On 2010-03-25 15:48-0400 Hazen Babcock wrote: > Btw, if you ever want to join in the fun of Windows debugging, you can run > native Windows on a linux box pretty easily using the open-source package > VirtualBox. > > http://www.virtualbox.org/ > > You will need a copy of windows, but since it is pretty hard to get a PC > without one these days, you might already have this. >
Hi Hazen: I hope you don't mind me bringing this bit of your off-list discussion with me back to the list because this topic should be of interest to a lot of those who subscribe to this list. To answer your implied question, I buy white boxes without O/S's preinstalled, and I don't want to actually go out and buy Windows. Microsoft already has enough money! :-) Also, that corporation continues to work actively and persistently against the software freedom that I love so I am voting with my dollars. That said, I have no objections to the Windows platform itself which is popular with both users and developers so I am glad there are active PLplot developers like you, Arjen, and Werner with access to and expertise with that platform who are testing PLplot on that platform, and I would like to help with that effort as much as possible. It turns out there _may_ be a straightforward way for me to join your PLplot windows testing efforts using WINE (http://www.winehq.org/) which is a Windows platform emulator that can be used with complete freedom (unlike the Microsoft proprietary version). Others here might also like to try WINE since it runs on both Linux and Mac OS X. I assume it would be just as convenient as virtualbox to run, and _a lot_ more convenient than a dual-boot system. WINE has been in development for more than a decade, and for most of that development time had a bad reputation as being immature. However, WINE has steadily improved all that time, and since its fairly recent 1.0 release I have read a lot of stories about how well it now emulates Windows. So in the future I would like to get into the MinGW/WINE testing game for PLplot using a generalization of the approach taken in http://m.linuxjournal.com/node/1005753?quicktabs_1=1. It seems to me such testing would expose most build-system issues with MinGW on pure Windows. Also, MinGW/WINE is a valid platform in its own right so it would be good to get PLplot working for that platform (if it doesn't work out of the box right now). So build-testing (and if that is successful, run-testing) PLplot on MinGW/WINE is on my agenda, but due to time pressures right now it will be quite a while until I can try that. If anyone else here wants to give it a try, please let me know what results you obtain. Make sure you use a recent WINE version since results from immature WINE versions are unlikely to be of interest. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
