I love when people claim Linux is harder than Windows. "Oh, just maintain TWO Windows installations!":)
It was actually my father who did this with NT4. I have no idea if it's still easy/possible to do with XP, as I use RH8 as my primary desktop (plus other computers with everything from RH7.3 to FC4), and the last Windows version I personally installed was 3.11 (not the For Workgroup version) on a P90, about 8 years ago.
But the point is still valid (about the 2 Windows installations). That way, you have all the rights you want on the "not booted" version, and all the power of running native software to examine/modify it, plus enough storage for all you want (which booting from a Windows CD doesn't always offer you, although I could be mistaken on that as I never used one).
That is why you should install 2 Windows installations side-by-side when you install it in the first place. One is your "normal", work and games related one, the other one is for snooping on the first one if you need to do something it won't let you by itself (like replacing some registry files, etc.).
Works like a charm when you want to restore a system backup too, and there's no need to play with CaptiveNTFS or such.
It worked quite well in NT4 with the NT bootloader (boot.ini), so you can probably do the same with XP's bootloader without resorting to a 3rd party boot loader (like grub:)). Don't forget to have different desktop backgrounds (like a red one for the administrative install), so you don't end up doing stuff you don't want to in the wrong environment.
Don't expect this next week. Some parts of the needed work are there, but there's not a big enough push for it right now, so nobody really works on it.
The FreeBSD port (maintained by Gerald Pfeiffer) has been know to be broken in the past year, sometimes for a couple of months. Not necessarily Gerald's fault, sometimes there were new features introduced which just didn't work on FreeBSD until somebody took some time to port it (or FreeBSD supported something Wine began relying on). But when there are no Wine developers besides the FreeBSD port maintainer who uses it, it can take some time to implement those.
Also, I don't know what's the status of FreeBSD on AMD64, ie if the kernel lets you use 32 bit code easily or not. If you can't drop a "normal" 32 bit app/libs and have it work, tough luck.
Anyway, the proper way to get it fixed is a note to the maintainer, not on slashdot.
Did it ever occured to you that it might be the fault of an underlying driver (ATI, NVIDIA) if you're seeing slowdowns?
I don't say that it is actually the case, just a possibility. Along with the fact that OpenGL will do things in software if the hardware can't, instead of not listing the possibility to the program as DirectX on Windows does.
It could also be things related to thread priorities (Windows and Linux don't have the same rules to determine which thread will be the next to run on the CPU, so some games don't get their optimal rotation around threads). Or because of some unoptimized codepath.
To correctly determine if/where is a slowdown, we need to run benchmarks on both Windows and Wine, on the same hardware. Even then, things like drivers can change the results, on no fault from Wine. Ideally each benchmark (at least in the beginning) would exercise a single aspect of the system, to more easily pinpoint where work is needed for more performance.
Tridge isn't listed in the AUTHORS file, nor in the Changelog file. He works on Samba.
And for the emulator part, Wine is actually another implementation of a standard (the Win32 API), along with various parts regarding the ABI.
You don't call a Yamah CD player an emulator either, right? After all, it's only an implementation of a Phillips/Sony standard, and for the disk, it's the same thing...
What the witnesses say before the Royal Inquiry cannot be used (directly) in a court of law. Of course, cops do listen to it, but they'll need to find proofs elsewhere to be able to present them as evidence in a criminal court.
The goal of the Royal Inquiry is to find what were the political responsabilities behind the scandal, so that it couldn't be repeated in the future. The goal is not to prosecute individuals for what they did, that's what trials are for (of which 3 will go underway in May, with maybe more in the coming months).
Since what they say cannot be held against them, they can't refuse to testify against themselves, because they're not testifying against themselves.
I think what OP meant was that Mplayer released a tarball, then found some bug in it and released a second one with the bug fixed but the same filename. Any MD5 hash of the first one will fail on the second one. Gentoo uses a MD5 hash to verify that the file is the right one.
The article is missing a third solution to the Automatic Decisions solutions: gracefully handle at runtime the absence of a (soft) dependancy.
What I mean is automatically enable all options which are available at build time, but don't hard link to them (use dlopen(3) or somesuch instead), so the same binary package would work in the presence or absence of such dependancies.
Of course, without the runtime dependancies, some options won't be available, but it's better to do it that way than to force everybody to download libfoo and libbar to satisfy an optional dependancy, or to arbitrarily disable some options (which will only be available to people building from source, not those using a package. You want your software to be useful, right?).
Most of what Transgaming uses from Wine is from when Wine used the X11 license (last such release was 20020228). Wine now uses the LGPL. There has been some work (ReWind) integrating patches from developers willing to double-license their patches under the old X11 license as well, but that fork is mostly dead now.
If you actually read the EULA for Cedega, you'll notice that they say that some of the work they distribute is under the LGPL, some other under the Artistic license, etc. So they actually use (as per the LGPL) some parts of Wine. I don't know exactly which ones are under which license, you'd have to look that up yourself.
Transgaming still have a freely accessible cvs server. I haven't checked it out since a long time ago, but if you want to see which parts are under which license, I guess that'd be a good place to start.
Each dll can be replaced on an individual basis, so it's very conceivable that it can be under a different license, even if distributed together. The best proof for that (except for things like kernel32 and ntdll) is that you can use the native (Windows) versions instead of the builtin ones (Wine/Cedega).
I don't have a list of what they contributed either, but I believe the current DCOM work (mostly needed for Installshield support, but also other things) is based on a patch sent by Ove Kåven about two years ago. The Marlett font which comes with Wine is also their work. Of course, don't expect any patches from them which touches DirectX or copy protection.
As rpm --help would have told you, you need to use -q (query) along with -l. Yes, that's partly because there are too many commands for the same program.
Which means, with 154, the Liberals and NDP form a majority (well, 50% exactly, actually).
Which means in turn that if every MP is present for a vote (not very likely, but let's say it happens for the sake of argument), the Liberals will win that vote only if the President of the House comes from one of the opposition parties (as the President only votes in case of equality). If the President comes from the Liberals (the President is usually taken from the governing party), they'll have 153 votes against 154, and would lose.
This analysis also requires every MP to vote with his/her party, but that's sadly usually the case already (even if Martin said he'd like to have more free votes in the House).
Does that mean the license does not extend to other usages (besides in Dirac)?
This could be problematic to include in Mplayer, as Mplayer is licensed under the GPL, and IIRC, there's a patent clause (clause #4?) in the GPL saying something along the lines of "if you license your patent for use in a GPL software, the license extends to all software derived from the first one, not only that first one".
If you want a 32bit Wine (most people want that as they want to be able to run Win32 apps), you need to tell it (actually tell your build toolchain) to issue a 32bit binary rather than the default 64bit.
To do so, follow the instructions given here, and you should be set.
It works the same as Nielsen ratings for TV. A few years ago select viewers were asked to pen down what they were watching every 15 minutes. Now it's a device directly connected to the cable box/TV.
I know that 10000 writes seems like a lot, and perhaps it is. Anyone knows how this figure looks for normal harddrives?
That's 10000 writes to the same sector. Some will see a lot more activities than others (typically filesystem data). I recall some story about somebody formatting a Flash card in FAT32 and busting the card each time (because the format utility wrote the info for one sector, then the next one, then yet the next one, which wrote a couple hundred thousand times to the same sector). That's why Flash cards have some special filesystems developed for them, which takes this into account (ie, the filesystem data moves from one write to the other one, so it's not always written at the same place).
... that the slowest part of a PC was the CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive. Seems either I didn't follow the latest PC development, or somebody didn't think much before typing.
Yea, that's what caught my eye too. 100k a day is about 3M per month, or 36M per year. That's a lot! I'm sure some part of that is never installed and another is downloaded over and over again (because it doesn't stay installed on shared Uni computers or such), but it's still a big number of downloads per day.
Slashdot Mirror
I love when people claim Linux is harder than Windows. "Oh, just maintain TWO Windows installations!" :)
It was actually my father who did this with NT4. I have no idea if it's still easy/possible to do with XP, as I use RH8 as my primary desktop (plus other computers with everything from RH7.3 to FC4), and the last Windows version I personally installed was 3.11 (not the For Workgroup version) on a P90, about 8 years ago.
But the point is still valid (about the 2 Windows installations). That way, you have all the rights you want on the "not booted" version, and all the power of running native software to examine/modify it, plus enough storage for all you want (which booting from a Windows CD doesn't always offer you, although I could be mistaken on that as I never used one).
That is why you should install 2 Windows installations side-by-side when you install it in the first place. One is your "normal", work and games related one, the other one is for snooping on the first one if you need to do something it won't let you by itself (like replacing some registry files, etc.).
Works like a charm when you want to restore a system backup too, and there's no need to play with CaptiveNTFS or such.
It worked quite well in NT4 with the NT bootloader (boot.ini), so you can probably do the same with XP's bootloader without resorting to a 3rd party boot loader (like grub :)). Don't forget to have different desktop backgrounds (like a red one for the administrative install), so you don't end up doing stuff you don't want to in the wrong environment.
I'm more interested in Windows/64 binaries
Don't expect this next week. Some parts of the needed work are there, but there's not a big enough push for it right now, so nobody really works on it.
The FreeBSD port (maintained by Gerald Pfeiffer) has been know to be broken in the past year, sometimes for a couple of months. Not necessarily Gerald's fault, sometimes there were new features introduced which just didn't work on FreeBSD until somebody took some time to port it (or FreeBSD supported something Wine began relying on). But when there are no Wine developers besides the FreeBSD port maintainer who uses it, it can take some time to implement those.
Also, I don't know what's the status of FreeBSD on AMD64, ie if the kernel lets you use 32 bit code easily or not. If you can't drop a "normal" 32 bit app/libs and have it work, tough luck.
Anyway, the proper way to get it fixed is a note to the maintainer, not on slashdot.
Did it ever occured to you that it might be the fault of an underlying driver (ATI, NVIDIA) if you're seeing slowdowns?
I don't say that it is actually the case, just a possibility. Along with the fact that OpenGL will do things in software if the hardware can't, instead of not listing the possibility to the program as DirectX on Windows does.
It could also be things related to thread priorities (Windows and Linux don't have the same rules to determine which thread will be the next to run on the CPU, so some games don't get their optimal rotation around threads). Or because of some unoptimized codepath.
To correctly determine if/where is a slowdown, we need to run benchmarks on both Windows and Wine, on the same hardware. Even then, things like drivers can change the results, on no fault from Wine. Ideally each benchmark (at least in the beginning) would exercise a single aspect of the system, to more easily pinpoint where work is needed for more performance.
Tridge isn't listed in the AUTHORS file, nor in the Changelog file. He works on Samba.
And for the emulator part, Wine is actually another implementation of a standard (the Win32 API), along with various parts regarding the ABI.
You don't call a Yamah CD player an emulator either, right? After all, it's only an implementation of a Phillips/Sony standard, and for the disk, it's the same thing...
Running 32-bit Windows programs on a 64-bit Unix? Forget it...
32 bit Wine (and Win32 apps) runs today on a AMD64 running a 64 bit distro if you have installed the 32 bit libs for your distro.
It's not 100% native, but then running any Win32 program on a 64 bit OS isn't either...
What the witnesses say before the Royal Inquiry cannot be used (directly) in a court of law. Of course, cops do listen to it, but they'll need to find proofs elsewhere to be able to present them as evidence in a criminal court.
The goal of the Royal Inquiry is to find what were the political responsabilities behind the scandal, so that it couldn't be repeated in the future. The goal is not to prosecute individuals for what they did, that's what trials are for (of which 3 will go underway in May, with maybe more in the coming months).
Since what they say cannot be held against them, they can't refuse to testify against themselves, because they're not testifying against themselves.
I think what OP meant was that Mplayer released a tarball, then found some bug in it and released a second one with the bug fixed but the same filename. Any MD5 hash of the first one will fail on the second one. Gentoo uses a MD5 hash to verify that the file is the right one.
The article is missing a third solution to the Automatic Decisions solutions: gracefully handle at runtime the absence of a (soft) dependancy.
What I mean is automatically enable all options which are available at build time, but don't hard link to them (use dlopen(3) or somesuch instead), so the same binary package would work in the presence or absence of such dependancies.
Of course, without the runtime dependancies, some options won't be available, but it's better to do it that way than to force everybody to download libfoo and libbar to satisfy an optional dependancy, or to arbitrarily disable some options (which will only be available to people building from source, not those using a package. You want your software to be useful, right?).
Simply put, no.
Most of what Transgaming uses from Wine is from when Wine used the X11 license (last such release was 20020228). Wine now uses the LGPL. There has been some work (ReWind) integrating patches from developers willing to double-license their patches under the old X11 license as well, but that fork is mostly dead now.
If you actually read the EULA for Cedega, you'll notice that they say that some of the work they distribute is under the LGPL, some other under the Artistic license, etc. So they actually use (as per the LGPL) some parts of Wine. I don't know exactly which ones are under which license, you'd have to look that up yourself.
Transgaming still have a freely accessible cvs server. I haven't checked it out since a long time ago, but if you want to see which parts are under which license, I guess that'd be a good place to start.
Each dll can be replaced on an individual basis, so it's very conceivable that it can be under a different license, even if distributed together. The best proof for that (except for things like kernel32 and ntdll) is that you can use the native (Windows) versions instead of the builtin ones (Wine/Cedega).
I don't have a list of what they contributed either, but I believe the current DCOM work (mostly needed for Installshield support, but also other things) is based on a patch sent by Ove Kåven about two years ago. The Marlett font which comes with Wine is also their work. Of course, don't expect any patches from them which touches DirectX or copy protection.
As rpm --help would have told you, you need to use -q (query) along with -l. Yes, that's partly because there are too many commands for the same program.
Which means, with 154, the Liberals and NDP form a majority (well, 50% exactly, actually).
Which means in turn that if every MP is present for a vote (not very likely, but let's say it happens for the sake of argument), the Liberals will win that vote only if the President of the House comes from one of the opposition parties (as the President only votes in case of equality). If the President comes from the Liberals (the President is usually taken from the governing party), they'll have 153 votes against 154, and would lose.
This analysis also requires every MP to vote with his/her party, but that's sadly usually the case already (even if Martin said he'd like to have more free votes in the House).
I thought electrons were always tied with another one of opposite spin: if one is up, the other is down.
Does that mean the license does not extend to other usages (besides in Dirac)?
This could be problematic to include in Mplayer, as Mplayer is licensed under the GPL, and IIRC, there's a patent clause (clause #4?) in the GPL saying something along the lines of "if you license your patent for use in a GPL software, the license extends to all software derived from the first one, not only that first one".
Is this a correct reading of the situation?
If you want a 32bit Wine (most people want that as they want to be able to run Win32 apps), you need to tell it (actually tell your build toolchain) to issue a 32bit binary rather than the default 64bit.
To do so, follow the instructions given here, and you should be set.
If you've got money burning your pockets, buy an FX53.
Without a survey of users to really know why, it could be as simple as Mozilla's users do change their homepage while Firefox's users don't.
It works the same as Nielsen ratings for TV. A few years ago select viewers were asked to pen down what they were watching every 15 minutes. Now it's a device directly connected to the cable box/TV.
Of course, you have to agree to have one.
(frr,yyy): (free registration required, yada yada yada)
But some PC's don't come with a floppy anymore. I know there are still a lot around, but I can't recall the last time I used a floppy here.
I know that 10000 writes seems like a lot, and perhaps it is. Anyone knows how this figure looks for normal harddrives?
That's 10000 writes to the same sector. Some will see a lot more activities than others (typically filesystem data). I recall some story about somebody formatting a Flash card in FAT32 and busting the card each time (because the format utility wrote the info for one sector, then the next one, then yet the next one, which wrote a couple hundred thousand times to the same sector). That's why Flash cards have some special filesystems developed for them, which takes this into account (ie, the filesystem data moves from one write to the other one, so it's not always written at the same place).
... that the slowest part of a PC was the CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive. Seems either I didn't follow the latest PC development, or somebody didn't think much before typing.
Yea, that's what caught my eye too. 100k a day is about 3M per month, or 36M per year. That's a lot! I'm sure some part of that is never installed and another is downloaded over and over again (because it doesn't stay installed on shared Uni computers or such), but it's still a big number of downloads per day.
Right, I should have mentioned it.