Bart wrote:
On 8/3/12, Reinier Olislagers <[email protected]> wrote:
Yep. Presumably changing over to (some less resource intensive version -
i.e. older or non-mainstream - of) Linux would be possible but would
still involve retraining costs/effort.
But old machines probably only can run old Linux distro's.
My 11 year old Celeron 700Mhz with 512MB RAM runs Suse 10.0, but I
must admit that it is stretching the limit.
Since I typically run older hardware, I crave indulgence to point out
that that's not strictly correct. In general, I'd expect a machine of
that vintage to run a recent distro, but /not/ necessarily to run a
recent desktop (alias, these days, window manager). I'd expect something
like Debian Squeeze plus xfce to be OK on anything half-decent, on the
other hand I'd expect even recent hardware to render its default desktop
badly if asked to do so over e.g. a remote X link (including ssh
tunneling) or VNC.
By "half-decent" above, I specifically exclude:
* Anything with fewer than 256 colours, or with a screen smaller than
1024x768.
* On PCs, anything predating the PC-99 standard.
* On PCs, anything with MCA, even if nominally compliant with PC-99.
* On PCs, anything that claims to be a fully PCI system but is actually
based on EISA (older Compaq servers fall into this category), even if
nominally compliant with PC-99.
With old distro's come old widgetsets.
My GTK2 is 2.8, which already is driving Zeljan insane (many thanks to
him for adjusting code for this version).
If the decimal is an issue, would it be possible to get the Lazarus
version splash to display it, or to have detected library versions
accessible somewhere? If I were doing a support job I'd definitely want
a caller to be able to get this info easily.
I sympathize with Graeme and his users.
OTOH maintaining Win9x/WinMe support is gonna be a huge task, and
who's gonna volunteer for that?
In the context of Lazarus, I have somewhat less sympathy for '9x
(strictly: the Win-32 API implemented by OSes other than the NT family)
than I do with older OSes such as W2K and NT. The reason for this is
that Lazarus and the LCL are, to a very large extent, a development
environment and class library paralleling Delphi; one of Delphi's major
selling points has always been good support for threads and as such it
would be unreasonable to expect it to be fully implemented on '9x, so
why should Lazarus try to do better?
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
--
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