But, WinCE is hoeplessly outclassed, from a design standpoint, compared to EPOC32 (The Symbian/Psion OS).
Not only that, the default UI of wince is grim, and needs serious reworking for palmtop use, whereas the only complaint I've ever heard levelled at the well-thought out EIKON UI on EPOC32 is double- click to run programs. Personally, I prefer single-click select, double-click to run, so EPOC suits me fine. It makes cut+paste much easier.
EPOC32 is also more resource efficient than WinCE.
Granted, PalmOS is pretty poor underneath the UI, but the UI is well thought-out and easy, unlike WinCE (WinCE is only remotely friendly if you've used ms windows before - I've never used ms windows as my primary computing platform, went Amiga m68k -> linux/m68k -> linux/i386)
And wasn't there some sort of deal between Symbian and Palm? In future, it may be that they'll just transfer the PalmOS look 'n' feel to run on top of the EPOC32 kernel, for the keyboardless PDAs.
Since the EPOC32 source code is mostly cross-platform C++, a port of EPOC32 to Motorola-arch CPUs as well as ARM and x86, makes sense. This could mean a binary-compatibility package somewhat like wine could be produced, that runs legacy PalmOS apps at native speed, provided EPOC is running on DragonBall.
How about buttons 1, 2 and 3 ? Works for me... And it means that you can have a picture of a mouse, and rearrange the order to 3,1,2 or 2,3,1 or 3,2,1 or whatevr takes your fancy...
HURD is a collection of server programs, that run of top of the GNUMach microkernel, AFAIK. However, in theory, isn't the HURD itself portable to other kernels? Might a stripped-down linux kernel work better as a "microkernel" than Mach? Relatively few people have taken the time to understand Mach. HURD-on-Linux sounds to me like an interesting idea.
Amiga interoperability is probably a BINFMT_MISC entry that runs UAE in a500 mode on ADFs, and UAE in 680x0/RTG mode on amiga executables. You wouldn't even need a separate partition.
It depends on the trackball, I guess. My trackball is a Logitech Trackman Marble+ (now called trackman marble wheel, AFAIK)
This is a thumb trackball, with two mouse buttons for your index and 3rd finger, and a mousewheel for your middle finger.
The ball itself is quite small - about 3cm diameter. It's red with a black dot pattern printed on it. The trackball works like an optical ("ball-less") mouse, except the light sensor reads the dot pattern on the ball rather than than a special mouse mat. It's quite high resolution, and the small, light, ball means the response time is very quick. There's no moving parts apart from the ball itself, which rests on teflon bearings. This is not like an ordinary mechanical trackball, which has rollers that rub against the trackball.
BTW, I still suck at quake, but I don't think my input device is at fault, I just don't play it as much as descent 3.
The sidewinder is surprisingly comfortable left handed. There is a ridge on the left hand side of the stick, designed as a finger rest for right-handed use, but it fits nicely into the palm of my left hand (smaller handed people could well have difficulty though - try before you buy...)
I wouldn't recommend using a joysitck for looking though - trackball's better.
I haven't got Quake3 to work with my joystick on linux/X as yet either. I don't know whether it uses the linux joystick API or the XInput API, if at all.
Unfortunately, I still have to boot into windows to run Descent 3, so when playing games, I tend to be in windows. I'm longing for the descent 3 linux client release, so I can lose my windows partition...
Personally, I play Quake and Descent 3 with both a joystick in my left hand (Sidewinder 3D precision pro - MS seem to be alright at hardware...) and a logitech trackball in my right. This means that in Descent 3 I can use pretty much everything without changing my hand's position. I use the same setup for quake to avoid overloading my poor brain with different control mappings...
Voodoos only do full-screen HW accelerated 3D - no windowed mode like Matrox G400.
(However, Daryll Strauss, who was working on 3dfx support for XFree, was looking into a hack to copy back from the 3D buffer into 2D, thus allowing windowed 3D - I don't know what the current status of that is, I suspect even if it did work, it wouldn't be in XFree until 4.0)
RH 6.1, Mandrake 6.1 both include glibc 2.0 compatibility libraries in/usr/i386-glibc20-linux/lib
SOffice links against them. Netscape 4.6/4.7 *should* also be linked against them, but only Mandrake does this properly out of the two. (which is one of the reasons people keep accusing Netscape of being buggy- when on a redhat system, it's usually linked against the wrong library versions, and crashes. The other reason is that rh left out a font path in xfs config which NS JVM needs...)
Have you considered writing your techinical documentation in the sgml tools, format?
We find it very useful, since it can produce i) well-formatted, hyperlinked and indexed HTML suitable for online documentation ii) from the same files, indexed and numbered cross referenced well-formatted LaTeX pages suitable for conversion to postscript and pdf for downloadable documentation, and for printed manuals
Anyone remember Catacombs of the Abyss?? It was quite a good game, with an EGA (!) Wolf3D-like engine - but with a doom-like plot.
I remember playing it and Wolf3D in school years ago...
Re:Why doesn't GNU/Linux Varkon get more attention
on
Bringing CAD to Linux
·
· Score: 1
I suspect it doesn't get as much attention in the US, simply because it's made in Sweden. Many Americans may simply be unaware of it's existence.
Also, varkon is extensible. Although I've no intention of doing it, it would be possible to extend it via some clever coding to make it spit out CNC machine programs, depending on how comprehensive you wanted the support. A varkon single surface to a particular cnc miller translator would be relatively simple. I'd do it, except I'm busy exporting varkon models to a CFD code for part of my final year mech. eng. project in university:-). Of course, generic CNC support would be a tad harder...you'd have to create a database structure for material properties, and machine tool specs. Of course, varkon does ODBC on windows, and the linux version could easily query postgresql through the shell.
I should also point out that this 3D CAD package is used in a professional environment by several european companies, often as the engine behind their own customised application user interface.
It's not exactly a conventional CAD package, but it is very powerful and customisable, and you can start it in a conventional 2D drafting mode as well as parametric 3D mode.
There's a project to GTK/GNOME up a UI for the 2D part of the program - but the 3D part is the really cool bit.
Clearly you haven't looked at the Wine undocumented API stuff then. The wine developers have had to reverse engineer chunks of undocumented APIs that are used by things like MS Office and IE.
Um. There are at least two flash plugins available for linux netscape. There's macromedia's official one, available from their site, and there is also, an open-source clone here
It's code is marvellously clear, (not like Mozilla's spaghetti mess) since it was conceived as an open-source GPL project from the ground up. (although their C++ formatting rules make more sense than the GNU official ones...)
They're also keen to get MathML up and running early on - so it's likely to be popular with scientists and engineers.
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But, WinCE is hoeplessly outclassed, from a design standpoint, compared to EPOC32 (The Symbian/Psion OS).
Not only that, the default UI of wince is grim, and needs serious reworking for palmtop use, whereas the only complaint I've ever heard levelled at the well-thought out EIKON UI on EPOC32 is double- click to run programs. Personally, I prefer single-click select, double-click to run, so EPOC suits me fine. It makes cut+paste much easier.
EPOC32 is also more resource efficient than WinCE.
Granted, PalmOS is pretty poor underneath the UI, but the UI is well thought-out and easy, unlike WinCE (WinCE is only remotely friendly if you've used ms windows before - I've never used ms windows as my primary computing platform, went Amiga m68k -> linux/m68k -> linux/i386)
And wasn't there some sort of deal between Symbian and Palm? In future, it may be that they'll just transfer the PalmOS look 'n' feel to run on top of the EPOC32 kernel, for the keyboardless PDAs.
Since the EPOC32 source code is mostly cross-platform C++, a port of EPOC32 to Motorola-arch CPUs as well as ARM and x86, makes sense. This could mean a binary-compatibility package somewhat like wine could be produced, that runs legacy PalmOS apps at native speed, provided EPOC is running on DragonBall.
Just out of interest, what's your opinion of Maverik
I have the same problem. Spend all of term time in Manchester, hear about all sorts of stuff happening back home, go home, and everything's over...
How about buttons 1, 2 and 3 ? Works for me...
And it means that you can have a picture of a mouse, and rearrange the order to 3,1,2 or 2,3,1 or 3,2,1 or whatevr takes your fancy...
Try MSWordView (now called wvware, in an effort to make people sound really flubby when naming it...)
www.wvWare.com/
try lojban:
www.lojban.org
HURD is a collection of server programs, that run of top of the GNUMach microkernel, AFAIK. However, in theory, isn't the HURD itself portable to other kernels? Might a stripped-down linux kernel work better as a "microkernel" than Mach? Relatively few people have taken the time to understand Mach. HURD-on-Linux sounds to me like an interesting idea.
Amiga interoperability is probably a BINFMT_MISC entry that runs UAE in a500 mode on ADFs, and UAE in 680x0/RTG mode on amiga executables. You wouldn't even need a separate partition.
** Trackballs are just too slow
It depends on the trackball, I guess. My trackball is a Logitech Trackman Marble+ (now called trackman marble wheel, AFAIK)
This is a thumb trackball, with two mouse buttons for your index and 3rd finger, and a mousewheel for your middle finger.
The ball itself is quite small - about 3cm diameter. It's red with a black dot pattern printed on it. The trackball works like an optical ("ball-less") mouse, except the light sensor reads the dot pattern on the ball rather than than a special mouse mat. It's quite high resolution, and the small, light, ball means the response time is very quick. There's no moving parts apart from the ball itself, which rests on teflon bearings. This is not like an ordinary mechanical trackball, which has rollers that rub against the trackball.
BTW, I still suck at quake, but I don't think my input device is at fault, I just don't play it as much as descent 3.
The sidewinder is surprisingly comfortable left handed. There is a ridge on the left hand side of the stick, designed as a finger rest for right-handed use, but it fits nicely into the palm of my left hand (smaller handed people could well have difficulty though - try before you buy...)
I wouldn't recommend using a joysitck for looking though - trackball's better.
I haven't got Quake3 to work with my joystick on linux/X as yet either. I don't know whether it uses the linux joystick API or the XInput API, if at all.
Unfortunately, I still have to boot into windows to run Descent 3, so when playing games, I tend to be in windows. I'm longing for the descent 3 linux client release, so I can lose my windows partition...
Personally, I play Quake and Descent 3 with both a joystick in my left hand (Sidewinder 3D precision pro - MS seem to be alright at hardware...) and a logitech trackball in my right. This means that in Descent 3 I can use pretty much everything without changing my hand's position. I use the same setup for quake to avoid overloading my poor brain with different control mappings...
Ah. I'm just a little behind the times...
Voodoos only do full-screen HW accelerated 3D - no windowed mode like Matrox G400.
(However, Daryll Strauss, who was working on 3dfx support for XFree, was looking into a hack to copy back from the 3D buffer into 2D, thus allowing windowed 3D - I don't know what the current status of that is, I suspect even if it did work, it wouldn't be in XFree until 4.0)
RH 6.1, Mandrake 6.1 both include glibc 2.0 compatibility libraries in /usr/i386-glibc20-linux/lib
SOffice links against them. Netscape 4.6/4.7 *should* also be linked against them, but only Mandrake does this properly out of the two. (which is one of the reasons people keep accusing Netscape of being buggy- when on a redhat system, it's usually linked against the wrong library versions, and crashes. The other reason is that rh left out a font path in xfs config which NS JVM needs...)
Have you considered writing your techinical documentation in the sgml tools, format?
We find it very useful, since it can produce
i) well-formatted, hyperlinked and indexed HTML suitable for online documentation
ii) from the same files, indexed and numbered cross referenced well-formatted LaTeX pages suitable for conversion to postscript and pdf for downloadable documentation, and for printed manuals
I suggest lojban...
Anyone remember Catacombs of the Abyss??
It was quite a good game, with an EGA (!)
Wolf3D-like engine - but with a doom-like plot.
I remember playing it and Wolf3D in school
years ago...
I suspect it doesn't get as much attention in the US, simply because it's made in Sweden. Many Americans may simply be unaware of it's existence.
:-). Of course, generic CNC support would be a tad harder...you'd have to create a database structure for material properties, and machine tool specs. Of course, varkon does ODBC on windows, and the linux version could easily query postgresql through the shell.
Also, varkon is extensible. Although I've no intention of doing it, it would be possible to extend it via some clever coding to make it spit out CNC machine programs, depending on how comprehensive you wanted the support. A varkon single surface to a particular cnc miller translator would be relatively simple. I'd do it, except I'm busy exporting varkon models to a CFD code for part of my final year mech. eng. project in university
I should also point out that this 3D CAD package is used in a professional environment by several european companies, often as the engine behind their own customised application user interface.
Check out varkon at www.microform.se
It's not exactly a conventional CAD package, but it is very powerful and customisable, and you can start it in a conventional 2D drafting mode as well as parametric 3D mode.
There's a project to GTK/GNOME up a UI for the 2D part of the program - but the 3D part is the really cool bit.
Clearly you haven't looked at the Wine undocumented API stuff then. The wine developers have had to reverse engineer chunks of undocumented APIs that are used by things like MS Office and IE.
Um. There are at least two flash plugins available for linux netscape. There's macromedia's official one, available from their site, and there is also, an open-source clone here
Try www.mnemonic.org
It's code is marvellously clear, (not like Mozilla's spaghetti mess) since it was conceived as an open-source GPL project from the ground up.
(although their C++ formatting rules make more sense than the GNU official ones...)
They're also keen to get MathML up and running early on - so it's likely to be popular with scientists and engineers.
If you're going to get a PDA with a keyboard,
just get a Psion Series 5mx...