was immediately impressed, and I'd like to do nearly all of my work in Linux. I don't want to give up my ability to run Windows, though, so what I want is a dual-boot system. Trouble is, I've asked at least one well-credentialed tech person who uses Linux heavily, and he says dual-booting is still fraught with complications.
I guess my question is, why is it possible to have a decent Linux distribution that runs within XP, but it's not possible to take a dual-drive Dell and easily make your system let you choose between XP and Linux atstartup? And why would anyone want to run Linux within XP, if they could simply have a dual boot system? Seems to me, if you just want to get a flavor of what running Linux is like, get ahold of Mepis and give it a whirl. Your next step should be the ability to gracefully install Linux and make your computer a dual-boot system.
To me, Linux under Windows sounds a lot like divorcing your wife but continuing to live in her house.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
1.) cleartype fonts
Couldn't care less. I've never been bothered by my fonts.
2.) automatic directX compatibility for games
This would be a good one. I could go 100% Linux at home.
3.) one solid universal gui
This I don't get. One of the strengths of Linux is options. I don't use a computer the same way as the guy next to me, why should we be stuck with the same interface? I'm incredibly productive in AutoCAD at work, partly because I have customized the interface to exactly the way I use it (to the point where nobody can use my machine).
I know training and support require standardization, but the more you use something, the more you want to make it work the way you like. Standardization breaks this, and makes people less happy and less productive.
And you forgot the most important thing:
4.) Applications!
If I could run AutoCAD on Linux, I would use it at work (for something other than a server). My mother would consider running Linux at her business, if the main application she uses supported it. People read the requirements for the software they buy, and it says "Windows XP", so they run Windows.
Phat Linux first did this many years ago!
http://www.phatlinux.com/about.html
In other news, the IDF has created an invention that they call "fire." IDF officials are saying that this new invention could revolutionize the world as we know it.
A big part of what keeps many users from switching is fear of being in a totally new environment that don't understand. This provides a midpoint between the two worlds: get a taste of Linux, and if you start to panic just hit the good old "Windows" key on the keyboard and you're back to familiar territory. (Or CTRL-ESC, but chances are if you're running Windows you have a keyboard with a "Windows" key...)
.conf file that you have to edit by hand.
Of course, the second biggest part of the hurdle is customizing the system without having to learn all the nuts and bolts of operating system function. This is *almost* solved, but compared to the rather intuitive and standardized interface that Windows has nothing in the OSS community has been able to match it.
For example, tweaking options for a program should be done via an "options" menu of some kind there is a logical, visual organization to the settings with checkboxes and drop down lists, not a 30+ page
God help you if it's case sensitive or syntactically anal, too; you may never get it right unless you've done it several times before. Your average home user doesn't have the patience to deal with that kind of thing, and until this hurdle is taken down they'll stick with Windows for sure.
=Smidge=
Why, because I believe in the Great Pumpkin!
Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger, Pepsi, Pepsi!
"They say travel broadens the mind, so I went over the falls in a barrel." -Thomas Dolby
I see what you're saying about Linux vs. window managers and being separate projects. However, when considering an OS, the UI is a critical component to consider.
I liken it to hamburgers on the Atkins diet. Sure the bun is not the meat, and it's probably better for you to leave the bun and pickles off. But it's just not the same.
I have been pwned because my
How often do we, here at /., ask if a new software development is going to change the world? Constantly. And how often does it? Never.
This is no exception. It's just a sort of more native version of Cygwin. Sure, it could be kind of nifty, but it's not some major breakthrough which will leave the world shocked.
Could people please stop being so melodramatic with their subject lines?
Do you know what approach Corel Linux took? I remember one of it's big selling points was that you could run it from Windows just like any other program; and to delete it you just had to delete it's folder. It was slow, but it worked.
When can we expect to see a "port" of Windows to run as a driver aside with Linux? Essentially they look the same, but it is politically more correct to have Linux as master and Windows as slave.
It adds a new dimension to the entire joke. Now, you can run a Beowulf cluster of IBM zSeries 900's running multiple Linux images, which are in turn running coLinux which is running Linux on Windows.
NT has claimed to have POSIX compatibility since 3.1 , but this (if ever) applied only to source code compiled on a Windows compiler....
definitely a good thing, because it might then encourage more people to take up Linux and have a look at it. It would give those people who are so 'married' to Windows a chance to look at what all the fuss is about, and to really evaluate Linux and see if it would be right for them. They wouldn't have to partition, re-format, re-jig their hard drive... and if things got too tough open up the appropriate Windows application to get their job done instead.
I also see it as a good thing in some corporate environments. Say you have a call center, and all the operatives have been trained to use some program for their task (let's say they're in a credit card environment) and their software is Unix based. Well, porting to Linux could be straightforward. Also for these operators they don't need to access the computer for anything much besides this application... and maybe the web and email to keep in contact with people. So these guys would have Linux desktops. Now there would also be some other administrative people who don't take calls, and who have other tasks. Like payroll, or some other fancy tasks. Maybe these programs were written for Windows, and there is no Linux port planned. Rather than trying to make these programs work through Wine or Crossover Office or something like that the obvious solution is to make Linux run on top of Windows. Then people have the best of both worlds for those kind of operations.
I also see advantages of running CoLinux in a dual boot environmemnt. That is, if you are short on disk space. I presume that CoLinux would run on the same filesystem as Windows. In a traditional dual boot system you might have a 20 gb disk, and split it up two ways - 10gb for Windows, and 10Gb for Linux. Let's suppose you are a Windows fan, and you easily eat up that 10Gb for Windows use, and hardly use Linux, except to 'play around with'. You then have 8Gb of disk space that Windows can't access natively (yes there are third party apps now that get around this) and as such you are short on space. So if Windows and Linux are sharing the same 20Gb partition, then Windows can use more than that smaller partition on those occasions it is deemed necessary (like downloading by broadband that 5Gb linux distribution on X # of CD's).
I don't see it as a "real major" security problem, because I perceive its main target is the desktop, and not for running security-critical applications which could get hacked to shreds. Also that these Windows boxes would be firewalled anyway for Internet access - behind native Linux firewalls on native Linux machines.
Mark.
There are a lot of laptops out there that aren't powerful enough to run linux on vmware on windows or windows on vmware on linux.
I wouldn't do it without a 3.0 Mhz system with 2 Gb of RAM, and at least a 40 Gb disk. I happen to have such a laptop, and I bought it especially for this purpose and paid lots of bucks for it. But my old 1.7 Ghz, 30 Gb, 256 Mb RAM Vaio R505 should be able to handle this...
It's a game about a movie about a game.
That's pretty close. =)
So I noticed the cygwin.dll, so I guess 'native' is relative..? Definately cool, but I'll stick with Hummingbird and an smbmount from my debian box.
You're going to be running applications on an unstable kernel. So why do this anyway? It would be better to run windows on the linux kernel instead of vice versa.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
I'm assuming you ment the ABI not the API. The API is what Cygwin does to run the binaries you need the ABI. This is why Linux can run *BSD programs because it supports the ABI. That also what Sun and IBM did for thier Unixes so they could run prorgams compiled for Linux. You still need the libraries though. Of cause if you could get the ABI working you could always do static comiles which removes the need for libraries but you'd still need X for the GUI. You'd also need to do some magic to get sockets and pipes working because as far as I know they are built into Windows. (You could lincense someone elses I guess)
Just because a thing can be done,
doesn't mean that it should, right?
Oh great. A new method to allow
Windoze viruses, trojans, and other
malware into a "linux sandbox".
Microsoft will claim "See, linux
applications are vulnerable, too!"
Much better for Wine, Bochs, etcetera
to run native Windoze applications
well (and in a "Borg-Box" so they
can't foul linux).
Sorry, you missed out on what I think would be your #0 ...
... and you know what, as long as they support it I don't even care that I don't have the source to the ATI driver).
0.) Driver support from the vendor side
Even if we had directX compatibility we would still be missing video drivers, storage drivers, etc. All of those items, to be a sustainable resource, have to come from the horses mouth (as in I can get my Radeon working with the Open driver, but to get 3D acceleration I need the binary driver from ATI
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
You know how windows has done the above? Not because it considered the operating system as 'a controller of input and output of the computer and basic services to programs'. It split its kernel design into two parts, ther kernel as above, and the Windows executive that handles all the optimization hacks. And guess what, it works. And its even stable after 10 years.
Your OS design school is based (like most academics) on the 1960s operating systems. Not every operating system has to be implemented in a strict monolithic kernel, or a strict microkernel method to be called an operating system. The operating system should make it easy for an application programmer (not a system programmer) to make an effective program. This includes all the hacks such as integrating the messaging system and video subsystems. An application programmer will thank you for it (and a system programmer will curse you for it, but thats the way it has to be).
OK. So i've got a DFI LanParty NF2 running an OC'd barton. this is a pretty nice performing
nForce2 mobo with dual 10/100LANs, onboard 5.1 audio, SATA, 400MHz FSB, etc.
We all know that the 2.4 kernels don't do well with the onboard LAN(realtek and nvidia), and
audio support is iffy, (although 2.6 is supposed to be better...)
AND we all know that nvidia's closed/proprietary drivers aren't necessarily the best thing(kernel
taint, no tuning, etc.) which means the distribution I chose, RH9(2.40...shrike) sucks because
it's way too much work to get the LAN(nv) and audio(soundstorm) to work,(yes i did try
building from the source tarball downloaded from nVidias website.)
So i caved and bought XP. It works fine(other than actually giving money to M$).
Here's the big question: if i try to run RH9 on top of XP with colinux, will the network and
audio work better, since XP already knows how to talk to those devices?
and what about all those colliding IRQs that i can't figure out?
BTW, just because i use IRIX/RH9/NT4/OSX at work doesn't mean i want to hack at home too...
"...that's as white as it gets; all the bits are on..."
Pretty much
- every
distribution can make this happen for you automatically... (yes, speaking from experience). The most recent of which I installed was Mandrake, works like a charm, nice easy colorful menu and all =-P (This is on an old Thinkpad 600E, with only one hard drive, so I'd assume you would have no problems at all).coLinux Wiki!
Great. Who knew. I can now effect a linux kernel with the BSOD. Scary isn't it. While the project seems very good for those of us in the corporate world stuck with MS and sick of compiling for Cygwin, one wonders how fortunate we are to now be able to kill linux kernels via BSOD too.
-- Friends don't let friends buy Nokia.
...You made all windows and mac apps run on linux, then who in there right mind would use windows? Well besidees the cool desktop, I love those rolling green hills!
I think that by doing this, it would only motivate people away from Windows and onto the Linux platform. Besides, with Linux LiveCDs, we can run Linux on Windows boxes without having to rid outselves of Windows itself.
And on a different note, people will get to see the most stable program that Windows has to offer. Even though it may crash a few times, giving Linux a bad name... but it's Windows fault.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
Incidentally, the palestinians aren't famous for their gentlemanly war either. Both sides are guilty of torture, sending their kids to blow themselves up in the name of religion, et cetera et cetera et cetera, as would say the king of Siam. It's a centuries-old hatred and it isn't likely to end soon.
I'd be more interested in the ability to natively run an entire windows environment in linux, i'd like to see further development of WINE, to the point where it can run most applications, and perhaps even an entire operating version on windows. Since my only windows box is my laptop, i'd like the ability to still run certain windows applications i need while staying inside my favourite linux environment
I love to deploy my packages
"The easiest option I have found is the use of two HDD's: one for linux, one for XP. Choose your poison at boot time using the BIOS options. This gets me around upgrade problems with MBR's and GRUB config."
Not sure if this means anything to you, but as an experienced Windows user, I completely concur with this.
"Having not used this native-emulation mentioned, I still rather doubt that Linux would have truly have control enough to avoid Windows' shortcomings."
I dunno what limitations XP would impose, but I imagine access to the graphic system would be limited. My reason for speculating on this is because VM-Ware still, to the best of my knowledge, cannot access the 3D hardware. I imagine it's too much trouble to jump through Microsoft's DirectX hoops.
" If XP locks up (which I have NEVER had) I imagine you lose Linux."
Why would this be the case? I mean, obviously if XP really really stalled, Linux wouldn't be able to run, but surely all saved data would be recoverable when you reboot? This is the main reason I'm replying here, I'm not sure I fully understand what you're saying here.
"I'll stick with Mac OS X and Linux, except where XP is required for specific software - you gotta do what ever it takes sometimes."
Though I personally believe that a lot of MS's business practices are overblown (at least on Slashdot...), I respect that you stick with the tools that you need. I really wish the religions around OS's would melt away.
Sorry for preaching, but I've been chewed about my choices for using Windows before. Never mind that the apps I run are only on Windows, I'm some sort of retard. Heh. I think most that have roasted me about it would be surprised that I have dabbled with Linux.
"Derp de derp."
1.) Don't do a goddamn thing to my fonts. My fonts are much nicer looking than Windows fonts ever were TYVM.
2.) Get rid of DirectX altogether, get OpenGL back on track, and take that piece of MS forced upgrading along with it.
3.) Don't even think about it. Some like Gnome, some KDE, others like a more minimalist approach. Focus on interoperability of themes, and such things but don't even suggest ridding one in favour of the other.
I dual-boot XP and Mandrake, but frequently I wish I could use apps from both at once. When developing a web site, for example, I want to simultaneously use Paint Shop Pro (XP) and Apache/Perl/etc (Linux). It's a pain to reboot into XP just to fool around with a graphic.
This is a specific example; my general point is that it'd be very handy to be able to switch between all your favorite apps without having to reboot.
P.S. I don't think dual booting is "fraught with complications" -- maybe it used to be, but not any more.
I should buy some cement.
A lot of newbie users who have some desire/need to do UNIX software development (for example, a good deal of MUD "coders") could benefit from this a lot. Most suffer through the hell of trying to get Cygwin to compile and run their apps. Getting an easy-to-install Linux system that Just Works would be bliss for these people.
;-)
And no, a second box is not a solution. "Hardware is so cheap" doesn't cut out the fact that many aspiring coders may not even have $50 (hell, I started at 9, think I had that kind of chash?), may not have the desk space, may not want the extra power drain, may not want to get a second monitor (or a KVM), etc. Just running Linux in a "window" on Windows is very cheap ($0, assuming they already own the Windows machine), provides no physical space/power hassles, and would be rather easy to use.
Again, for some people, switching to Linux, a second box, or dual booting just *isn't a choice*. For those people, CoLinux is a boon. For the rest of us, it's just a sick toy.
I recall there being a lot of discussion when ms introed Cleartype about Steve Wozniak having developed a virtually identical font smoothing algorithm for the Apple II. Has this been rebutted? Do a google search for wozniak and cleartype. Here's one article.
Isn't this just UserModeLinux ported to Windows?
Whaddya bet that MS changes their EULA to make running another OS concurrently a violation of said EULA? I can see that happening judging by their history.
User Mode Linux hacker and all-round-cool-dude Dan Shearer has previously mentioned he's interested in porting Linux to the JVM. This would enable you to run native Linux apps on anything than can run a JVM, and also allow you to have multiple OSs on those machines.
Its pretty hard tho - the JVM is nowhere near a complete hardware platform, but it would be possible.
You can't say that this won't take the world by storm. Just imagine -- a system with all the stability of Windows and the user-friendliness of Linux! What's not to like?
May we never see th
Perhaps if DirectX actually was inferior, and if it wasn't the primary or only API for 90% of the games out there, you'd have a point.
DirectX is great for PC Games - but for real scientific/commercial work it *SUCKS*.
Whenn Boeing dows the next 7E7 fly-though in DirectX, give me a call.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
It's not "fraught with complications" -- the repartitioning is the most technically involved step. It's just a pain in the butt to be rebooting your system and to have a set of apps that can't be running at the same time as another set of your apps.
May we never see th
There is basically one issue with dual booting linux and windows, and that is where to put your data. Linux now has pretty good NTFS read support but reliable NTFS write support is only available by using the NTFS.SYS driver from Windows itself. There IS good support for changing the contents of a file on NTFS but not for creating files, enlarging them, etc. You can use this to create a disk image on an NTFS volume for use with linux, but that won't solve the problem of having both operating systems having access to a partition they can both read and write. You could use something like FAT32, but it sucks. It's slow, it has silly limitations, it doesn't support any kind of security whatsoever. Other than that, dual-booting the two is trivial. Just make your /boot your primary master, install Windows on your secondary master, put your / on your tertiary master and your fourth fdisk partition slot is an extended, for whatever else you need. Set the NT partition active, install NT, then boot a linux CD or floppy (heh) and install, placing the boot loader in the MBR and teaching it about NT. Voila, dual boot. Now you just have to decide on how you're going to handle those files...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Part 1 | Part 2
Until then we have
THIS
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
Excellent explanation.
Of coure the primary benefit isn't just being able to run Linux binaries, but rather being able to run an entire Linux distribution! For example, you could boot Knoppix without exiting Windows! That's pretty freakin cool.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Huh? What complications? I dual-booted for several years before ridding myself of Windows entirely, and never ran into any complication that a reinstall of the bootloader wouldn't fix. (And even that can be avoided, if you install Windows before Linux.)
It's a little more complicated if you want to share files between systems, but it's not that hard to work around.
"It sure was strange to see something on Usenet about me that didn't involve Klingon gang rape." -- Wil Wheaton
So how does this run on Win2k/XP if the drive is formatted in NTFS? Does it communicate with Windows when writing? Or does it need its own partition?
Who doesn't like free music?
The only thing I'd use this for is to run WINE to get my favourite Winshit apps running under .... wait a minute!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
QEMU can't run windows very well yet, but it runs Linux, ReactOS and handful of others already.
Here I go feeding trolls again...
> 1.) cleartype fonts
Xft looks -MUCH- nicer. The most recent generation of all major applications supports Xft now, although this is a very recent development. Until fairly recently, getting gorgeous fonts in all your apps was quite a chore.
> 2.) automatic directX compatibility for games
Hopefully, pressure from growing Mac and Linux markets will attack this problem from one angle, that is giving game manufacturers a good reason to use open APIs, and wine's ever-improving implementation of linux-native directx will attack the problem in the more direct way you suggest.
> 3.) one solid universal gui
Just as long as it's WindowMaker !!
Anyway, IHBT IHL IWHAND
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Bzzzt. Wrong. YOU are a troll. The most cursory of Google searches shows the article appears verbatim as above here.
I guess my question is, why is it possible to have a decent Linux distribution that runs within XP, but it's not possible to take a dual-drive Dell and easily make your system let you choose between XP and Linux atstartup?
It is possible. Most major distributions (eg, Red Hat, SuSE, stacks more) detect the presence of your Windows partition and simply add it to the boot menu.
It won't change the world.
Running linux under windows is not the same thing as running linux. Period.
It may be better than running VMWare or the like.. but it's not "2 systems on one computer."
It's still windows, with all that implies.
Unless there is some miraculous (and I do mean miraculous) kernel level integration..... there is no performance benefit or anything like that...
So.. is it neat? yeah.. kinda. Is it revolutionary? Hardly.
XEN is far cooler....
DirectX is great for PC Games - but for real scientific/commercial work it *SUCKS*.
Much more money in PC games though I'm afraid. And as always, money talks.
To me, Linux under Windows sounds a lot like divorcing your wife but continuing to live in her house.
Windows will go down on you much more often than any woman will.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
I think it'll be good for teaching as most schools will already have windows machines and you know how pricey those sparcs are. And the fact that they don't have to restart the machine and use a boot-selector, helps reduce f*ck ups by the admins at the said schools and also helps reduce the security factor of being able to select the boot, though linux to begin with would be better...and using a winex/etc. type of setup is better.
In essence, it's more of a demo of their skillz.
Gotta give 'em braggin' rights though more braggin' rights goes to those who got Micro$oft software to run on linux.
Wonder when a 2.6.x kernel version will be out.
Most Linux distributions, when you install them, will automatically put in a boot loader like Lilo and configure it so that you can boot either Linux or Windows. Some can even repartition the drives for you to make room for the Linux partitions. Installing a dual boot system couldn't be easier.
/home and then have to boot back into Linux, move it to a FAT32 partition, then boot back into Windows.
There are some issues. First, there is a risk that one OS could mess up the other. The bigger problem is that Windows doesn't always play nice, but you can do some serious damage in Linux as root. The biggest problem with dual boot is that you can't use both OSes at once, and it usually takes several minutes to switch between them. Because of that my dual boot boxes usually end up sitting in one OS most of the time. Finally, it can be a bit cumbersome to move data between the OSes - writing on NTFS partions in Linux is still kind of iffy, and Windows in general won't see the Linux partitions. Nothing is more annoying than to boot into Windows and realize that you left something important in
All? Have you downloaded and installed the Bitstream Vera families into your X11 font server?
If she is still cooking/cleaning then what's the difference? It's not like she was going to bang you anyway.
... is hardware support. Nobody can sell hardware without making sure that it works for Windows out of the box; the same isn't true for Linux. It's a chicken and the egg problem: there won't be "mandatory" hardware support until Linux is widely used, and Linux won't be widely used until there is mandatory hardware support.
Of course, in the meantime the folks whose job it is to get this stuff working are able to do it pretty well without much help from the manufacturers. I don't know what's involved with it, or even who does it... I just know that I can load Mandrake on a machine and have 80% of the stuff "just work", and 15% more work after a quick google.
I just read through all the comments here and even for /., there's way too much BS.
/.
This is cool for a number of reasons:
1) It can access rootless X via Cygwin's xserver.
2) It can run linux from your dual boot partition! (No, I haven't done this myself but it's in the FAQ.)
3) Some of us want to run both XP and Linux simultaneously from our laptops. (No, I'm not going to carry two laptops around with me.) I need XP for Matlab and its windows-only toolkits and also for the ultra-cool Medved QuoteTracker, and I want Linux for just about everything else.
4) Cygwin is great but not everything compiles or runs correctly within it. (E.g., even Perl has bugs within Cygwin.) Also, contrary to popular belief, not everything is prebuilt for Cygwin and dl'ing binaries saves me enough time to read
5) I think all the people shouting "one box/one OS!" are in dire need of a paradigm shift. Thinking like that is the reason MS rules the OS world, and we should be celebrating anything that chips away at that misconception.
6) Finally, having linux and Windows apps side-by-side will go a long way towards getting linux coders to improve their terrible looking GUIs. Contrary to some of what I've read here, IMHO, improving the look of linux is the single most important requirement for gaining mass appeal. And like it or not, XP apps today look a lot better than Linux ones.
Probably one of the worst ways to be introduced to a new system is through emulation. Its going to make the emulated system look bad due to the very nature of emulation- visual/performance/etc.
This project is pretty damn close to being a complete waste of time for everyone involved. Unlike something like Virtual PC that actually serves a purpose. I'm convinced that Mac OSX along with Virtual PC is the easiest and only way for the majority of the users in the world today to ditch a dedicated Windows XP box. Of course, why try so hard to ditch something like XP that works pretty well to begin with. There is a time and place in this world when it is appropriate to spend large amounts of time trying to make "a point" of some sort. But this ain't one of them.
Red Hat 9.0, Mandrake 9.2 and Knoppix 3.3 'just work' for me including supporting the motherboard sound on my brand-new off-brand (ECS and Gigabyte) Athlon motherboards. No crashes, normal mouse behavior and keyboard works fine on GRUB or LILO boot selection. Frankly 'name brand' hardware, by that I assume Dell, HP or Sony, is crap, but I don't know what you are doing wrong since I've not seen those problems on at least recent Dell (1.8GHz P4) hardware. Haven't tried an SBLive! card (the motherboard sound is good enough for anything I need) though. I am a little suspicious that you won't name the hardware or Linux distro that is supposedly causing you such problems.
In fact, it appears the Cygwin (POSIX inside Win32) people and the Wine (Win32 inside POSIX) people are using each other's programs as a round trip test case. And yes, you can probably run Wine inside CoLinux if it implements all the POSIX APIs that Wine requires. However, because this CoLinux is kernel level, it probably can't be run inside a free Windows ABI emulator until the ReactOS (NT kernel clone) people get their codebase to at least 0.5.
Wow! Its so simple!
I can't even imagine why everyone isn't doing this!
Er, I mixed my terms. This is what happens when I slashdot with a serious headache. You put /boot on your first primary, winxp on your second, / on your third. My information is still good, but my terminology is wrong, potentially leading people to think that they need three IDE buses...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Personally, I have not had any problems with creating a dual-boot system. Here is (basically) what I do when installing a new system:
- use a boot CD/disk to load up linux
- fire up fdisk and create two partitions
- reboot and let the windows install CD have its way with the first partition
- reboot and let a linux distro CD (redhat and suse are both nice ones I've tried) chop up the second partition however it wants to
- you're done. I think both redhat and suse automatically realize you have a windows install, set up the grub conf file accordingly, and overwrite the MBR
In a nutshell, you always want to do things in this order: partition, install windows, install linux.Magnatune: Quality (DRM-free) MP3/FLAC/
The wife of a friend of mine is legally blind. In order to see the text on the screen, she needs to use some software that "zooms in" on a part of the screen, and by moving the mouse to the side of the screen, the zoom area pans in that direction. She has been using this software for over a decade, and it works much better than xzoom, where you have to find the zoom window, click, drag out into the screen, release the mouse button, and then try to click on the small version of whatever it was you were looking at in the zoom window. I have not found any Linux tools that come close to the usability of her Windows software.
Her little brother stayed at their house for a while, and he wound up downloading Kazaa, along with just about every piece of malware out there. Imagine only being able to see 5% of the screen at once, trying to do your homework, and having ads pop up in IE every 2 minutes. She was having a hard time with her schoolwork because of the interference the malware was causing her. Since I have not run Windows on my own machines for years, I had no idea how to help them; I have never encountered this kind of problem at home. I downloaded AdAware (I hear it mentioned on Slashdot once in a while) and a couple other programs, but they failed to clean the trojan programs off their system. I installed ZoneAlarm, which blocked outgoing connections from 6 or 7 random programs that kept trying to "phone home", and the ads stopped popping up.
I suggested that they install and use Knoppix in order to give them more security, but the only thing that kept them back was this accessibility software that zoomed in on the screen. If this Windows-only software could provide the accessibility she needs in order to use the computer, then a Linux starts becoming a possibility for her. This is where Linux-under-Windows starts to make sense; at least until accessibility software under Linux catches up.
Pick one per box. Have two boxes if you must.
I received my box as a gift and cannot afford another because I'm still looking for a job, you insensitive clod!
Here is an argument for Linux-Windows compatibility.
Currently, a number of Linux-Windows compatibility projects catch a good deal of flak from Linux advocates. Cygwin seems to go mostly unscathed, but a lot of people bash WineX. Regular ol' wine catches some complaining, as does Crossover Office. Anything dealing with Microsoft servers (Exchange interoperability, for example) occasionally gets the same. Ports of Linux software to Windows sometimes catch flak.
A number of people seem to think that compatibility damages Linux. In the case of WineX ports, they worry that game companies may feel that advising users to use WineX is "good enough". In the case of ported Linux software to Windows, people feel that it decreases a Linux-only advantage, and brings Windows up to the level of Windows.
I think that these arguments generally fall flat.
Eric S. Raymond's fundamental thesis is that "Open Source works better than closed source." It isn't an ideological argument, a la Stallman's approach -- it's just that people are *better off* with Open Source. There is less duplication of labor, more value is promulgated to a greater number of people, bugs are more quickly fixed, etc.
Building on ESR's argument, I feel that it's reasonable to say that Linux is better than Windows in a number of ways -- furthermore, it improves more quickly. It is less expensive, provides a good amount of functionality, and has a good deal of focus on security. It is free.
Why, then, do people not use Linux instead of Windows? It's because of inertia -- it's difficult to have a Linux workstation interoperate nicely with a Windows one in a number of ways -- format and protocol compatibility are significant and operate strongly in Microsoft's favor. The leveraging of compatibility has served Microsoft well for years. They suck people into their camp, and then work hard to make it difficult to leave.
Projects that work to help Windows and Linux interoperate, I argue, assist Linux in the long run. In the short run, they may provide additional value to Windows users, or may allow someone to scrape along on Windows instead of moving to enjoy some crucial tool. However, they ultimately lower the compatibility barrier to switching, and some number of people will choose to switch. Those people make it more difficult for Microsoft to maintain compatibility barriers.
Ultimately, anyone that wants to see Linux become more popular knows that ultimately, those Windows users will have to manage to find their way across the divide. Making the path easier is a primary goal -- the strongest weapon Microsoft has of all is in keeping that gap wide. If there are lush meadows in the Linux world, but a vast canyon separating those meadows from the majority of the people, then those people will not move.
Let us say that GIMP is ported to Windows (it has been). Perhaps a number of people are able to use Windows to use the GIMP instead of having to install Linux. There are, however, few people that are likely to choose to switch to Linux just for the GIMP. However, now all those people are using a piece of software that exists, is open source, and works well on Linux -- in fact, if anything, it works better on Linux. They have been moved away from Photoshop or whatever else they'd be using that exists only on Windows. The next time they consider switching, instead of facing the loss of all their apps, they face the loss of only a few. And since Linux is ultimately better than Windows, they can begin to move across.
It is much easier to move to Linux today than it was a few years ago. There is usable (if not perfect) Office file format support, the ability to connect to Windows shares, and the ability to talk to many Microsoft servers. However, it is still not a trivial path. Most people are not willing to simply drop Windows and hope for the best, so it may involve repartitioning to allow dual-booting. There is a huge learning curve that must be overcome -- tech folks gene
May we never see th
Since you don't know what I'm using my system for, if I were you I would think again before calling me an idiot.
For the work that I do, I need that horsepower to have multiple VMs running simultaneously, running different OS's, all doing some serious compilations.
For that, you need the kind of machine I described. Now that can't be done using a standard laptop at all. But for going on the road, colinux would be nice to use on a smaller, lower power, standard laptop. Because why would I want to shell out a several hundred bucks for vmware just for that? Idiot...
I've seen a number of scattered reasons (above) for running coLinux but here is the scenario I have for using coLinux.
The need to run a linux Distribution from within a Windows box not the need to run Linux applications on a Windows box:
First I want to point out that cygwin will get you a secure shell, gcc, and a number of other biaries, as ported from Linux. But it will not natively behave the same way that Linux does. The primary difference I'm referring to is hardware support and native binary support. It is for this reason that Cygwin will never be as useful to the Linux world as other distributions are. (Contributions back to Linux from Cygwin are not practical.... [Mozilla aside, there are no other good examples of OSS projects where there is a large number of developers porting their software from a Cygwin environ back to Linux]). There are several interesting cases of Linux software being compiled for windows (Xine, Gaim, X, etc) but these programs are not sufficient to be considered a "linux distribution within windows" instead should be considered, Linux apps for windows.
Consider now, my personal usage example, I have had a Linux dist sitting idle on my drive because I sold my second box (power is expensive!), and I needed to develop in MFC (Direct X 9.0) for a course that I was taking (leave linux on one part, install XP on the other). Right now there are several applications and other things that I'm missing from when I had primarily booted Linux, but I can't move away from Windows and still continue my studies (and btw, dual-booting is not an option I'm eager to go back to [takes forever, and I always want that one windows or linux app when I'm in the wrong boot]). So, after this project matures, I will hopefully be able to mount my existing Linux partition, boot my kernel, and access my applications and settings as I left them before, without disturbing my continued study with MFC and Direct X.
A few final points:
1.) XP is not as unstable as everyone here seems to contend, I have had weeks of uptime on my computer at work, as has the other developer who works with me.
2.) Cygwin does not allow developers to comfortably develop Linux apps on windows, and is limited inherently by Windows (terminal width constrained to less than 72 characters, X Windows loads slowly, etc).
3.)There are a number of practical uses for virtual machines but the speed of these systems, their somewhat limited application (hardware) support, and the price of the software ($$$ you would pay a heck of a lot more for VMWare than for Windows XP, buddy) tends to leave something to be desired from that corner of the market.
In conclusion, yeah, coLinux may not change the world, and it may not even turn a few heads, but it certainly could be useful for a number of people such as myself who are looking to get a little bit more Linux out of their Windows boxes.
.: 2+2 = PI SQRT(1+N)
No.
Next question.
What are you talking about?
1. Of course you shouldn't be running the xserver in it. The documentation clearly states this, and explains that the way to get a gui is to either:
a) Run an X server under Windows and use XDMCP to connect... or
b) Use VNC to connect to it.
PS: There is a bug in the libpam-runtime, so have fun doing any sort of apt-get upgrade action.
First of all... if this were true, it would be a bug in one of the harddisk images, not in coLinux... coLinux is just the kernel and the mechanism for running it in windows... It is not a Linux "distribution".
Second, it works for me. I used the provided debian disk image and dist-upgraded to testing with no trouble whatsoever.
I also had very little trouble using VNC to get Fluxbox running either in full screen or in a window(TM).
Even at version 0.60 it is very impressive. I suppose it will be even more impressive when it is included on a Knoppix cd with a simple installation method for those who are too lazy to RTFM.
Your average home user doesn't have the patience to deal with that kind of thing, and until this hurdle is taken down they'll stick with Windows for sure.
I guess that's fair. I don't have the patience to deal with the average Windows user. I'm sick of whiny demanding ADD tools who want to run their bleeding edge hardware on Linux and not have to even think about what they're doing, let alone read any documentation - and they want it for free. Then they want me to sort them out when they fuck their system up, and have no clue what they even did to it.
Screw it, life is about choices, and if you want a Windows experience then pay for it. Don't use Linux just because it's free then bitch about how hard it is. Submit a frickin bug report or something. Linux works fine for Grandma and for Developers - it seems to be the midrange users and L337 gamerz who think they know shit that get upset when things aren't they way they're used to. Linux for everyone is a grand idea, but as a free software developer I ask, what's in it for me?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
For business use, hardware support is pretty much a red herring. Clueful purchasing by the IT department pretty much takes care of that and it isn't too hard to do. It is a problem for Joe Sixpack; I'll grant you that.
A big part of what keeps many users from switching is fear of being in a totally new environment that don't understand. This provides a midpoint between the two worlds: get a taste of Linux, and if you start to panic just hit the good old "Windows" key on the keyboard and you're back to familiar territory.
I see CoLinux doing the same thing for Linux that Windows 3.1 did for Windows.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
For me dual-booting has not been a problem and I've been dual-booting on and off for seven years now. These days most installers do it fir you but there has been an easy to follow HOWTO for ages now.
Yeah, data storage is a bit of a problem but I just make sure I have at least on FAT32 partition for any data I need to share between the OSes.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
Dual booting is a crappy compromise at best. I personally think that people should pick an OS and just make it work. It's usually not as hard as people think it is... Provided that if you want to play games, you use Windows. My Windows system is a little flaky of course, because it's Windows, but in general I get good uptimes, it's fast, I have it skinned and looking nice, and it does the job... of running games. My linux systems do what little real work there is to be done around here.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No Windows version.
Can't compile in Cygwin.
Enter coLinux... finally a way to run GnuCash on my Windows laptop.
I am sure there are other programs like this.
It is even possible to run Linux programs in rootless windows so that they appear to be native Windows applications.
Ah, but many many mor people than not *do* use fonts. Happy with command line? Fine, no one is stopping you. But you don't represent 70 or 80% of the other computer users who do use fonts and do like a nice standardized user interface experience.
But there is one more thing: Embrace the idea of a good standardized user interface for Linux, or quit your bitching about Microsoft /Windows dominence. A good GUI, a good standard installer that handles dependencies with little or no user interaction, and decent usable applications, this is what Linux needs to gain the desktop. Otherwise, enjoy your Microsoft, it'll be here to stay.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
cleartype fonts
"ClearType" is a Microsoft branding term. The generalized term, subpixel rendering, is definitely supported under XFree86 and x.org. LCDs with multiple layout order of the RGB elements are even supported.
2.) automatic directX compatibility for games
WINE does this, but honestly, while there are a lot of game developers out there that know DirectX, there's nothing particularly magical about DirectX, and it'd be pretty hard to "just" do DirectX without supporting the other chunks of the Windows API (though I guess you could do a "DirectX-like" API). OpenGL is a truly open standard that's widely supported (and preferred by videocard developers), and SDL and its child libraries provide a more modular system than DirectX does.
one solid universal gui
I see why you want it, but it's not going to happen. Too many KDE people like KDE (which is, while not unbreakably, still strongly tied to Qt) and too many people have legal issues with Qt or prefer GNOME for technical reasons.
Honestly, I don't think it's all that necessary, either. Windows users have been using non-Windows widget sets for a long time in major apps -- Lotus Notes or Mozilla or any of the standard Win32 variants, which operate differently over the Win95-WinXP lifetime. People adapt pretty well. Both Qt and GTK are pretty snappy. Both interoperate pretty well today. Two widget sets is hardly a reason for a platform to fall apart.
May we never see th
does the Microsoft DRM patent buyouts make sense? Or anything else, for that matter?
C|N>K
I tried to install coLinux under VMWare (guest OS is Win2K) running on Linux, but it crashed VMWare...
If I remember correctly, it was not anything that anybody wanted. I never knew anybody who bought it.
resigned
3.) one solid universal gui
oh come on its soooooo KDE. I dont wanna start a flame war (meh its too late) but if you know enough about linux to use gnome all the time you probably know enough to make it work for you. Almsot anyone new to linux is using KDE and althought gnome is perfectly fine on its own i think the clear choice is KDA. Saying there is too much choice in window managers is an old problem. Why dont we all move forward and think of something better to spend our time working on other than flame wars about which one eveyrone should use.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
I can agree with your opinion here, but would like to add something.
THE CONFIG FILE MUST BE THERE. Manage it with a GUI if you like, but preserve the option of working with the file directly.
Those that understand how to put the right tools on those files gain far more than those that need the GUI lose.
Blogging because I can...
DirectX is great for PC Games - but for real scientific/commercial work it *SUCKS*.
Is there a reason why it sucks for such work? I've only done experimental game-related graphics work with both APIs, and although each has its own unique style, I don't really see any major problems of either that would prevent work of any type from being done using it.
I think the real reason why DirectX isn't used for scientific work is because it only works on Windows, and it hasn't been around for as long as OpenGL.
Fonts are fonts. I use Windows fonts in Linux. They look great. Big deal.
What do you mean by "the window manager have them?" My fonts look fine. In fact, try any recent distribution like SuSE, Fedora Core, Mandrake, etc., and I think you'll get the same impression.
Without DirectX, few games ever make it to Linux. Thats because DirectX is much more than just a 3-D gaming API. It has other features that make games easier to develop for.
OpenGL+SDL does as well.
Without a standard window manager and a standard API to program for (thanks GNOME vs KDE war), there is hardly any incentive for an application developer to go to linux. Sorry, its just too complicated to make it run correctly (across window managers).
Umm, are you implying that an app compiled against Gnome libraries will suddenly break if you try to run it in KDE? Actually, you can just choose the one you like best and develop for it. Copy and pasting will take care of themselves, and with good themes, they can look nearly identical.
What do you mean running properly "across window managers?" Window managers almost certainly could never prevent a program from working properly, unless they draw a border and buttons when they're not supposed to, for example.
So basically, you can't decide if you would want to program for Gnome or KDE, and you don't like the fonts that distros ship by default (even though haven't been an embarrasing smidgen on the Linux desktop for years), so you don't really think it's worth your time to develop for Linux.
I think it's more than fine to just say "hey, I'm doing fine developing for Windows, I don't have any problems with it, so I don't need to switch." So often zealots convince people on Slashdot that you ought to be ashamed of yourself if you run Windows, and while I disagree with your post and reasons for not choosing Linux as a development platform, I think it's totally fine to not choose Linux for no reason other than you're content with what you have :)
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
I first installed Linux back when XFree86 was at 3.x and yes, the fonts sucked royally. I ended up Windows-free for about a year and a half until I took shine to MOHAA and started dual booting with W2K. I also used to have OSX on my laptop. Fonts on Linux look better to me than either of the two consumer OS platforms. I'm not "in denial".
DirectX is much more than just a 3-D gaming API. It has other features that make games easier to develop for.
DirectX doesn't offer anything that can't be found on a *nix platform. Few games make it to Linux because the market is small. Battlefield 1942 came out nearly two years ago. A Mac client was just announced. Games for Linux are more likely to exist because of developer appreciation for the platform alone. They aren't being held back by distain for the difficulty of going without DX.
Sorry, its just too complicated to make it run correctly (across window managers).
Window managers aren't toolkits.
NO, 99.9% of the world don't give a shit about running linux on windows. For them, running is just a means of getting from one place to another.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
No, really? DirectX was designed explicitly for games. That means that early in its life, it sacrificed accuracy for speed (compared to OpenGL, which took the opposite approach and didn't really gain speed on consumer hardware until 3D accelerators took off). Even now, DirectX is driven by games and multimedia, not CAD and scientific/engineering requirements. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, and in fact it's better for games that it's focused on games and multimedia rather than engineering applications, because the requirements for games are different.
If you're writing scientific software, use OpenGL. If you're writing a (Windows- or XBox-targetted) game, use DirectX.
Oh, yeah, it's also possible to use DirectX and OpenGL together. Like SDL, DirectX is an entire framework, not just a 3D rendering interface. Id and theCarmack use DirectX for input and sound while rendering their 3D visuals in OpenGL.
Is a DX->GL wrapper library possible?
The problem is, which version of windows has the standardised interface? Where do you want to go to find the same item on half a dozen windows machines today? The only way you get a standardised interface on windows is if the same person installs the same version of the OS and most of the same applications on all the machines - or if your organisation has a procedure to duplicate this. Even just with the NT branch you need to ask people whether they are running NT4, 2k, XP, 2003 before you can tell them where to find something as simple as the network settings. Once you branch off into the realm of 98, ME etc, you then have to remember a whole different visual map of where things are in menus. I forget lo look for "dial up connections" in "my computer" every time, I expect it to be with the network settings. You don't need server 2003 to duplicate a typewriter, so we are stuck with a confusing array of interfaces from just the one vendor. It shouldn't be a big suprise that a lot of us just drop to the command shell or use key shortcuts almost every time we use someone elses machine. Where do you want to go just to find the file browser icon to click on today?
CDE, KDE, Gnome etc are also only the answer if you want a common GUI environment and you stick it on everyones machine. Linux is a version of *nix, with all the things that entails, a very different way of doing things to MS windows. Being able to pipe just about anything through grep or a thousand other programs would be difficult to put in any easy to read menu - so the command line is essential.
Personally, I would rather have a configuration file that can have comments in it, including commented out previous selections, than some unreadable thing like the windows registry. With many programs it is possible to choose settings which prevent the program from running at all - so you can't even run the program to change the settings to something that will work, you need to reinstall - or try to find out what all the bytes in the binary configuration file are supposed to mean.
It's a case of different forms of memory - visual memory which some people are good at, or being able to remember a method or sequence of events. Being able to group things into sets should work - but it doesn't because menu options either cannot or are not sorted into logical groups, and the location of items in menus differs between programs and versions. Syntax can be looked up - menu options need to be hunted down and found unless the help system is better and more up to date than in most programs available.
The differences between the systems make it a pointless exercise to have a slavish copy. If the users can launch their applications the same way, and the applications behave the same way, that is a good thing. If anything else needs to be done you need a vague idea of how the systems works, so admin tools that pretend to do the same thing are confusing - you'll go looking for a defragger or scandisk. Showing first year engineering students how to do simple graphs in MS Excel (no, they weren't stupid, it only appeared that way since the program is NOT intuitive) made it clear to me that even using computers the MS way is not easy - computers ARE hard things to use and most people are lazy enough to think that the MS skills they took so long to learn are all they need to know - but it is specialized knowlege that only applies to a given array of menus. Even macs are not obvious. I had trouble on a iMac just starting up a dial up connection - obvious once you know what the icon is, but unfindable in the manuals.
To sum up, it's all different - but MS doesn't have a standard interface. If go so
Er, partitioning is technical? Guess I've been living under a rock or something. Not, BTW, that I'm crazy about dual boot - the standalone solutions like knoppix are far superior IMHO.
C|N>K
Penguin-Does (penguin-does.com) is another one in the arena of 'Linux on Windows' programs... I heard that the company behind it has made some pretty good steps towards full X-Windows support, but I still can't rip/play my music CDs with it.
Let S_n = {nst+us+vt : s,t in Z \ {0}, u,v in {-1,1}}. For all n in Z where |n| > 2, Z \ S_n is infinite... right?
That is the root of the problem. You have to download the libraries and get them working which requires you to enter commands in a terminal. Do you think the average user wants to do this? I would go further and say that it makes gnome/kde seem not ready for prime time to the majority of windows users.
I have a film scanner. The nearest equivilent which *might* have linux drivers is over $1000 more. So, you can see why I don't just buy a different scanner.
So, why not just boot into windows, do my scanning and get out?
Because scanning a roll of film can take hours of off and on work. I don't want to to be stuck with Windows that whole time.
Wine (when it works at all) is of no help. It runs only apps, not drivers. Even VMware, when the host OS is Linux, is of no help.
1. Create linux QT app
2. Embed my QT app into a minimal colinux app
3. Send out my QT/Linux software on CD
4. Profit!
5. Thumb nose at Trolltech
6. Profit some more!
-Adam
If I could run AutoCAD on Linux, I would use it at work (for something other than a server).
There is an AutoCAD clone for Linux. Here's a quote from my Linux user group list. (I haven't used it, so YMMV)...
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 09:41:07 +0100
From: "BricsCad BackOffice" email-deleted
Subject: BricsCAD goes Linux
BricsCad, the market leader in low cost DWG CAD software, today announced the beta release of BricsCad for Linux. The product is based on the IntelliCAD kernel.
BricCad for Linux is an "almost clone" of AutoCAD(r). BricsCad uses the exact same DWG drawing format as AutoCAD(r). Drawings made by BricsCad can be read by AutoCAD(r) and the other way round.
BricsCad for Linux addresses the untapped group of individual and corporate professional CAD users in the LINUX community allowing them to use their operating system of choice without being locked out from the professional Engineering world and the DWG standard.
The full press release can be found on their website(s):
English version
French version
German version
Interested beta-testers are invited to contact BricsCad at linux@bricscad.com
2.) DirectX is a MICROSOFT ONLY format. It will never, ever, be in any linux distro except in emulation form. And for second, why should it be? OpenGL is fine and great, and with 2.0 coming out you can stuff DirectX where the sun don't shine.
At its very core, DirectX is just a set of APIs. Yes, it's a Microsoft API, but the exposed interfaces are well documented, and ignoring any possible legal issues, it is entirely possible to write a DirectX implementation on another platform. Okay, some of you may disagree on whether or not DirectX is well documented, but it's documented well enough for emulation purposes.
There are wrappers available that translate Direct3D calls into OpenGL calls (similar to Glide wrappers from the 3dfx days), and I don't see any technical problems with removing the OpenGL layer and having the new Direct3D implementation call the graphics card directly. However, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think Linux 3D graphics drivers are currently all proprietary, so nVidia and ATI would have to provide the Direct3D layer.
Still, even with an emulation layer, why SHOULDN'T DirectX run on Linux? Ignore legal issues and Microsoft's desires. Believe it or not, there are some developers who've only used DirectX and not OpenGL+SDL. It's worth having DirectX on Linux even if only a tiny fraction of those developers decide to port to Linux. That fraction may grow, and after familiarizing themselves with Linux they may switch to other APIs that are better supported on Linux, such as OpenGL and SDL.
Well, the vera fonts come with most distros today, but even if they didn't, installing them is a matter of copying the fonts to /usr/share/fonts. Just like in Windows!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
What's wrong with the existing fonts? Freetype renders just great on the majority of systems, and depending on your tastes, better than Cleartype on very high resolution systems. RedHat 9 and up have very nice looking fonts indeed.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
And I might add that it seems to work too!
/.'ing for once...). There are two distributions "images" available from coLinux, and it sounds like the changes to get any distribution working within coLinux are quite minimal (I think it's mostly setting up the virtualized hardware drivers...).
I happened to be playing with coLinux for the first time this afternoon (beating the
It works easier than I expected. And it really does use regular binares. For instance, I've just installed X and KDE from the regular Debian package repositories.
I tend to think of this as a specialized, i.e. Linux Only, alternative to a VMWARE for Windows license. Free, and moderately easy to install - I'm sure that in time, it'll be a lot easier to setup.
I think this is a great idea. It will allow more linux software to be developed, under the assumption that the target audience now will include also Windows users. Then, one day when the company tallies up its software expenses and sees that the only thing it pays for is the MS OS, and that this OS is only an emulation for free linux software, it could easily decide to cut Windows out - without really making any drammatic change for any of it's employees.
Unless of couse MS blocks this feature in later OS's...
The power of Christ compiles you!
There is basically one issue with dual booting linux and windows, and that is where to put your data.
I ran into this one some time ago, when I started running Windows inside VMWare on RH Linux. (Which, BTW, is WONDERFUL!)
My solution was to run Samba on the Linux host, and save all files that needed to be exhanged in the home directory of a user name that I logged into from the Windows side as well as from the Linux side.
The files interchange peacefully this way - It's normal for a process (say, precompiling an application) to involve steps performed on both platforms - For example, I might compile the app at the Linux command line, but use a Windows-based installer to make the final software distribution file.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
You see, I believe it is rather impossible to get everyone using one window manager. I wouldn't touch the horrible layout of KDE even with a long stick. Right now I'm using xfce. There are many people who use one window manager and dislike the others. And I believe that is the strenght of linux. The freedom of choice. You say that Gnome is hard to use, which I find weird. I have installed Dropline Gnome as the first window manager to two of my mates while installing linux first time for them (slackware btw), and they have had absolutely no problems with it. I believe the only problem with gnome being hard is that if you get too used to KDE. IMHO, the biggest fault of Windows just might be the fact that you have to use the same everyone else is using. No freedom of choice. Sure, there are programs that create layouts over the current system (I believe), but freedom of choice is minimal.
I don't think it's really the new enviroment, I can deal with that. The problem I have had is just getting the damn OS installed and having all my shit work.
I got RedHat to install fine on my Laptop(Dell Inspiron 5100) and it worked fine for the most part it just wouldn't recognize my sound, but I really liked the Debian packaging system. So I tried to get Debian installed. Went with the stable, testing, and unstable and on all I got it to work with everything except direct rendering. This isn't a stab at just Debian, I love it, just no direct rendering.(Radeon Mobility 7) I followed various documentations I found on the web and not a single one worked. I even fucked up my xfree somehow.
Now my point is, I have a few partitions, after getting Debian working without direct rendering, I went and installed Windows on another partition. I put the CD in and it worked installed fine. Then I put in my driver cd and now everything is a okay.
Maybe I don't really have a point, just wish Linux was a bit easier to install and get all the hardware working and working fine. It's the problem we have at work too, all the Comp operators here have laptops and we explored linux but just never got it working 100%, so we are still on Windows....
True, it installs a virtual network card driver, but this isn't at all unusual, as VMWare and Virtual PC do this too.
He's just trying to plug a Virtual Machine solution that isn't anything at all like CoLinux.
The minimum requirement for Linux within Windows is the freedom to open a Linux and Windows app and cut and paste between them. Edit your photo in GIMP and pass it on to Publisher.
I guess Windows is just as "broken" as Linux.
Time makes more converts than reason
wtf? I thought it was april fool's day all over again.
Whenn Boeing dows the next 7E7 fly-though in DirectX, give me a call.
When I use the next 7E7 fly-through on my desktop, I'll definitely give you a call.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
I got RedHat to install fine on my Laptop(Dell Inspiron 5100)
Not surprised you had trouble with RedHat. They waited so long to switch to ALSA that sound has been a problem with them for awhile.
IN any case, why didn't you try Mandrake? I've put Mandrake on several flavors of Dell Inspirons, including the 5100 (iirc) and had it work flawlessly out of the box. I suggest you give it another shot with Mandrake. I've got Mandrake on an IBM Thinkpad right now and it works, well, flawlessly. (Except my wife burned up the power supply, so it's down until I get a new power supply)
Like what I said? You might like my music
I've used Linux on the desktop solely for 4 years, and I don't give a shit about beating Microsoft. I'm perfectly satisfied with the way things are, and you will take my Ion from my cold, dead hands.
I mean, GnuCash? Who the heck uses this crap anyway.
Maybe you're just a fucking idiot.
/dev/dsp* and friends. Use aumix to set volume. You're done.
SBLive is a fucking cakewalk. You compile emu10k1 into the kernel or as a module. Set permissions on
The main thing is this seems to be a cool hack - I mean, getting two OS's to cooperate in ring zero.
It's neater than User Mode Linux - if it actually works.
I don't see it "transforming" anything - if for no other reason than Microsoft will move to block it if it starts to "transform" anything Gates has an investment in.
Depending on how it works and how you use it, it might be very useful for things like security (each OS doublechecking each other's actions - like some of the NASA space missions computers do).
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Threw this on MetaFilter a few hours ago; hope this helps clarify what's going on here. Thanks to the good Jason Spence for explaining most of this to me over fine tequila at Defcon a few years back :-)
:-)
===
OK, terrible terrible story. Nobody's going to contest that. My immediate reaction: "Yay, another whiz kid story. Kid probably rediscovered prefetching web pages."
Yeah. Then the CoLinux guy came up.
People, CoLinux is absurdly brilliant stuff, the kind of hardcore engineers get drunk about and laugh that "some psycho pulled off WHAT?!" regarding. I can say this from personal experience
To put it simply, most approaches that involve multiple operating systems sharing a processor require a significant degree of subordination. In the Cygwin model, the "Linux/Unix" way of requesting services from the operating system (open this file, give me that network connection) is translated to the Windows way through a library of functions. The mapping is pretty good, but like any translation, it's not perfect. Some actions, like starting new programs, are very very fast under Linux/Unix and are extraordinarily slow under Windows. Cygwin deals with this as best it can, but there's only so much it can do.
VMWare offers a different approach. Instead of translating Unix to Windows, VMWare creates a "virtual PC", complete with its own processor, motherboard, sound card, network card, and everything else. The child operating system -- Linux, for example -- gets a complete environment to manipulate, and VMWare handles the translation between what the child PC is asking to do and what the parent PC is actually capable of. This interface is much more isolated than what Cygwin offers -- memory, for instance, is not shared between the two environs -- but as such, the child operating system is freed of many of the particular quirks of the parent OS. The child Linux really is Linux, and can do everything Linux can do, because Linux is an environment for controlling a PC.
The only catch is that it's a virtualized PC, and VMWare needs to do alot of work to keep the two contexts separate -- and to emulate all the hardware resources that are normally "just there", but now need to be simulated. There's a 20-30% speed cut out of this. Also, switching contexts between parent PC and child PC is not a trivial thing to do, meaning it can only be done a certain number of times per second. This causes issues for some real time operations. Specifically, audio in VMWare is a problem.
CoLinux is something else entirely. x86 CPU's have the concept of Rings -- these are roughly analogous to privelege levels, in which certain classes of commands may be issued to certain components of the architecture. Lowest level code operates in what's referred to as "Ring 0" -- at this level of permissions, one can directly control the raw components of the PC, for better or worse. This is a gross oversimplification, but there's basically two things that live at Ring 0: A kernel, and device drivers (which are not entirely separate from the kernel). Kernels are basically a core set of commands that user software can execute to get things done -- create processes, read files, open network connections, and so on. Here's a list of Linux syscalls, at least from 2.2. Not on this list -- stuff like, "Send this block of memory to this device on the PCI bus, and tell the sound card to start emitting sound from that memory address on its internal buffer." That's what device drivers are for -- they get some kind of interface that userspace can talk to, and they do things with what they're given. Those things can be pretty much anything the underlying hardware can do -- stuff way deeper than "write this file" and "trace this process", and into the nuts and bolts of what the PC is -- a collection of wires and memory addresses. Normally, that's what a device driver does: It implements the requisite hardware calls to let some piece of equipment work.
Distributions.
Distributions put these things together for end-users to enjoy, and any recently updated distro worth it's beans has either Gnome 2.4 or the Bitstream Vera fonts. In my not-so-humble opinion, they are far superiour to the fonts in Windows. Unfortunately, however, they look pretty horrid in Windows, if you ask me.
Don't you think you're being pretty unreasonable saying Linux w/KDE or Gnome is unsuitable for anything like this (fonts) when it's already been addressed? You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink, download a better distro plz.
"We invented personal computing." - Bill Gates
How come people think this is good news. It takes away a lot of reasons to switch to Linux. You can all think that this will lead to people learning Linuxprograms. When the same people do not even know how to make their machine virusfree by updates, do you realy think they are going to run Linux programs?
The people who want to use it will already be with Linux and could even switch back to Windows, because their programs run in Windows.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
now they'll be able to "break" Linux... ;)
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Being able to click on a single file and have a fairly standard installer sequence pop up would be ideal for GUI, but I'd even settle for a standard CLI method, hold the endless switches and dependencies please.
Here's my opinion on fonts.
Can I read the fucking document?
The font is fine.
I don't care if it's German Gothic or whatever that weird one is called.
I have never understood people's - especially font makers - obsession with twiddling pixels to make one letter different from another. It's the same psychosis as many geek bit twiddlers.
We used typewriters with one or two lousy fonts for decades, for Baron von Christ's sake!
We DO NOT - even with the desirabiliy of choice being a given - NEED six hundred or six thousand different fonts on a PC.
If you type in 48-point, maybe you'd notice some of this stuff, but for the average user who is not a graphics art student, it's utterly irrelevant.
Yes, a font should be easily readable and look fairly sharp. Beyond that, it is an utter waste of time and money. You have more important things to worry about.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
How do you know he doesn't use a GUI? Is that how you deal people deal with criticism - mod everybody who has no problems down as commandline geeks?
Ever since XFT2/fontconfig and the Bitstream Vera fonts have been released, I've been enjoying high-quality, subpixel antialiased fonts on my Linux desktop computer. I suggest you to upgrade to a modern distribution and use the Vera fonts.
Alternatives are not going away. What's wrong with making both GNOME and KDE so userfriendly that the user can find it's way no matter which desktop he's using?
Some people prefer simplicity while other people prefer power and bells & whistles. What's wrong with being able to choose what desktop you want based on your *preference*?
In case you don't want to choose - fine, use whatever default desktop is chosen by your distribution. You don't have to choose if you really don't want to.
As for standardizes interfaces: even Windows doesn't have standardized interfaces. Installers all look a little different from each other - fullscreen blue InstallShield, MSI, Win2k-style InstallShield, fullscreen Inno Setup, Win2k-style Inno Setup, WinSFX, WISE Installer, etc. etc.
An installation system that handles dependancies with no user interfaction is being worked on - see my sig. We're close to 1.0.
I keep saying the "big boys" - IBM, HP, Sun, etc. - need to lean on the peripheral manufacturers - or better yet, PAY THEM to do Linux drivers at the same time as Windows drivers. What can it cost to have somebody on staff to do this? Another $100K? Which some companies now demand from any third party wanting to develop a driver for their hardware?
I say it would be a cheap investment for IBM and HP to sell a lot more Linux boxes. Even if you assume they have no motivation since THEIR stuff already runs Linux, the point is that people want to add hardware to whatever they bought from IBM and HP - and they won't run Linux if it can't do that. So it is in IBM's and HP's interest to see that third party peripherals run on their OS.
Seems obvious to me.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
One of the strengths of Linux is options
Well, funny that you think this is a strength. This is IMO the main weakness of all Unix based systems. Too many options means you can be familiar 100% with your system, and yet you won't be able to operate (well) another Linux, because things are so different. Hence the difficulty to debug your mom's Linux on the phone because your freaking brother installed it and he's on vacation right now, so you have no clue how to drive your mom through the command line stuff. With Windows, if she has a Win98 and you too, you're on the same page. It basically boils down to:
If you want a huge userbase, and a lot of knowledge of your system spread around, present a homogen system. Heterogen system will look (from Joes SixPack's point of view) as different systems, and he will be - rightfully - scared. Joe Sixpack wants a system that works. Not a tetrazillion of options and choices. Joe is scared by choices by nature.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
1.) cleartype fonts
Not sure what this means (I am not a font expert), but ever try reading slashdot on a Windows machine? The Italic font is horrible. Microsoft can't get down something as simple as anti-aliasing.
2.) automatic directX compatibility for games
Shudder
3.) one solid universal gui
It kind of goes against the grain of open source to say that EVERYONE should use only one gui. That really is more of a Microsoft thing.
Then again, Gnome is pretty much a standard gui on Unix now-a-days.
You forgot 1) Eudora for Linux (promised by Customer Service Real Soon Now) 2) easy peripheral installation of ANY recent peripheral (if it requires a kernel recompile, Joe Sixpack will be nuking his Linux install and getting Windoze) 3) easy software installation (no more dependency hell)
Tech Public Policy stuff
Which of these do you get if you run Linux over Windows?
None of the above, of course.
If one simply needs a Open Source Office, that's what OpenOffice.org is for and there is a Windows version.
If there were a killer app for the general population that only ran on Linux and can't be ported, this might make sense. Name one.
This may be touted as a technical miracle, and it might be. But change the world? Looks more to me like a solution in search of a problem.
Tech Public Policy stuff
yeah, it's called WineX. but it's not free
What? Me? Worry?
Right, Boeing is dirt poor compared to a software comapny that makes FPS games...
At least someone else seems to think so too in this rant.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
Unfortunately, Vera fonts have still incomplete support for (at least) Eastern Europe character sets, so I am still stuck to MS Truetype fonts.
Incidentally they are, as they are in real financial trouble right now.
Are there more aerospace engineers in the world than computer game players?
> But there is one more thing: Embrace the idea of a > good standardized user interface for Linux, or
> quit your bitching
Hmm, Linux is all about choice, that is one of its big selling points. Any company/OEM Computer Vendor/etc. can choose a interface as a standard and go with it. The power of Linux is that both they and Joe Sixpack have that choice.
Next...
I can't afford a sig!
I did not RTFA, but wouldn't this make a good alternative SW firewall for windows? Setup all windows networking through coLinux and getting rid of Norto^H^H^H^H^H [random crummy firewall app] Or am I missing something?
DirectX is great for PC Games - but for real scientific/commercial work it *SUCKS*. Not exactly. I know that at least in the simulation area DirectX pretty common in the commertial software under Windows. If app intended for windows only DirectX have some advantages (mostly managing texture memory). Thogh difference not so big. Don't forget that both OpenGL and DirectX not much more then the interface to the hardware 3D.
Why do people keep trotting this one out and getting modded up? The freedom to tinker is fundamentally what Free Software is all about, trying to enforce a single universal anything is like trying to make water not wet. Even if Bruce Almighty, as an act of divine intervention, granted you this wish, anyone who wants to can immediately fork the project or start their own (and *someone* will want to).
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
Perhaps if DirectX actually was inferior, and if it wasn't the primary or only API for 90% of the games out there, you'd have a point.
:)
Or more to the point a lot of computers are never used for playing video games in the first place. Given the level of "convergance" between movies and computer games it's quite possible that Linux was highly involved in the production of quite a few of these DirectX games
Well, it's not the fonts that are bat. It's the way they are rendered on screen. Fuzzy.
I stopped using Windows and every other M$ product in 1995 when I left an M$ enslaved company to venture out on my own. From that time forward to this, everytime I am forced to go back to use Windows I am always struck by the fact that the Windows vaunted `friendliness' is a myth,
People are just used to it. Those of us who have successfully beaten the M$ addiction wonder what the attraction is. To me, I find Windows too limiting.
If the whole world would simply go "cold turkey" the world will soon be rid of that terrible dream called Microsoft that has been the main contributor to the fact that software technology is fifteen years behind where it ought to be.
There is no need for CoLinux or anything else along those lines. The cure is simply to stop using all Microsoft products and end the slavery and addiction.
Much more money in PC games though I'm afraid. And as always, money talks.
Really? Where can you buy an airliner, capable of seating a few hundred passengers, for a few tens of USD? When did governments hand out huge amounts of "corporate welfare" to computer games companies too?
I have three boxes OSX, Windows and Linux. I use all three and have to say it is all about the applications. Linux for server side is fantastic, even for development purposes. However as a general client OS Linux has a very LONG way to go.
When I compare my general client OS OSX I see what an ideal UNIX client is all about. I am even thinking that having people copy Windows is really the wrong way to do things.
Let me give an example. On the OSX box to do Windows file sharing there is a simple check box. From there the user's home directories are shared. Nowhere is there any feature to define the domain, security descriptors, etc. The OSX box defines default security descriptors.
The interesting bit is that Apple has determined for the average use that this is good enough. Frankly Apple is right. However, I wanted more and to do that I needed to edit the Samba configuration file. That is ok because I am a power user.
My point is that Windows forces everything to be editable using GUI dialog boxes and that makes for some REALLY hideous dialog boxes. Apple on the other hand does enough to make the system usable. The extras are up to the skill level of the user. The advantage of this approach is that you do not waste developer bandwidth adding unnecessary features that people do not want.
So I wonder if Linux should not follow the same path. Instead of copying Windows, why not look at the features that people want and create distributions geared towards those people. Sure people will argue, but what are the required features? Counter argument is that OSX is a better platform than Windows, and Apple managed to do it, why can't we?
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
This I don't get. One of the strengths of Linux is options. I don't use a computer the same way as the guy next to me, why should we be stuck with the same interface?
Computers are frequently used as "embedded systems" or in process control where the user interface may not remotly resemble a WIMP GUI. With such a UI being in the catagory of "excess baggage"...
Ah, but many many mor people than not *do* use fonts. Happy with command line? Fine, no one is stopping you. But you don't represent 70 or 80% of the other computer users who do use fonts and do like a nice standardized user interface experience.
Do you ever see people moaning about the fonts on an ATM? How about those on a cash register? Or those on a telephone... These kind of things are used by far more people than PCs.
Being able to click on a single file and have a fairly standard installer sequence pop up would be ideal for GUI, but I'd even settle for a standard CLI method, hold the endless switches and dependencies please.
With the vast majority of computer systems end user installable software (including Malware) is not a desirable "feature". In some cases, e.g. turning an ATM into a jukebox it is very undesirable.
subj
/*
:-)
Not so fast, hombré.
`hombre' (man in Spanish) is written without any accent
*/
The screenshots showing Knoppix on top of Windows look promising. I think this project could become really useful in an office as a step towards a long-term migration to GNU/Linux.
Windows users:
Internet Explorer is obsolete. Please upgrade to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
Does it have a Wise Installation Wizard? Does it require any knowledge of anything that looks vaguely dissimilar to Windows?
Then no, it's not going to change anything, because having to know even one little thing about Linux is just as equal as having to know it all. Most Windows users don't even know what it looks like and the only gnomes they have seen are in their gardens.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
This article has nothing to do with "conquering windows"! "I just don't think this project is filling the gap just quite yet." It's not intended to. It's got nothing to do with this perceived gap.
Does anyone(*) actaully need a separate /boot partition these days? I'm pretty sure that PC BIOSes have allowed bootloaders to access the disk past the first gigabyte, or whatever, since the late 90s...
/boot for reasons other than the usual then go ahead, I'm not telling you what to do with your system. :)
* In the general case, if you want RAID but don't trust RAID autodetection, or else have some other esoteric setup that demands a separate
I personally think this software has to overcome some big problems at the moment, but has a great potential for the future. I had it produce a kernel panic within 2 minutes after logging in. Also, it's way too slow to use more than an hour. Yet, after some more development, I think this will replace most of my Cygwin applications.
I set up windows to bridge the tun and eth device to make the linux vm connect to the local network. This runs perfectly!
*adds this article to bookmarks*
.sig: No such file or directory
Linux will get installed more if it can "upgrade" a Windows installation. You insert the CD, run a Setup.exe and it then installs Linux, it migrates your email and network settings and keeps all your files.
Of course, for this to be possible it would require the use of Microsoft development tools (non-free), so for most distributions to remain free-software (beer and speech) they would need to have a separate Winstall disk.
From the article:
A member of the international open source community, Aloni developed CoLinux along with several Japanese programmers, collaborating over the Net. According to the Web site, they've written special core drivers for the host OS which modify the way the host OS receives notifications from the hardware - thus allowing both OSes to coexist peacefully - and run at a decent speed as well.
And from the VMWare site.
VMware Workstation works by enabling multiple operating systems and their applications to run concurrently on a single physical machine. These operating systems and applications are isolated in secure virtual machines that co-exist on a single piece of hardware. The VMware virtualization layer maps the physical hardware resources to the virtual machine's resources, so each virtual machine has its own CPU, memory, disks, I/O devices, etc. Virtual machines are the full equivalent of a standard x86 machine.
Well, as the article says, the trick is about virtualization of hardware. How does that differ from VMWare? I don't see how "IDF innovated again".
I've been wondering about this. How many Windows users want a standardised interface? An awful lot of people, when sat in front of a new PC, seem to instantly start looking for ways to customise -- change default fonts, set up wacky cursors, modify the colour scheme and so on.
I think this quest for a standardised interface is being over-stressed. Most available (or rather, popular) desktop environments (Gnome, KDE, IceWM, etc) have enough in common for most punters to have an idea -- a menu system like the Windows "Start" menu, window buttons for maximise, minimise and close, and so on.
What's the point of running Linux under Windows? I can only see one purpose: it makes cross-development of applications a bit easier - and then it's not much better than cygwin. So you gain the ability to run Linux applications natively on Windows. So what? All of the good ones work on Windows anyway... OO.o, Mozilla, Apache, MySQL (I think). The only reason anyone runs those on Linux is because its faster (often) and more stable (almost always) than Windows. The article is a bit misleading in that it makes you thing you have Windows and Linux running in parallel... it's actually Windows running a Linux kernel. So you still can't get it to be any more stable nor faster than Windows. The other way around would be great: Have Linux run Windows applications natively. Wine is doing a good job, but they still have a long way to go.
If it weren't for fog, the world would run at a really crappy framerate.
Tell that to all the hardware I have, which doesn't say "designed for Windows XP". None of it works with windows, no matter if it's designed for Solaris or HP/UX.
dxglwrap.
While this is a really neat idea and it's cool to see someone get it working, I'm not very comfortable with it.
Why would a company let people install Linux natively when they can just run it under Windows?
I can certainly see my own workplace putting up exactly this argument.
Doesn't that mean we'll now have a less stable Linux that's slower and has all the Windows security vulnerabilities present?
Will Linux developers have to put up with complaints from people because the Windows end of things is breaking their software?
I don't like it. I can see where it might be useful, but for me the losses outweight the gains by a significant margin.
- MugginsM
People rarely spend 8 hours a day interacting with an ATM/Phone/Cash Register and high resolution and small type.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
No, but there are more people who use airplanes (ie fly on them, fly them, man the airports) than there are game players, and their are defiantly more aerospace engineers than game developers, so go figure...
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
My comment didn't address such systems, because they're not relevant to the topic at hand. Windows has a position of overwhelming dominance on the desktop of home and office systems for a number of reasons, and I think one of the reasons Linux isn't currently competitive in that sphere is the relative difficulty of installing software.
Linux can compete in ATM systems because that concern isn't relevant; it can't compete on the desktop... oh hell, why am I bothering? IHBT, right?
Well, that is the whole problem isn't it. You are a fool if you ignore legal issues or Microsoft's desires.
The original post appeared to compare DirectX and OpenGL's technical aspect, which is why I didn't touch upon legal issues.
If DirectX ever became popular on Linux, I can almost guarantee that Microsoft would pull out some patent and screw whatever company wrote it.
I'm completely unfamiliar with any of this legal stuff, but could Microsoft really prevent the independent implementation of a specification? I don't think it'd be reverse engineering either, since the DirectX documentation is freely available online. Plus all the specification is in this case is a set of #defines, interfaces, and maybe some functions somewhere.
Also, has Microsoft used patents before to screw a company that was writing an independent implementation of a Microsoft specification?
*shrugs* It's late, sorry if I don't make sense.
Starbucks gives you a standardized experience, inspite of all the options they offer. Windows gives you options to affect many superficial things, but at its core, it behaves the same way. (The worst thing you can do is enable single clicking in list views, post-Windows 98, and even that can be turned off with one click.)
Now, compare that with Linux, where double clicking on the titlebar can do anything from shading/unshading a window to maximizing/restoring it. And where would you go to change this behavior? KDE and Gnome have totally different prefs panels. And if you're running some other WM, then -- well, it's time for lots of fun. And then there are the eternal cut-n-paste problems (which is a standardization problem IMO -- nobody implements it right). Virtual desktops (or the lack of them). And so on.
At least someone else seems to think so too in this rant.
Joel's rant is incorrect. His whole premise is flawed, because he's arguing from incorrect definitions.
He states anti-aliased text is bad... when what he really dislikes is scalable text.
His complaints all come from the idea that onscreen text can be scaled to an arbitrary non-integer pixel height. If nobody used scalable fonts, his problems would vanish. But given that people do wish to view 12 pt text at 115% WYSIWG magnification, antialiasing is the best option.
He shows two sample paragraphs that he labels as non-anti-aliased and anti-aliased. But if those paragraphs were redone with text scaled 21% larger, then the non-anti-aliased version would be immeasurably uglier.
there are more people who use airplanes (ie fly on them, fly them, man the airports) than there are game players
No, there are not.
Too bad this wasn't posted early, since no one on /. will see this now.
No
are belong to us :)
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I'm completely unfamiliar with any of this legal stuff, but could Microsoft really prevent the independent implementation of a specification?
Of course, there already is an independent implementation.
The problem is, which version of windows has the standardised interface? Where do you want to go to find the same item on half a dozen windows machines today?
With *very* few exceptions, all windows programs have:
- A "File" menu, inside which is "Open", "Save", "Save As", "Print" and "Exit". In programs that support multiple files in one session, there's also a "Close". If a program is missing any of these options it's probably because the program can't do it at all (ie: image viewing programs might not have a "Save" option...)
- An "Edit" menu, which typically has "Copy", "Cut" and "Paste" and "Delete" at the least. Also the place you'll find "Undo" and maybe "Redo".
- Standardized shortcuts. CTRL-X/C/V for Cut/Copy/Paste respectively. CTRL-P for print. CTRL-[SHIFT]-TAB for switching between documents in multi-file programs. Also, ALT keystrokes for accessing menu options without the mouse.
- Minimize, Restore and Close icons in the upper right corner. The developer has to put in extra effort to change that, too.
- Additional window management commands by clicking on the program's icon in the upper left of the window, or right-clicking on the program in the taskbar.
- Standard control element sets: Checkboxes, drop down lists, "Open" and "Save As" dialogs, Radio buttons, tab interfaces, and so forth.
All versions of Windows since 95 have:
- A Taskbar with "Start" button, system tray, and clock.
- ALT-[SHIFT}-TAB for switching between applications in the taskbar.
- WINDOWS-? Shortcuts. (M)inimize all windows, (E)xplorer file manager, (R)un program, and so forth.
- A control panel for accessing the deeper system settings.
- A "Desktop" with familiar icons such as "My Computer" and "Recycle Bin".
- A "Start" button that contains folders for "Programs", Recently accessed document history, control panel, search, and shutdown/logoff.
That's just off the top of my head, too. I bet you'll have a tough time finding 5 native Windows applications that break any one of these design standards, and for each one you do find I'll dig up twenty that don't.
With many programs it is possible to choose settings which prevent the program from running at all
Then the programmer was either lazy or a sh*thead for letting those settings get saved! Another benefit of having an in-program editor is that you can check to make sure the settings don't break the program before committing to them. I won't argue that settings in readable files is a good thing, ini files are better for the user than the registry.
It's a case of different forms of memory - visual memory which some people are good at, or being able to remember a method or sequence of events. Being able to group things into sets should work - but it doesn't because menu options either cannot or are not sorted into logical groups
If your menus are not grouped logically then you haven't put enough thought about it. The typical menu setups in Windows apps are very logical: "File" contains all things that go with file operations. "Edit" contains all document editing functions. "View" contains all document viewing and program appearance settings, etc. If an app breaks the pattern (and some definitely do), then either the developer has a really good reason to be different or has not considered the user interface carefully enough. With all the cash MS dumps into usability studies, you'd think the way they have everything laid out would be pretty optimal for Jow Q User.
Syntax can be looked up
Which takes time, and for some people learning syntax for some programs would be like learning a whole other language. I'm amazed our office's secretary can find her way to work every day, let alone be able to understand a conf file filled with technical poo.
Your next paragraph deserves an insightful moderation. You are absolutely correct that just beneath the surface computers start to get m
You know, if you play modern games on Linux and Windows, the Linux versions always look and perform much better. Take, for example, Win and Lin versions of America's Army and UT2k4.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Actually, I was recently at a conference where NASA researchers were explaining how they are using DirectX to model the International Space Station.
Prove it, just go and prove that there are more people who have used something out of the aerospatial industry than there are teenages in Europe/US who muck about on their consoles.
+ If you add in all the parcel services that use airplanes + freight, you are talking about 2/3 of the worlds population who depends (and there for uses) this technologies, compared to XBox + PS2 + Gamecube = 400M max.
Also, my point was that the great grand parent was wrong in comparing the number of aerospace engineers to the number of game players.
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
Interix is a whole seperate subsystem that talks directly to the NT kernel, in parallel with the Win32 subsystem. Cygwin is a DLL kludge that rides on top of the Win32 subsystem.
I'm not sure I understand the difference between the Cygwin model and "a whole separate subsystem that talks directly to the NT kernel." I'm not trolling, just curious. I've done some work in Cygwin and found it surprisingly adept at handling things that I though Windows was incapable of doing. What can the interix (Windows Services for Unix) do that Cygwin can't?
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
DirectX relies on COM, so porting it to another platform isn't realistic without porting COM.
You may be thinking of CAD operators. Real engineers don't use CAD much, we do engineering, not drawing.
(I do actually agree with your main point)
... which would explain why the ISS is dying (as Netcraft and the random 'metallic bang' sounds confirmed)
--Kevin
by being able to run linux in windows environment, regular users will be able to start migrating to linux.
the problem with right now is you have to use either. you can get emulation but to a certain extent.
by doing the opposite, you can slowly migrate software that you previously have in windows and run them in linux. once you are comfortable with it, you can remove windows altogether.
this will help us (as i am from a corporate) to be able to test new applications in linux *without disruptions* to the existing system. migration will be much lower and hopefully at the end, the tco for linux will be much much lesser because minimal migration costs will be needed. applications are running in linux, users already has experience in linux, etc.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
And the PC gaming industry isn't a multi-billion dollar industry larger than Boeing can dream.
What is that old saying? "You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear".
I hate sigs.
Is there a reason why it sucks for such work?
Well, the OpenGL guys have long said that DirectX was only concerned with getting things to "look right," rather than having pure mathematical accuracy. In other words, some of the rendering calculations were done in such a fashion as to make them inappropriate for, say, physics modelling, but fine (and faster) for video games.
That said, I'm not sure that argument holds much water anymore with the later versions of DirectX. It's hard to say, since I don't use it. But anyway, from the games standpoint (which I'll agree is lots more important to Linux's mainstream success) it doesn't make hardly any difference now, which was your main point anyway. Both are plenty fast with modern hardware, and do all the stuff games need.
Which of course means that the point that started all this (that Linux needed DirectX compatibility to succeed) is totally bogus. But then, that's no surprise, so were his other two points.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
This is a terrible idea.
All this will do is help promote an incorrect sense of low Linux performance, additional installation complexity and low security to those evaluating Linux for the first time. There's already plenty of CD-bootable 'live' linux ISO's around that provide a much better evaluation platform.
I'm just waiting for all the skewed benchmark results because of the morons who try to do comparative benchmarks of Linux on a PC concurrently running Windows.
It will also give all those power-mad MIS people another way of forcing Windows onto linux users.
How is this different from a port of User-mode Linux?
My server
It's worth noting that many Microsoft applications, such as Office and Visual Studio, use non-standard Widgets too.
Linux shouldn't cater to 'Joe sixpack,' this is your fundamental misunderstanding here. Can Linux be used to cater to this? Sure. Because there are options, because it's flexible. Any step that impairs its flexibility is a bad move in the longrun.
Distros are the ones that can and should cater to particular audiences. Distros can produce standardized 'desktops' and all the stuff you're talking about, and that's fine. Several are trying to cater to your 'Joe sixpack' and that's great. But they can only do this because Linux is so flexible.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I think a more accurate comparison is:
Are there more aerospace engineers who use OpenGL than game developers who use DirectX?
The KDE font installer takes care of this. Don't know about GNOME. It lets you install fonts to your own home directory (~/.fonts) or system-wide (prompts for root password).
No they are not, unless you have xft set up incorrectly. You are probably using sub-pixel rendering on a CRT, when it's designed for TFTs as they have a fixed pixel layout. Normal anti-aliasing works best for CRTs.
Incidentally, xft's sub-pixel rendering is much sharper and clearer on my 1600x1200 laptop than Cleartype is.
Without DirectX, few games ever make it to Linux. Thats because DirectX is much more than just a 3-D gaming API. It has other features that make games easier to develop for.
OK genius, what do you suggest is done about this? Shall we all ask Microsoft to port the DirectX API to linux? I'm sure they'd love to do that. If not, how about an independent reimplementation? Well, seeing as DirectX is a proprietary API with lots of Windows-specific dependencies and is changing with every revision, it's not an easy task. Although plenty of games work perfectly under WineX.
As other posters have mentioned, there is also OpenGL which works on both operating systems and more besides, and is an open standard with free, already completely working implementations.
I would contend that fonts under Linux are a problem. Take Mozilla. You can have all your "fonts" in a row under KDE or Gnome but Mozilla is still likely to render and scale them improperly. Going into prefs and trying to set them to scale usually means having to compromise. This is a fault, perhaps, more with Mozilla than Linux but it's a problem. Installing font-type "x" or "y" is just not the answer. A good look and feel out of the box is needed. I would agree that SuSE and most new distro's do this well, but go install some apps (again, Mozilla) and watch it all go to pot.
If there were a killer app for the general population that only ran on Linux and can't be ported, this might make sense. Name one.
Spoken like someone who hasn't tried to port that many apps.
Some people want to be able to get the actual work they're trying to do, done, not waste a day or two porting an app and it's dozen or so dependencies.
Cygwin is being used a lot these days. Some much so that I ended up with 3 conflicting versions of Cygwin on my computer as a result of installing various development environments and applications..... and I'm not even a software guy, I'm an EE!
Running Linux apps under windows can be a real PITA and this has the potential to be a great solution.
Life is too short to proofread.
I don't know. Each time this kind of conversation starts, there is a lot of talk about standardisation and 'the one true interface'. I am replying to this thread because I have read two very well thought out replies and thought 'this I can talk about'.
Your points about shortcut keys and the like are interesting. I will admit that most windows apps I use share the same shortcuts, but then most of the Linux apps I use do too. I am typing this in Mozilla (I know -- the cross-platform nature of the app makes this more windows-like), and it obeys all the rules you mentioned. Likewise Openoffice, Koffice, gnumeric, etc.
On the other hand I type almost all my documents in Emacs, and the bindings I had to relearn there are used consistently in my Matlab editor and on the Bash command line.
In my experience, most users will see buttons as buttons regardless of the exact widget set you are using. Take winamp as a good example, or any recent game. Their interfaces look as similar to the standard windows interface as many of the linux apps I run. Because of the power of the GUI and the basic widgets everyone knows, they can learn to recognise that something that looks like a button probably is.
Most linux window managers mimic the Windows setup of close button top right, but it irritates me no end, as I keep closing stuff when I want to max/min it. So I have moved my close button to lop left.
The point I am trying to make is that for most of the applications people use regularly, the interfaces have been standardised enough already. The apps with confusing config files and the like are probably that way because of a user base that is familiar with the way things work and would probably be confused more by a change to a user friendly GUI than anything else. So how much more standard do the applications have to be?
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
Here's a list of things linux needs to conquer windows.
1.) cleartype fonts
2.) automatic directX compatibility for games
3.) one solid universal gui
BWAAAAAHAHAAHA!
Seriously...there may be a (short?) list of things Linux needs to conquer windows.....but these aren't on it.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Dude, where are these cut and pase issues you speak of? Select middle click or use cut/paste in the app of your choice. What's missing?
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
No, there are not.
Yes there are, times infinity!
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Just a quick response to this post.....
/XP) for dial up networking so it looks identical on ALL their fucking operating systems.
I couldn't agree more with this fellow.
When working on a H/D myself (retail end level ISP) I LOATHED microsoft, because each fucking version of windows has a different dial up networking gui.
As far as I'm concerned MS should release a bloody patch (much like IE is compat with 98 / ME
This single change alone per OS is an absoloute bastard to work with.
Tenon's machten did something like this a decade ago on the mac ( but not linux ).
Call me when all the games on gamestop support mac/linux. Until then linux is just the firewall/router between me and the internet and the webserver to handle my domain. I dont think windows can touch linux as a small server. In the desktop market though, I dont care if its so sexy it causes instant orgasam. Until I can play games on it, there is no reason to switch. I dont want to mess around with wine to get games to run. Insert CD, double click setup, wait, swap cd, wait, swap cd, wait, swap cd, wait swap cd wait, bitch about dvd's not being standard yet, then play game. Thats what I want. I have editplus and context, thats good enough for my webscripting, and my work gives me a machine to program on.
I like linux a lot. I like how it runs as a server and I like the development and cost model. But until the gaming world embraces it, saying well they could use this isn't a good enough reason to switch. I'm not saying linux can/will/should support directX. I just think that is the biggest thing holding back linux. If it can game and is cheaper, the parents will buy. The children will learn, and market share will grow.
1. Integration of video drivers into the kernel. Yes this makes it unstable, but Linux currently is plagued by the problem that Windows NT 3.51 had using fastLPC and HAL to control the video cards. Integrating into the kernel will give the necessary speed.
Well, shit, here this whole time I thought nvidia.o was loaded into my running kernel each time I booted. (Oh, and before you start going on about the GLX module, it's in the right spot too...suggesting it should be a kernel module would be obtuse at best.
2. A thread model that allows thread ownership to be changed dynamically. Most important is the thread model. IPC is just too dammed slow compared to reading a common memory heap for a process. Without a thread model it is very difficult to make a responsive GUI application that does anything complex (unless of course you use IPC and spawn several processes).
Without a thread model? Pthreads? Oh, and about thread ownership changing dynamically, I'm too frightened by the security consequences of something like this to even think about it.
3. A GUI messaging system that makes much faster calls on the operating system. GUI applications will not be able to compete with the speed of windows apps unless something is done to integrate this GUI messaging system with the OS. While this sounds like it is forcing a default Window manager, this isn't so. It just requires a programming standard to the messaging system to be written.
You know, Linux could use that. Perhaps even through a scheduler that can dynamically reassign priority to a server process when a client is waiting on it....hmmm....Oh wow...that's funny...that's in the 2.6 kernel.
I'm not saying X is perfect...but it's pretty damn good, with speed in the same neighborhood as Windows. And looking at the change in performance over time of the two systems (Windows slowing down, X speeding up), it's not X that should be worried.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
I think the "ashamed for running Windows" bit was aimed at all Linux zealots, not just Gentoo ones. And he's right, people shouldn't be made to feel ashamed because of their choice of OS. It's just code, not a religion.
Fonts are fonts. I use Windows fonts in Linux. They look great. Big deal.
But they are rendered in different quality. I switch between linux and windows with a KVM-switch, and here is a font AA and blurred, and there is a font AA and crisp.
It's not the font, it is probably Freetype.
There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Try QCAD.
(it is getting increasingly difficult to find an app that doesn't have an answer of this varietty.)
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Exactly.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
By the way, I do not use a GUI, I am strictly command line with my *nix boxes (that's more than one). But I don't expect that the average computer user will want to edit text in vi or even pico, read their email that way... Manage their 'puter that way. Some people LIKE a GUI, why make them feel like second class Linux users?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Which is going to allow more people to seriously consider Linux as their primary OS? The ability to play most of the games out there, or the ability to run software for CAD, data visualization, etc.
I think it must be called LINE (Line Is Not an Emulator)
In my experience in helping people convert to GNU/Linux it's not the "tetrazillion" choices that scares Joe, it's really the notion of Change. Joe is fearful that he won't be able to do the things he used to do. He's worried that his way of doing things will have to change.
Every single person that I've helped convert to GNU/Linux has been in love with all the available choices once I've given them a brief hand-holding, and showed them how they can effectively find those choices, and review them, without being overwhelmed -- which by the way is not that difficult.
It is obvious through your post that you are not a knowledgeable unix user/administrator otherwise you would not have said a few of the things you did. It is possible to set up a GNU/Linux install in a completely arbitrary way. You don't even have to follow the standard file system specifications if you don't want (/usr, /bin, etc). You can choose from different init systems, or invent your own. But if you knew how unix actually worked, was booted, etc, you would know that no matter how a unix system is set up, it is *easy* to figure out how it has been set up, and no matter what the case may be, problems can be diagnosed even if you are initially unfamiliar with the setup. Thankfully almost every modern linux distribution is set in essentially *exactly* the same way. Subtle differences like package management, and installed packages are simply not problems for experienced unix people.
For knowlegdeable unix people all unix systems are homogenous, regardless of their setup. You have clearly presented yourself as Joe Sixpack, and it is obvious that you are fearful, and that is what has drivin your comment.
Now that I have been using unix for several years, have done countless installs (including building Linux From Scratch multiple times), use it on a daily basis at home, at work, and at school, whenever my friends or relatives call me asking for help diagnosing their windows problems I find that I quickly become frustrated at the very system that made me frustrated when I first decided to try GNU/Linux. The transition can still be made easier, but it will always be a transition. Why? Because the GNU/Linux, and the opensource movement is a completely different philosophy. And I am glad that it is.
The parent post represents a greater common truth. If GNU/Linux were interested in a huge userbase (right now), as many suggest it should, then a good idea would be to present Joe with a closed system free from choices... one that Joe is familiar with (as the parent poster suggested). I believe that the slow (but steady) conversion of people from Windows to Unix shows that as more people become interested in computers, more people realize that there are options... and that is what GNU/Linux was born from. GNU/Linux itself IS an option. It would be suicide to eliminate the very thing that it is based upon.
If people want to use GNU/Linux, and benefit from all that it offers, they have to be willing to accept that their way of doing things IS going to change. If people are interested in that change, they will find themselves gravitating toward GNU/Linux, or FreeBSD, or whatever other choice they decide upon. This is essentially a blue pill / red pill question.
For Joe to take the red pill is a scary thing. It means his world changes, and it means that his cushy life may be disturbed... but I believe that the benefits of freedom will eventually outlive the benefits of imprisonment.
The goal must be to have vendors ship machines that don't have Windows on them at all. This is actually a step backward.
AFAIK if you use LBA you will have problems booting from cylinders > 1024, and if you don't use LBA you won't.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Maybe I can finally run PostgreSQL on my machine. My old Linux box finally died so I have nothing to develop/play with lately. I tried the windows proof of concept, but was never able to get it working and it messed up my existing cygwin installation.
1) How many people still use Eudora? For that matter, what's wrong with the multitude of GUI e-mail clients already out there for Linux?
2) The Linux kernel has supported automatic device detection for quite a while now.
3) That's been included in pretty much every modern distribution. Just type "apt-get install " and everything's taken care of.
Fine. But the parent said something along the lines of "Direct3d can do stuff besides 3d," implying that OpenGL+SDL could not. That is what I was refuting.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
As long as this is established to be a per-application issue, then we don't need do waste time saying "fonts in Linux suck." We can just file bug reports--and I think there already is one for Mozilla.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
The software you are installing for this hardware
TAP-Win32 Adapter
has not passed Windows Logo testing to verify its compatibility with Windows XP. (Tell me why this testing is important)
Continuing your installation of this software may impair or destabilize the correct operation of your system either immediately or in the future. Microsoft strongly recommends that you stop this installation now and contact the hardware vendor for software that has passed the Windows Logo testing.
----
It does make me wonder if XP Service Pack 2 is going to have a "fix" for this like the XBox did.
The funny thing is I think every driver I have, even for HP or D-Link products has instructions in their manual that mention this box appearing, the next stop is to "Click install anyway" and continue.
They did, it's called Internet Explorer ;^)
(Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections)
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Cygwin does not allow developers to comfortably develop Linux apps on windows
The parent understates this point: You can't compile any linux app under Windows, unless you don't make any library calls or system calls. Perhaps CYGWIN provides basic text I/O libraries for gcc, I don't know. That's fine for toy problems, but not for industrial use.
So CoLinux on a machine means easier access to Linux for Windows developers: you don't have to set up a dual-boot configuration and then boot back and forth.
Easier Linux access === Faster Linux transition.
Maybe now I can final run all of my Linux games on Windows.
I keep getting told that somehow the rendering in Linux is actually supposed to be better than that of Windows. Nothing illustrates better the fanatical fanboyism some people display, because when I run the latest freetype, complete with bytecode interpreter and everything, and standard Windows fonts, I still get bizarre line widths, particularly in Ws, 2s, and other diagonals and curves. It's the ugliest thing I've ever seen, and apparently people completely ignore it, or they're just not paying enough attention to see it. I don't know.
So now we have to learn 10 different "distros." What's the damn difference?
On an unrelated note, "Joe Sixpack" is an annoyingly overused term around here. Not to mention, it's sort of inherently condescending. Just because we're geeks who spend hours trying to get our soundcards working doesn't make us better than someone who uses their computer only to chat with their jock friends.
1.) Don't do a goddamn thing to my fonts. My fonts are much nicer looking than Windows fonts ever were TYVM.
Yeah, check out those diagonal lines in characters that suddenly fatten up, or even disappear. I see them in capital Ws, digits, and other characters all the time in screenshots people show me to "prove" that somehow, Linux font rendering is magically supposed to be better than Windows. Sorry, but I have yet to see a 10pt Times New Roman in Linux look better than a 10pt Times New Roman in Windows.
Of course, OS X blows away everyone's font rendering anyway--if you want to be proud of anything, strive for theirs.
There is already a way to run Linux on Windows. Here are the steps:
1. Remove Windows.
2. Install Linux.
3. Run Linux.
----
Are we there yet?
I think it would be entirely more valuable if someone could make a great Windows emulator for Linux, like there is for Mac OS 9 [and maybe X too?].
I would run Linux as my primary OS if I had the option to run my Windows programs in the blink of an eye, at the click of an icon.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I think you answered your own question. The government hasn't handed out tons of corporate welfare to computer game companies because they are profitable all on their own.
Ok, it really has nothing to do with that -- it probably has something to do with all the problems our military would have if one of it's biggest suppliers suddenly went belly up.
But still, I think your "where can you buy an airline for a few tens of USD" is a silly question. I mean how many airliners does boeing sell? And how many copies of Half-life has Valve sold? And how much R&D went into the airliner, vs. how much R&D into Half-life? Now I'm not suggesting Half-life was easy to write... or that they didn't have any R&D at all, but I suspect their budget was a lot smaller and their overall return (percentage wise) was a lot better.
Your definitions are completely invalid. You call someone an "airplane user" if she has once, ever, gotten anything that was ever on an airplane.
By that reasoning, everybody uses airplanes. But that metric is not only meaningless to determine how important planes are to society, but even more useless to measure how much software development effort goes into each area.
To be at all meaningful, you should only be able to compare people who frequently travel on airplanes with those who frequently use games. Or have used them in the past year, or something.
XBox + PS2 + Gamecube
That's a minority of game systems. Add in cellphone Snake and Windows Freecell, and you can septuple those numbers.
But that whole question is pointless. The number of users of airplanes doesn't matter. You'd have to compare the users of airplane software (basically just pilots) with game players. That's where the overwhelming differential comes from!
PS. As it happens, I'm monitoring software development for a major upcoming airplane project. We're using NVidia 59xx cards, because they're the best. Our programmers despair of achieving graphically quality to rival top of the line videogames. Heck, they probably will hardly even equal the dubious quality of Battlefield 1942.
Maybe you don't understand how bad the SOTA for airplane software is. It's very, very bad.
There is more money in the PC market than the mainframe market, more money in the home sound card market than professional sound card market, etc. (etc including the 3d video game market vs the cad market)
Who said Joe is scared by choices? Of course the average user doesn't care what sound server he has or what window manager he's running. When it comes to the applications they care about (wordprocessor, spreadsheet, accounting software, photo manipulation program, software synthesizer, whatever) they usually want to be able to change options.
/home in a different place or man is called nam. And really, I run openbox with no menus/pagers/panels/etc and I don't think i would find it hard to work on a computer with a pager at the bottom of the screen.
The windows print dialog has a whole bunch of options and people can print just fine. MS Word has a million options but nobody is scared of using it, they only change the options if they actually need to.
BTW, Linux has options, it's not like every distribution puts
>> 3.) one solid universal gui
Many people slighlty miss the point of this one, it is not as unreasonable as it first sounds.
With better interoperability and some standards a 'universal GUI' is very much possible.
There is no reason why mulitiple toolkits such as GTK and QT, XUL, Motif and others should not continue to exist but they should be able to integrate so that users are not able to tell what toolkit was used anymore than they can tell what programming language was used to produce the application.
The attempts by various distributions such as Red Hat to produce consistant themes is just a band aid on a much bigger technical puzzle.
With any luck XUL, kaXUL, gladeXML and others will come together to offer a standard way of describing user interfaces and users will be presented with applications that look the same irrespective of the toolkit used.
How many Windows are there? How many Unix/Linux variants?
I think you get my point now. 10 vs 1/2 million.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
First let me say, this program is absolutely AWESOME.
I'm a Windows user. Why? Because I love to play games, I use quite a bit of software for which there is no Linux clone, and I like the rapid response and eyecandy format that Windows provides.
Having said that, as an engineer, I've always wanted to get better at using Linux. Oh, sure, I can log on, cd, ls, updatedb, locate, man, and generally get my way around a linux system. But I don't know my way around a Linux box like I know my way around a Windows box. I spend all my time in Windows, so this is no surprise.
I don't want to run two boxes, and VMWare is dirt slow at running linux. I have a 2.4Ghz P4, and it's just frustrating to watch VMWare boot like it's running on a 250Mhz K6.
In comes CoLinux: In just a few short hours, I've installed the Debian distribution, installed KDE, and now have a full fledged KDE desktop running in Windows! Now I can use Windows AND Linux side by side, and finally have the oportunity to learn to use Linux the way I've always wanted to.
Now, I'm an engineer. Your average joe probably wouldn't get as far as I have gotten. So what needs to happen next?
If some bright programmer out there (I have no time, unfortunately) would write a server application for Linux and Windows that would connect to a client application in the other operating system and LAUNCH APPLICATIONS ON REQUEST FROM THAT CLIENT -- it would be the start of mass transition to Linux.
Imagine: You start Windows. In the background, the linux "box" starts up as a service. The Windows "box" is networked via Samba to the Linux drives. The Linux box is networked to the Windows drives. The Windows box starts an X-Server.
You click "START" in windows: Up pops all your favorite (hated?) Windows apps... ALONG SIDE YOUR LINUX APPS! You click a linux app. The shortcut causes the Windows Client to send a UDP message to the Linux Server to start that application. The Linux box starts the application, connects to the already running XServer on the Windows box, and up pops your Linux application!
Now imagine, your Windows user has come to love linux so much, he decides to switch to Linux. He's not ready to dump windows yet, but he wants to start using KDE instead of the Windows Explorer.
You set windows to connect to the Linux box at startup, and you have KDE running. Now you log into KDE, click the K-Start button, and up pops all your Linux apps -- with Windows apps right beside them! You click on a windows app, the same thing happens in reverse: Linux contacts Windows, Windows starts the app, up pops your windows app.
Even shortcuts to applications work in their respective OSes.
All data files are visible from either OS.
Finally, after months of learning to use Linux, our user finally reformats with Linux, goes fully secure (notice we're assuming this linux box is single user, and non-secure while being used from Windows to make life easier for our Windows user.) Now he runs Wine or VMWare to get access to the few remaining Windows applications he still has to have.
THIS is the key. THIS is what will let Windows users finally break into Linux. When my GRANDMOTHER can finally click START -> Programs -> Konquerer and be using Linux instead of Windows, THAT is what is going to change the world.
Oh, and of course, the Clipboards of the two OSes MUST interact. =)
It's a great day for Linux and Windows users alike.
-tENS0r
May I remind you that you started by comparing _creators_ of planes (ie aerospatial engineers) to _players_ of games. Just admit that your original comparison was apple meet orange, and we'll call it a day by admitting that anyone can come out on top by presenting the stats a particular way. And if you've quite finished, we'll get back to the topic...
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
I didn't 'turn it into a straw man' because 1) I used the example provided, and 2) the point was irrelevant to the topic at hand in the first place. However correct it is to say that not anyone should be able to turn an ATM into a jukebox, it's got nothing ot do with the ability of people to turn a home computer into a jukebox, which people can and should be able to do.
Your mischaracterization of my original post, which was available for quoting in its entirety at the cost of a couple of clicks at most, bespeaks trollishness far more than the actual 'straw man' which you offer of a comment I didn't make.
It's absolutely true that 'in many situations' users don't have any need to install software, which I don't and didn't deny, but those typically aren't the cases where Windows is the dominant OS. My comment discussed one of the factors which makes Windows dominant in the sector which was under discussion, viz. home and small office, where the user typically does perform 'admin' functions such as installing software.
In situations where that isn't the case, obviously the lack of easy application installation isn't a factor. I think it's not coincidental that those are the very areas where Windows is losing ground.
Standardization does not preclude choice. However, if every company/OEM Computer Vendor/etc. chooses a different standard, then it isn't really much of a standard, is it? Any kind of standardization does not mean you can't install other choices, it just means that you can sit down at any Linux computer and expect a common GUI interface available. Obvious exception for servers.
Right now, the only thing that you can expect on a Linux computer is the console. Since a lot of potential users are turned off by the console, people want to extend this idea by having a common GUI. This DOES NOT mean that the standard GUI should be the only option available. It simply means that someone can become proficient in a common GUI and be able to apply those skills on any Linux computer.
As a practical matter, however, this is gonna be really tough. Lots of people want standardization, but they all want the standard to be whatever their favorite is. My guess is that the first company that really starts to push their Linux distro to home users and gets it used by the major OEMs will dictate the standard. Oh well.
Karma: Contrapositive
Windows 98SE did not come with ClearType fonts, jerk. Nor did Windows ME or 2k.
ClearType brand subpixel rendering technology is a feature of your font renderer, not of the fonts themselves. Here's how it works. (Summary: stretch outline horizontally, rasterize, blur horizontally, and gamma correct.) Even if you take old Win95-era TrueType fonts and drop them into Windows XP set to display on an LCD, they'll probably show up with sub-pixel AA.
It (Mandrake) also overwrites your MBR with its own bootloader without even asking! Awesome, that's what I call user-friendly!
Actually, thats not true. It clearly gives you options about how exactly you want to set up a dual booting system. (It just gives you an easy cop-out option, and let mandrake do its thing, which I did)
I feel like I'm missing something.
Is it just me, or is the guy responsible* for the software that was the subject of the article that sparked the whole thread sitting here with an unmodded post?
I don't know, +1 "Interesting," at least? That third paragraph sounds "Informative" to me, can somebody with mod points hook a brother up?
Do it for the children.
The Dalai LLama
...doesn't have a well-developed sense of irony... does this count?...
*This was to make the paragraph smoother. He seems pretty humble on the site he referenced; I'm sure he'd want it noted that he didn't do it by himself.
My sig could be your sig!
I've been saying for years that one of the most difficult things in adopting Linux, for Windows users, is an unfamiliar interface.
While running it under a PC emulator is all very well and good, it runs at a fraction of the equivilent speed it would run at on the host system.
Thus, a false observation of either speed or efficiency would be made, since the equivilent system would create so much lag. If you ran, for example, Open Office on a PC emulator as opposed to Win32 native, to demonstrate it for a client, they would say, naturally, that it is crap, because most pointy haired bosses don't know the restrictions involved. Sure, you could set up a seperate system, but they would respond negatively, thinking a seperate system would be the sum total of the case for upgrades.
However, if you can sheer away those limitations so it would run under Linux/Win32 accordingly, logic would dictate that without a hardware emulation platform as the intermediate limiting factor, and thus, the response would be more appropriate.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
If you consider only Microsoft's own software you will find frequent examples where that is not the case. The old ALT-F ATL-X trick will not work on many Microsoft programs simply because you DON'T have the File-Exit menu combination, but most likely some other word, or even in a different menu. So much for standardisation within even the same company. Putting "exit" under "file" is not intuitive anyway, and I suspect that just putting it in the top left hand side menu as with apples and ataris is the reason.
My point was about the window manager and things entirely under the control of MS anyway. On some machines I haven't even been able to find the "start" menu without poking the mouse in all four corners of the screen and waiting to see if it will pop up. My point about there not even being a certain location of even the file browser still stands - and I think that is a very major drawback. I don't see it as being a paragon of an interface design. Self-consistancy is important.
There shouldn't be ANY within Microsoft itself. Other applications they have less or no control over, and we've all seen absolute horrors of user interface design written in VB - but that can be done by anybody anywhere, so that isn't what I am talking about.
My reply was to the assertion that there is an MS interface standard - and it can be answered easily with a question - which one? Copy a MS desktop too slavishly and people will expect the quirks or OS specific bits as well - if another system looks too much like windows they will treat it as such, which is not always the best thing to do. They may expect to find menu items or icons in exactly the spots where they put them on their home computers, in places where no-one else would expect them. There will be very different applications available, and others that are not there at all. We can learn from good examples, but we should learn why they are good examples, and implement things on that basis. Consistancy is important, and users should be able to see that they are using CDE, KDE, Gnome, WinXP, Win2k, Win98 or OSX and work accordingly with whichever of those very different desktop interfaces (all with some similarities however) that they are using.
The difficultly in that case was navigating a series of menus and dialog boxes which had names which did not seem to relate well to their function - and an inability of that version of MS Excel to save those settings for use the next time it ran.
In that case the tutorial was originally run using MS Works, with effectively command line entries into the spreadsheet - then run in later years with MS Excel. Using MS Excel prolonged the time required for the students to do the tasks significantly, despite most students having no contact with MS Works at all prior to the tutorial. Whether it came down to people assuming it was harder using MS Works and taking care, and assuming they knew what they were doing in MS Excel and making incorrect choices is uncertain. Even when the students were given full menu paths of every selection they had to make it still took over half an hour longer with MS Excel, but they had to learn how to use it sometime, while they will probably never see anything like MS Works. The nested menu interface is not always the way to go - a config file or a big dialog box full of options which duplicates that idea can save a lot of ti
> Select middle click or use cut/paste in the app of your choice. What's missing?
The ability to copy/paste anything other than text, for one.
(Although the clipboard works quite well across programs built with the same toolkit.)
those of us who use http://alterslash.org get to see it however. :)
A little overkill never hurt anybody.
You know how windows has done the above? Not because it considered the operating system as 'a controller of input and output of the computer and basic services to programs'. It split its kernel design into two parts, ther kernel as above, and the Windows executive that handles all the optimization hacks. And guess what, it works. And its even stable after 10 years.
Windows has the whole religion of "how the stuff has to be done". Too bad, it is incorrect, and they have to compensate its inadequacy with various "make-the-test-case-run-faster" hacks. No effort was applied to actually fix the source of the problem, it's better to just repeat old tired dogmas that no one but Windows-oriented developers believe in.
Your OS design school is based (like most academics) on the 1960s operating systems. Not every operating system has to be implemented in a strict monolithic kernel, or a strict microkernel method to be called an operating system.
Monolithic vs. microkernel vs. everything else argument seems to be older than the operating systems themselves, however currently it's firmly in the realm of purely academic discussions. Windows adds nothing new to it, unless you count "it's common that developers start with microkernel, and over the time shift toward using the system as if it was monolithic because they forgot why did they start with microkernel in the first place" as new.
The operating system should make it easy for an application programmer (not a system programmer) to make an effective program. This includes all the hacks such as integrating the messaging system and video subsystems. An application programmer will thank you for it (and a system programmer will curse you for it, but thats the way it has to be).
This is false. Application programmer doesn't give a shit about a hack designed to speed up a particular kind of application or design as long as it doesn't happen a kind of application, or design philosophy that he is working on at the moment. Developers want a system that behaves predictably, consistently and provides an environment that is friendly to whatever they are working on. Messing up the system with application-dependent hacks and stuffing it with every idiosyncrasy that happened to be present in the 65537th attempt to marry descendants of DDE and OLE is not a way to provide any of the above.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
What does this provide that Cygwin does not? Does it allow all Linux x86 binaries to run? That seems to be the only thing that is missing in Cygwin (except the power of Linux on its own).
:(
I guess the biggest issue is that the Windows Registry can still tank both systems at the same time...
running these two on separate hard drives at the least. that seems to work fine, sharing a drive has given us many issues which a second drive solves in each case.
Actually people should be shamed for running windows and supporting Microsoft. It is part of the counter marketing effort to drive Windows down and push Linux up, when the Beast started using offensive methods to destroy Linux they iniated a marketing war, a war between a greedy, dishonest Corporate entity and consumers (a substantial portion of which are cranky ex-microsoft customers who got sick of the marketing BS and the failures in the software). So I, like other people want to choose to use an alternate operating system, Microsofts solution is not to make their software more desirable, or even make the slightest attempt to make amends for the past abuses of their customers, but to launch an all out attack to destroy my ability to make a choice about which operating system I can use. This is a war, a war about my right to choose which operating system I want to run, about being able to get a laptop with Linux pre-installed, about having a full choice in aplications I want run on the operating system I choose, about not being forced to upgrade and relearn at what ever interval the Beast decides beat suits it's balance sheet. As such the friend of my enemy is my enemy, it sucks that it has fallen to this level, but MS took it there.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
ou can have all your "fonts" in a row under KDE or Gnome but Mozilla is still likely to render and scale them improperly.
:unscaled for all bitmapped fonts; download Microsoft and Bitstream truetype fonts and have them load before anything else; and don't forget to regenerate fontconfig cache. So basically, it's not Mozilla's fault, it's the fault of your sysadmin if he can't configure fonts properly.
This is an interesting point. I have recently switched to Xorg 6.7, and noticed Firefox and KDE fonts get uglified. Solution took a bit of time to find. Essentially: carefully look at the order xfs or xserver loads the fonts; use
Oh, and if it matters, I am using Firefox compiled against gtk2. Maybe the gtk1 version has worse font handling, but then again, why would you want to use it?
Wow! You're right, Mr. AC! All I have to do is spend the next 12-18 hours install Gentoo and trying to get it to work with my non-standard hardware, then download (or purchase) a couple of games, then test them out. Clearly, my subjective opinion won't be biased because of the hassle I went through to get it to work. Oh, what? You mean in order to do a reasonable test, I'd have to have two identical machines with installations of Windows and Linux and run them side by side to test them? Well, sure, I'll just go buy another machine, because somebody made an unsupported claim on Slashdot.
Those URLs do *NOT* count as support of the claim. At all.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Yea, i've kept my eye on that for sometime. Most of the games I play though require punkbuster and I've read they have some trouble getting that to run properly. I have played some good native games on linux (nwn, ut2004, ut2003) and that is really want I want to see. The problem is how to convice developers that cross-platform means more then just xbox and windows.
I always find that I have to take ranters who can't tell the difference between a search for
Joel on Software
and one for
"Joel on Software"
with more than just a small pinch of salt.
FP.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
> However, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think
> Linux 3D graphics drivers are currently all
> proprietary,
Wrong. There are RADEON drivers in X.org and XFree86's tree with both 2D and 3D accellerated. The ATI driver supports the latest cards and supposedly has better acceleration. But I wouldn't know about that since Free drivers is why I tossed the NVIDIA card and now buy only hardware supported by Free drivers. The horror of keeping closed drivers working through kernel/distro upgrades wasn't worth it.
Democrat delenda est
special driver software on the host operating system is used to execute the coLinux kernel in a privileged mode (known as ring 0 or supervisor mode).
By constantly switching the machine's state between the host OS state and and the coLinux kernel state, coLinux is given full control of the physical machine's MMU (i.e, paging and protection) in its own specially allocated address space, and is able to act just like a native kernel, achieving almost the same performance and functionality that can be expected from a regular Linux which could have ran on the same machine standalone.
That is from colinux's page. You're on crack dude. It runs as a driver and it runs in ring 0. Yes, if Windows does something unexpected with the timer interrupt or with kernel memory, it will break coLinux.
What's more, Xen is 1) open source 2) not a virtual machine. It's a hypervisor. Get a clue.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
You just made my point. "Go here, do this, then do this, and go here...here..and here...now do this." You can't be serious? How do expect that to compete with "Click Start, then Run, now type d:\setup.exe and install."