Senior Member
If anyone cares about, no, they did not, and they don't either now.Originally Posted by ninez
Source: I check the forums everyday, most members thinks it is a waste of time.
Senior Member
Nasty is an understatement
Windows drivers use a far different interface model than Xorg drivers do, and the Windows driver interfaces are not fully documented so it will require a lot of reverse engineering to find out what undocumented Windows driver interface registers and calls that such drivers commonly use.
Senior Member
Where did you get that? The device driver interfaces are extensively documented in Windows. They employee people who do nothing but write documentation (66MB compressed).Nasty is an understatement
Windows drivers use a far different interface model than Xorg drivers do, and the Windows driver interfaces are not fully documented so it will require a lot of reverse engineering to find out what undocumented Windows driver interface registers and calls that such drivers commonly use.
How do you think hardware manufacturers release drivers for every oddball device out there, by reverse-engineering the kernel?
Senior Member
Nasty is an understatement
Windows drivers use a far different interface model than Xorg drivers do, and the Windows driver interfaces are not fully documented so it will require a lot of reverse engineering to find out what undocumented Windows driver interface registers and calls that such drivers commonly use.
You don't implement support for all drivers. Windows has userland drivers with very well documented interfaces for many things so you can implement support for those sorts of thing.
example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network..._Specification
For video acceleration the ideal way from a current perspective would be implement trackers for DirectX and GDI. Then you composite Windows applications into a Wayland desktop. Just like how you are going to do it for your X applications. That way you can get native support for a multitude of APIs without having to support many multiple driver stacks.
The alternative being trying to run X graphics acceleration driver + DRI graphics acceleration driver + Windows graphics acceleration driver + OpenCL acceleration driver + video codec acceleration driver etc etc.
Junior Member
It's Wine.
They are using Wine. Check the screenshots in the application compatibility list on their web site.
Junior Member
They're using Wine. Check the screenshots in their application compatibility list.
Junior Member
I don't know why everybody is so negative about this project.
I admit that I'm a little bit anxious about support for Windows binaries on Linux.
On the other had I also admire this project.
It does exactly what open-source stands for.
Open-source is about encouraging people to create or modify software to their needs.
Of course we have projects like WINE, but the creator of Longene obviously feels a need for another approach of realizing a way to get Windows programs to work.
So I hope this person will still be putting his effort in this project, so everybody who uses Linux has maximum freedom of choice on how their system will be installed / configured.
Greetings Jasper
Senior Member
"Unfortunately, it's maturity is far from being comparable to Wine"
... so in other words... its WORSE than useless
Jasper: There are far more useful areas in which to contribute to Linux rather than to try to homogenize the desktop operating system landscape.... and far LESS DESTRUCTIVE areas. One of the reasons why a lot of software developers don't write Linux software is because of the mistaken idea they have, that WINE or similar emulators (and don't let anyone fool you into thinking that it isn't an emulator.... it is) will be able to magically make their binaries work on Linux. Without testing, they typically assume or suggest (I've heard it from software makers), that you can "just run it in wine" and it will work.
In my opinion, MS is in the final days of its empire. Its falling apart. THEY know it, but the world is somewhat oblivious to it. Mobile computers are taking over for the desktop, and these are getting smaller.... cell phones and tablets. The average person can now use these instead of a desktop, so they'll most likely be using Android/Linux (since it is the world's most dominant smartphone operating system). Meanwhile, MS has virtually 0% of the mobile market and really not going anywhere.
In my opinion, MS will go away over the next several years. There is no sense wasting resources to prolong its demise. It only existed to begin with because of a serious of very serious blunders (predominantly made by IBM...), but it is dying as a result of a truly competitive market.
Junior Member
MS won't go away. Their market is primarily in the enterprise, were you won't find many people filling SAP forms using a mobile device.
Senior Member
@droidhacker
Tablets and smartphones are no replacement for a desktop computer, or even a laptop. there is a huge difference in power/performance. the type of applications a lot of people use on a desktop don't really run all that well in a mobile device, if at all. and by that i mean, take a good look at android's apps and iOS's apps.... do you really think app wise, that either platform really does away with what OSes like WIN/MAC/LINUX provide? I think not.
The interface of a tablet/smartphone, while interesting, pretty much sucks in many fundamental ways - prime example typing. So do you think droidhacker, being able to type fast isn't as important as being able to 'flip' to some weather, GPS application or game??? another example - how about screen size, ya, everyone is just going to ditch their 17" to 27" displays, everyone would rather use a 4" or 8" display instead, it just makes more sense right? lol.
do you also think that gamers will drop their desktop gaming PC, to instead only play Android games? lol. probably not. Do you also think that someone like myself who writes music on a computer will be doing that with Android instead? bah hah ha. How about running all of my Virtual machines for work? oh, didn't you hear, the new HTC running android comes with 16gig of RAM and the latest i7 CPU, 2tb HD with RAID 0 and also comes pre-installed with VMware workstation for android. awesome, right? too bad it's a fantasy, but hey - who really needs to be able to do that anyway, what we really need to be able to do is browse the web and type 3 words a minute. lol.
I could go on and on. the point is Tablets and smartphones serve a much different purpose than Desktop PCs and laptops. While i do agree for some people, specifically those who only require a browser, facebook, email, etc, may replace their desktop with a tablet, the majority of people wont. they will own both, because each device is better suited for certain tasks.
I think you are buying into the hype, and not looking at the situation realistically. The same goes for your Microsoft comments. While it's possible, MS could lose some marketshare in desktop computing over the next few year ~ business and the corporate world won't be dropping Windows anytime soon, and by soon i mean atleast a decade, if even then... as there is a lot of dependence on MS software and infrastructure, and i don't see that changing anytime soon.
...back to the actual thread topic, which isn't about tablets/smartphones doing away with windows;
While i do think Longene is a waste of time, i would have to disagree with Wine being a waste of time. There are tons of windows apps that work very well in wine ~ i have used many, and still use many. The ones i do use, there pretty much is no software for linux that is equal, which tends to be the reason i have them installed in wine. Some apps do 'just work' in wine, and i think it is silly to think that people won't port stuff to linux because Wine exists.
People usually don't port to linux, because they don't use Linux or there are other problems like lack of a stable ABI, API's, etc. While it's certainly possible that some windows developers assume that there software will just work in wine, I think the majority don't make that grand assumption. There is also the issue for developers, where they are not familiar with various libs, toolkits, APIs, etc found in gnu/linux, but are very familiar with windows. Because of this, many developers end up using MS specific stuff in their code... so they don't want to have to rewrite there app, because it the end it isn't all the portable and also they probably aren't using Linux anyway....
it's not exactly good motivation to port or develop software on an OS, they don't even use, right?
anyway, that's my 2 cents.
cheerz
Last edited by ninez; 09-09-2011 at 07:35 AM.
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