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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.
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
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
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.
The biggest benefit I see is that people could start running (and liking?) Linux applications without having to make "the big switch." Once they realize that they like Linux better and [hopefully] can do everything they need to under Linux, then the next computer they buy may run Linux alone. It's certainly more elegant and appealing to current Windows users than just telling them they're unsophisticated dolts for not using Linux.
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.
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.
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.
They could be doing that now, easier in fact than this, with a live cd. It would still require someone with technical knowhow to set this up on an office full of computers. They could just as easily set up a whole mess of linux installations or just custom live cd's.
I doubt this will turn to much, it seems like a toy for geeks.
From what I remember:
1) It runs as a device driver under Windows, which provides it with hardware access.
2) It doesn't yet run X correctly; any screenshots showing an X interface were done by running a separate X server under Windows and having CoLinux talk to that.
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 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
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.
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 ~~
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.
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=
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.
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. =)
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).
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).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
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
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
Yes but then it would only run Linux alone. The beauty of this system is that it provides both a social as well as technical solution to the Open Source problem.
The technical solution is that it will allow native Linux applications to run in Windows without the massive overhead of emulation.
The social solution is when some Pointy Head Boss who is taken in by MS FUD about the evils of linux and wants you to write an app in that runs in Windows for a task that you know Linux can preform better.
So what do you do? With coLinux, you can still write the app to run in Linux, then run it on the windows machine with coLinux. So it makes the PHB happy by giving the impression that it's running on Windows, but Linux is actualy doing the work and at the same time you gave Linux a foothold on Windows' terrortory.
So down the road, when MS decides it's time to "Upgrade" you can propose that instead of spending millions on new MS licences, you can show that all the applications that were written to run the business runs perfectly and exactly the same under Linux, and it's time tested since all this while Linux was doing the work, thereby justifying ditching MS altogather.
Why this is good is that it provides a bridge between Windows and Linux. You can demostrate without leaving the Windows enviorment, the power of Linux and at the point where you eventualy make the transition, re-education needs will be minimal as employees will already be familier with using native linux apps.
Finally, a technological fix for a social problem.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
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
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.
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.
All? Have you downloaded and installed the Bitstream Vera families into your X11 font server?
... 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.
but what about the cost of changing the way you develop apps or modify the existing apps to run on linux. This seems like a back asswards approach to convince the boss that linux is good. I think a better approach is for developers to make both windows and linux versions of their software as they have been doing for mac os for years. Then when the phb says "gee, if we switch to linux, can we still use program X?"
I've started doing this with mozilla and thunderbird so that if I switch eventually, it'll be less painful when all the programs look and act differently.
However, with commercial software, the problems occures when you have a bunch of licenses for windows and you want to switch to linux. I think it'd be in the developers intrest to offer trade-in's of windows licenses for linux licenses. This might be a radical step, but the only people that buy software are those that already buy it.
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.
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.
NT's POSIX support is POSIX.1 support. The Unix world is interested in POSIX.2.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
Well yes, I do agree with you that the idea is "back asswards" (and i mean it). But the point is that it's a way of introducing Linux into the equation while keeping the Windows that the PHB wants on.
If there wasn't a PHB in charge but a rational manager who knows his shit, you won't need run hoops around him anyway.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
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!
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
Right, Boeing is dirt poor compared to a software comapny that makes FPS games...
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.
Heh. I'll take this on, I agree with it mostly, but there's a few things I wanted to bitch about, but not at you directly.
First, we need to decide if we want *every single* desktop, or if we'll just be happy with "enough". You know, "enough that we can run Linux without being oppressed by Windows zealots" and so forth. "Enough" that we can reasonably expect a document sent to us in email will be readable in our environment, and so forth. That's what I want, and when we have that I don't give a rat's ass how much of the market Windows has.
Cygwin seems to go mostly unscathed, but a lot of people bash WineX. Regular ol' wine catches some complaining, as does Crossover Office.
Near as I can tell, WineX and Crossover Office get bashed regularly as an extension of the Wine License Schism. I think wine catches flak just because of existing bad blood between various factions and is completely self-defeating. Wine is great, runs a lot of stuff, but doesn't run a lot of stuff well, at least in my experience. I think wine's best purpose is to allow applications to be recompiled for LInux that were written for windows. That's what I think, anyway. ;)
Anything dealing with Microsoft servers (Exchange interoperability, for example) occasionally gets the same.
This stuff irritates me because there's a reason Exchange does many of the things it does. Bashing interoperability with Exchange ignores the basic fact that Exchange got those features and a fair bit of subsequent adoption because *NIX didn't have them. Or we did, but our implementation was kludgy and unwieldy. Interoperability with Exchange is now required if we want to get those servers back.
Ports of Linux software to Windows sometimes catch flak.
There's two sides to this that I can see right away. There's one side that says "If all of our great stuff runs in Windows, nobody will ever *need* to switch", and there's the side that says "If all of our great stuff runs in Windows it'll be very *easy* to switch". I can see both sides of this argument, although I'm generally in the second group. Cross-platform compatibility is a goal we really need, and in the absence of standards that work in a lot of areas (granted, we are also in the presence of standards that work in a lot of areas), then the only way we can get some of our own standard agendas and interoperability to work cross-platform is to port Linux stuff to Windows. If you ask me, and you haven't, I'd say it's immoral and unethical to write an end-user application that doesn't run on multiple platforms. Since when does the developer get to pick and choose what platform the end-user uses? Plenty of cross-platform development libraries and kits available, no excuses left.
In the case of WineX ports, they worry that game companies may feel that advising users to use WineX is "good enough".
This argument falls on its face in general. One of the top reasons I hear from family and friends for not switching to Linux is because of games. !? Right. Fucking games. Well, if all their favorite games (such as Everquest, for example) run fine in WineX, they can switch if they really want to. When enough people switch, the game developers will continue to do what they do best: make games that require lowest-level access to the hardware for best performance. And they'll look at their audience and they'll say....
Your line, George.
OH yeah. "Hey you, get your damn hands..."
Er, anyway. Then we'll get native LInux games that really fucking rock, because the audience will be there.
Like what I said? You might like my music
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.
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))"
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
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.
dxglwrap.
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.
The GNOME Desktop project has been putting serious effort into making the Linux desktop accessible for a few years now. It has a screen reader and a top notch maginifier. For instance, the magnifier can be made to watch an area of the desktop for change, so that it notifies you of changes in another part of the desktop while you're entering text somewhere else. It also has extensive tracking and cursor presentation options, much more so that its Windows counterpart. Check out some of the newer features in GNOME, it has improved a lot in just a year. There's also a long Accessibility Guide for GNOME, but it's not very good IMO. Still, all of the tools now have decent integrated help in 2.6.
:)
KDE has a similar effort underway, but it's not as complete as GNOME's. In fact, the current roadmap seems to be to also use parts of the GNOME Acccessibility Toolkit (ATK) in KDE. Xzoom isn't the height of accessibility under Linux/X anymore
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.
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.
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.
... which would explain why the ISS is dying (as Netcraft and the random 'metallic bang' sounds confirmed)
--Kevin
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.
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.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Maybe now I can final run all of my Linux games on Windows.
Quiet fool! Linux is ready for the desktop! Even my grandmother could use 'ldd' to tell which version of the freetype library her X server is compiled against in order to install a font. Now if you excuse me, I'll be over in the corner waiting for Linux to take over the world. *hands over ears* LA LA LA LA....
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
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
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!
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.
This isn't like Cygwin. The end result is more like running Linux in a VM (e.g. VMWare). Yes you can run all Linux x86 binaries. It's just like having the real thing installed.
You can even use an actual Linux partition instead of a file, so it could possibly be used in a dual boot machine, where you can run Linux even when you are booted into Windows using the same Linux partition that you boot into. I don't know if anyone has tried this, but I imagine it should work.
#!/
> 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