71–80 of 127 posts
Does anyone remember Win4Lin? It would run Windows 98 as a process and translate system calls to their Linux equivalent. It was very convient for testing my websites in IE. And I swear it was faster and more stable than running Windows on bare hardware. And when it did blue screen, I could have it back up in a matter of seconds.
Crazy how much old software had ties to universities ( tamu Linux, BSD, wuftpd ). Are there any modern examples of this or have universities gotten out of the software game
Meanwhile the uni got huge donations of hardware and software licenses from now legacy unix providers. The senior EE students would do VLSI design on sunos workstations (sunos was from the oldest versions of solaris pizza box era back when Sun made hardware). Well, if my 386 desktop is 50 times faster and four times the memory of the sunos workstation, why do they have all this fabulous OS and application software and I'm stuck on singletasking msdos or sometimes windows3.11 works and sometimes it doesn't? Why not do TCP/IP and fancy GUIs on linux using the same hardware?
Does anyone remember Win4Lin? It would run Windows 98 as a process and translate system calls to their Linux equivalent. It was very convient for testing my websites in IE. And I swear it was faster and more stable than running Windows on bare hardware. And when it did blue screen, I could have it back up in a matter of seconds.
SLS Linux was my first distro. It was probably early 1993 when I first installed it, on a 386SX/20 with 3 megs of RAM. I think it was on 12 or 16 floppies.
I ordered a set of SLS floppies from some random person I learned about via Usenet news groups (comp.os.minix and later comp.os.linux). It used Linux kernel version 0.99pl12 or thereabouts. I had previously been using Coherent Unix (with the enormous compendium in a thick book). I was first setting up my home NFS server using NE2000 Ethernet cards to try all that out. This was all run on a Gateway 386 @ 25MHz which s…
Around that time, I vaguely recall Linux switching from DWARF to ELF, some kind of libc5 (libc4 ??) to libc6 migration in the the ecosystem and a Sanyo CDROM driver that needed some source code edits to work for my model causing me endless grief as a kid exploring beyond DOS. Great times!
For me, the biggest migration pain was being a heavy KDE user in the middle of GCC 2.95 -> GCC 3.0 migration, with my Debian unstable (in between woody and sarge, iirc) getting into state where half of the C++ code was compiled with 2.95, and half with 3.0...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always wondered why no Linux app store has risen to prominence? Can one make a living selling their Linux applications to end users?
It's quite simple, the market for paid end user applications on Linux is tiny. Canonical was saying years ago that they were going to add paid applications to the Snap Store but seemingly never got around to it. Elementary's App Center has integrated payments but they are optional and ~99% of users do not pay anything. You can certainly make a living selling a cross platform application that supports Linux, but it's…
I recall being in a B. Dalton Bookstore in the mid-90's. I picked up a book that had "Linux" on the cover. In the cover it had a floppy disk or two. Something felt very wrong to me. You can't give away an entire operation system! Perhaps this was just some "free for educational purposes" thing? I went home and fired up WebCrawler on AOL and came across Yggdrasil. I had experienced Unix on an SGI system. And I was ver…
Anyway, I had a friend whose mother ran a small data processing business, and it was known in our circle of nerd friends that she was in possession of a "real Unix machine". And what a machine it was - a beige box the size of a small car, with intriguing lights and cables and powerful hums and clicks. Anyway, I told her about this "Linux" thing, and she dismissed it as fantasy, so I brought my computer around to her office and gave her a demo.
The only comment I recall her making was something like, "Well, looks like you got yourself a $100 Unix machine." I could tell in her eyes, though, that she was feeling the world shift, heavily, from one epoch to the next.
I recall being in a B. Dalton Bookstore in the mid-90's. I picked up a book that had "Linux" on the cover. In the cover it had a floppy disk or two. Something felt very wrong to me. You can't give away an entire operation system! Perhaps this was just some "free for educational purposes" thing? I went home and fired up WebCrawler on AOL and came across Yggdrasil. I had experienced Unix on an SGI system. And I was ver…
