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Rant: That Old Linux Package Format Blues

Jan 30th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments

I described my FreePascal from Square One book project in detail a couple of weeks ago, and I work on it as time allows. There have been some hangups; in fact, I sometimes wonder if I’m not Cing evil spirits at work hereabouts, frustrating my efforts to popularize Pascal.

A lot of this has to do with Linux software package formats. I’m trying to write a chapter in a beginners’ book describing how to install the FreePascal/Lazarus compiler/IDE combo. For Windows it’s easy: Download the executable installer, run it, and answer the wizard’s questions. I ran into a stone will with Ubuntu: There is a deb package for Lazarus (which includes the FreePascal compiler binaries) but it’s ancient, and much worse, it does not install the compiler source code, which Lazarus needs. Now, why an IDE needs the source code for its compiler is obscure, but that’s how they wrote it, and when you run Lazarus in the absence of FreePascal’s source code, it complains, and warns that some (unspecified) subset of its features may not work.

The rpm package, on the other hand, is current and complete. In the installation chapter I’d like to describe installation in detail for Windows and the three most popular Linux distros: Ubuntu, Fedora Core, and OpenSuSE. Fedora and OpenSuSE use RPMs. No problem there. Installing Lazarus under Fedora may in fact be as simple as opening a console and typing “yum install lazarus.” (I haven’t tried that yet; more on why a little later.) YaST has OpenSuSE covered. But with the Linux market leader, I’m hosed.

Yes, I know, there are solutions: Get the tarballs from the Web site, build the whole damned thing from source, convert from rpm to deb with Alien, etc. etc. etc. I can do that stuff. But this isn’t about or for me. It’s for people who are just starting in on programming and may be just trying out Linux. I don’t want to explain how to frakking rebuild the whole damned 200 MB monstrosity from source code. (Wasn’t CP/M Turbo Pascal happy to take up 24 KB? Does anybody even remember that old letter “K”?) All that is beside the point. The real question is this: Why can’t the FreePascal/Lazarus guys keep a workable deb package together? I know enough about Debian package management to be sure that it’s possible. (I don’t knows enough, alas, to do it myself.) It isn’t being done. And nobody seems to want to talk about why.

Not having a complete install for Ubuntu made me uneasy about running tests in Lazarus under Ubuntu, so I realized I would have to get instances of Fedora Core and OpenSuSE together. How hard could that be? Well…

  • I created a new VM in Workstation 5 for Fedora Core 12. The install failed partway through, with the VM locked up. “He dies and gives no sign.”
  • Ditto a VM for OpenSuSE. Ditto. The YaST installer could not detect the virtual hard drive created for the VM, so we didn’t even get as far as installation.
  • I reformatted an old Kubuntu partition on a machine downstairs and attempted to install Fedora on it. Different fail, but fail nonetheless. The DVD vetted itself with a clear bill of health, but I may download it again anyway.

I managed to get OpenSuSE to install on that same partition, so I finally have a complete and trustworthy Linux installation of Lazarus. And I will say that I really like OpenSuSE. (This is the first time I’ve ever laid hands on it.) The OpenSuSE Build Service is a thing of beauty.

The double VM fail is a puzzler. And that led to me wonder if newer distros just don’t play well with 2004-era Workstation 5. So I finally took my still-sealed retail copy of Workstation 6 off the shelf, installed it, registered it…and VMware doesn’t seem to know how to license it. I’m sure they don’t do much business in boxed product, but that’s no excuse. Email tech support with their Indian support people has a 24-hour turnaround, and the last time I got a response, the guy sent me the serial number for my copy of Workstation 5 and told me to use that, as it was already licensed. Gakkh. So they have my $180, and I have a copy of Workstation 6 that won’t run. We’re three days into this adventure, and I’m sure nothing will get resolved until Monday. If then.

You wonder why I hate activation systems so violently.

And people wonder why tech books take so long to write.

Screw it. It’s the weekend. I’m going to find the nearest bag of potato chips and eat the whole damned thing.

Odd Lots

Jan 24th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments
  • Here’s a nice detailed article about how Linux treats hard disks and how Linux partitioning works.
  • We now have two major sunspots on the visible face of the Sun. I don’t remember the last time I saw that. (Most of the specks we’ve been giving sunspot numbers to in the last couple of years don’t count, in my book.)
  • The New York Times has finally shone their light on an ebook marketing technique that Baen Books pioneered years ago. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • Version 4.0 of the FastStone Image Viewer is out, and well-worth having. It’s the best image browser I’ve ever used, and if you have to sort an SD card full of digital photos and cull marginal shots quickly, there’s nothing like it. Make sure you get the portable version; it lacks nothing and doesn’t make any changes to your system. Freeware. Highly recommended.
  • Rich Rostrom sent a pointer to a fascinating article on Moscow’s stray dogs. They’re going feral, but it’s a peculiar sort of urban feral that considers humans and all their gadgetry to be just another part of the landscape. They’ve learned how to ride the subway, for pete’s sake!
  • I’d read in a number of places that faces judged as beautiful are generally “average” faces, without a lot of distinguishing characteristics. Because I could never quite get a grip on what an “average” face would be, I always took the notion with a grain of salt. But this site, assuming it really is creating a “facial average” from a gallery of headshots, suggests that there’s something to it. Start with two faces, then add faces one by one, and see if the average face doesn’t become more beautiful (and distinctly ambisexual) as you go. It did for me.
  • Here’s a short interview with Bob Silverberg, describing his writing life during the Golden Age of Pulps. A million words a year…
  • Cracking ice in the surface of a frozen lake sounds like a blaster battle.
  • From the That-Certainly-Has-To-Count-For-Something Department: Behold the world’s largest disco ball.

The Night of the Monumental Fail

Jan 19th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

(And you thought I was talking about the Massachusetts senatorial election…)

Pulled down the Fedora 12 DVD ISO earlier today, burned it to disc, and turned it loose on my Linux SX270, which at the time had a 60 GB hard drive with a functional Ubuntu Intrepid partition on it. I’d been meaning to install Fedora for some time, and wanted to try a few things on which I’ll report in the near future.

Alas, things went what may be irretrievably bad, or bad enough to be irretrievable without completely wiping the hard drive, including my Ubuntu instance.

No, I don’t know what went wrong. It’s hard to troubleshoot a failed install of an OS. What happened went this way:

  • I used the built-in partitioner (Disk Druid, unless I misrecall) to shrink the existing 55 GB partition to 22 GB.
  • I allocated the rest of the drive to the Fedora partition.
  • With the shrink/allocation apparently successful, Anaconda dove in and started the installation. After installing 106 package files, the process stopped. The machine wasn’t completely frozen–the mouse pointer still worked–but nothing was happening, no disk activity, nada.
  • After watching it sit at file 106 for over an hour, I gave up and hit the power switch. The machine had only 512 MB in it, so I dropped my spare 512 MB DIMM into the second slot. I know that most Linux installers set a lot of stuff up in memory prior to the actual install, so maybe it just ran out of RAM.
  • When I booted back into Ubuntu to take a look at what remained in the wake of the crash, I saw the new partition, and saw that it did not have a file system. That seemed odd to me, since for all appearances it was copying files to the hard disk.
  • I rebooted from the install DVD and started the install from scratch. I tried to make use of the partition I had created on the first pass through, but nothing selectable allowed me to make use of the partition.
  • I booted back into Ubuntu and deleted the new partition. I then restarted the install DVD and told it to use the free space where the new partition used to be. Again, it stopped at the partitioner, this time telling me that there was no root partition defined. I defined the existing Ubuntu partition as root, and kept going.
  • Almost immediately it died and gave no sign.

Now, I have nothing irreplaceable in the Ubuntu partition. I could wipe the whole drive if I wanted to. But it makes me wonder if the engineers at the Fedora project ever took into account the (inevitable) event of an install failure. Is there any machinery in Anaconda to pick up the pieces when an install croaks and it has to start fresh?

If a Linux distro won’t install with 1 GB of RAM, I’m not sure it still qualifies as Linux. Or is there something else freaky about this machine? I don’t know, and don’t know how to find out. I have room on my slightly cranky 3 GHz Pentium downstairs, and that box is loaded. I’ll try again down there. Still, this counts as a very significant fail for Fedora. I’ve installed Ubuntu on SX270s at least five times, and never had any problem more significant than a video mode screwup requiring minor editing of xorg.conf.

Next attempt: OpenSuse. We’ll see if it can move into Fedora’s slightly scorched apartment, or if it needs to gut it to the walls first.

Odd Lots

Dec 31st, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment
  • So here, on the eve of the end of a year I’d just as soon forget, the last Odd Lots of 2009. Carol’s in Chicago and I’m staying home tonight with a lapful of dogs and a good book, which on this occasion will be Brian Fagan’s The Long Summer, his history of the Holocene Warm Period. Carol will be back on Saturday. Getting tired of meat. May have some mashed potatoes tonight.
  • The Christmas tree is no longer taking water, and I perceive that’s it’s begun to dry out. We brought it home on December 10, so it has been standing guard in our living room for three weeks. This may be a new record for us. We’ve had trees stand (a little) longer, but their final two weeks were a rain of needles.
  • The day after Carol and I showed Carol’s mom our Christmas tree via Skype video call, this Zits strip was published. (Thanks to Roy Harvey for letting me know–I read Zits but generally in the newspaper, and not every day.)
  • 2009 is ending with 260 sunspotless days. 2008 had 266, and December was the most active month of the year, so we’re guessing that the Long Solar Minimum is mostly over. Can 15M skip be far behind?
  • Ray Kurzweil has announced a new ebook software reader package called Blio. Not a lot of detail and no software to download yet, but it’s going to be a free product, with versions for both mobile devices and the desktop. Introduction will be at CES next week.
  • The ebook technology to watch in 2010 is Qualcomm’s Mirasol, which promises color without sacrificing battery life or readability. Looks good, but what we need much worse are larger displays and higher resolution.
  • Once again, Bruce Schneier nails it: The bulk of our antiterrorist strategies rely on magical thinking. This is not the way to win; alas, magical thinking appears to be a pervasive part of modern culture, and I’m not talking about Harry Potter.
  • Recent discussions of digital media piracy reminded me of the 2005 article in Wired describing the media piracy “scene” ecosystem (topsites, couriers, races, etc.) and how it works. Big Media may be paranoid, but that doesn’t mean that no one is out to get them.
  • Pete Albrecht photographed two UFOs flying in formation (big animated GIF) while taking a long-exposure shot of M42, the Orion Nebula, through his big Meade telescope. Nothing spooky or alien about it, but before you click on the explanation (in his December 28 entry) think for a second and see if you can figure it out on your own.
  • From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: murse, more often called a “man bag,” which is basically a purse carried by a guy.
  • Ditto above: prepper , a person who prepares for the end of the world by stockpiling peanut butter etc. They called themselves survivalists until survivalism became equated in the public mind with psychos packing machine guns; watch for the word to vanish when 2012 ends but the Earth is still here. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)

10,000 Pirated Ebooks

Dec 29th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
9 comments

Ebook-related items have been gathering in my notefile lately, and this is a good time to begin spilling them out where we can all see them. The triggering incident was a note from the Jolly Pirate, telling me that one of my SF stories was present in a zipfile pirate ebook anthology that he had downloaded via BitTorrent. That people are passing around pirated versions of my stories is old news. “Drumlin Boiler” was posted on the P2P networks a few months after it was published in Asimov’s in 2002, and my better-known shorts have popped up regularly since then. No, what induced a double-take was the name of the pirate anthology: “10,000 SciFi and Fantasy Ebooks.”

10,000? You gotta be kidding!

But I’m not. Jolly sent me the 550K TOC text file, which is 9,700 lines long, with one title per line. Not all are book length, and many, in fact, are short stories. Still, the majority of all book-length SF titles I’ve read in the last thirty years are in there, and so was “Borovsky’s Hollow Woman,” albeit not under my byline. (I wrote the story with Nancy Kress, who is listed as sole author.) The only significant authors I looked for but did not find were George O. Smith and Charles Platt. (One howler: Bored of the Rings is said to be by J. R. R. Tolkien. Urrrrp.)

The collection is 4 GB in size. The Jolly Pirate said that he had downloaded it in just under three hours. He attached the file for “Borovsky’s Hollow Woman,” which was a plain but accurate 57K PDF. Intriguingly, the date given under the title is January 28, 2002. The damned thing has evidently been kicking around for at least seven years, if perhaps not in its full 4 GB glory. This suggests that the anthology is not entirely ebook piracy but mostly print book piracy. (“Borovsky” was never released in ebook form.)

Some short comments:

  • I verified the existence of the anthology from the Pirate Bay search engine. It really does exist. (So, evidently, does the Pirate Bay, which surprised me a little, considering recent efforts to take them down.)
  • 10,000 ebooks do not take a great deal of space by today’s standards. (Admittedly, better files with cover scans would be larger.) No one will think twice about a 4 GB download for size reasons, when 750 GB drives are going for $69.95.
  • The PDF is ugly. The lines are far too wide for easy readability and (since this is not a tagged PDF) not reflowable. That said, I did not find a single OCR error.
  • The Windows pathname of the text file from which the PDF was generated is shown at the top of every page. The pathname includes the full name of some clueless Dutch guy, from whose Mijn Documenten folder the file came. Ebook piracy clearly belongs to the common people, not some elite cabal skilfully dodging the **AA.
  • I’ve used a scanner to rip a couple of print books (plus ten years of Carl & Jerry print stories) and it is horrible hard work. However, the anthology demonstrates that if print is a form of inadvertent DRM (which I have long thought) it is not a particularly strong one. After all, as Bruce Schneier has said about DRM systems generally, they only have to be broken once.

This last item is key. A printed book is a worst-case challenge for an ebook pirate. Compared to cutting off the binding and making sure the paper pages all feed straight through the scanner ADF and then fixing the inevitable OCR errors, stripping out an ebook’s DRM is trivial. If ebook piracy is not yet a big deal, it isn’t because it’s difficult. It’s still because reading ebooks is borderline painful. I may not be typical, but if I can buy a used copy of a recent hardcover of interest for $10 or less, I’ll choose the hardcover rather than an ebook at any price. Sooner or later the readers will catch up to paper, and by then, well, we may see a 4 TB file called “10,000,000 EBooks About Everything” on the file-sharing networks, and it won’t even take an objectionable chunk of our 80 TB hard drives.

You think I’m kidding? Let’s compare notes in five or six years.

Linux Bug #257790

Dec 19th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

I never thought I’d say anything like this, but…I may have run afoul of Linux bug #257790, “Kernel does not recognize Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200AAJS 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0 GB/s Hard Drive (2nd Generation)”. I recently bought a new 7200 RPM hard drive (guess which model!) for my main desktop system, which had come with an older Seagate 5400 RPM unit as the primary bootable drive. I migrated my Windows XP install over to the new WD drive without any trouble. But when I go to do a clean Linux 9.10 install, the installer does not see the WD drive. It does see the secondary drive in the system, which is a 5400 RPM Seagate 750 GB unit. But the WD? Installer no see.

Interestingly, gparted has no trouble seeing the WD, and even resized the Windows partition there to make room for two additional Linux partitions. However, when I go to install Karmic in the new partition on sda2, the installer doesn’t see the sda device at all…except when I check the button telling the installer partitioner to erase the whole drive and install Linux on the entire thing. Then sda magically appears. At that point, when I re-check the option to install Windows and Linux side by side, the sda device vanishes from the device selection pane at the top of the installer partitioner window.

While sniffing around the Web looking for insights, I ran across Linux Bug #257790, simply because it names the precise model of drive that I just bought. Supposedly, that bug was fixed for the 9.10 Karmic release at the end of October, but evidently the installer still has some reservations about certain WD drives…like the one I now have. I’m tempted to download and install Fedora to see if I get better service, but if any of you Linux gurus have any suggestions I’ll certainly hear them. I do not want to go back to my older (slower) drive, nor do I want to wait for Lucid Lynx (V10.04) due in April. I can’t imagine that this is not a fixable problem. Thoughts?

Odd Lots

Dec 16th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment
  • I know, I know, I’ve been quiet for a week, but there’s been a lot to do away from the keyboard, much of which borders on sock-drawer sorting. Focusing on only one project for most of a year almost guarantees that things will get messy away from the target of your focus. So I’ve been picking up downstairs in my workshop and sorting my office closet. No socks, but lots of loose fileables sitting in a pile, one with a yellowed corner that did not come with age. (So much for cacheing data on the floor.)
  • We have a rattlin’ good sunspot creeping across old Sol’s face, and whaddaya know: I spun the dial across 15 meters this afternoon and heard voices. ‘Course, my fire alarm still does not like the Icom 736, so all I could do was listen, but it was nice to think of this overlong solar minimum as something other than eternal.
  • If you haven’t already, upgrade to Firefox 3.5.6. There are a number of newly discovered exploits in earlier releases, including a remote code execution item that looks pretty ugly.
  • I also upgraded to Thunderbird 3.0 earlier today, and so far am most pleased. They’ve added a profile-wide message search feature that (considering the appalling number of emails I’ve accumulated and carried forward since 1995) will be extremely useful here.
  • Speaking of ugly, when a film with the budget and ambitions of The Avatar can only do aliens who look like ugly humans, you have to wonder what CGI is for. This is the problem I’ve always had with Trek: A splurch of latex on some extra’s forhead does not an alien make. I’ll see it anyway, but I call failure-of-imagination based on the trailers.
  • InfoWorld posted a very nice review of the major virtualization products, including VMWare Workstation 7, Parallels Desktop 4, and Sun’s VirtualBox 3.1. VirtualBox is free and installed by default in Ubuntu 9.10, but you have to jump through some inexplicable hoops to get it to recognize USB devices. I haven’t upgraded to VMWare Workstation 7 yet, but Workstation 6 is cheap and does everything I need it to do.
  • People argue a little about how useful certain time-honored degunking techniques are (especially disk defragmentation, and double especially defragmentation for SSDs) but the biggest single win in my own experience is degunking the Windows Registry. There are a number of apps to do this, but the best on the free side is doubtless CCleaner. (Its original name was Crap Cleaner, which gets points for truth-in-advertising.) Freeware, and if you’re ever faced with a Registry that’s been gathering crap for eight or ten years, you’ll appreciate what it can do.
  • Two people wrote to me (a little breathlessly) to tell me that Neal Adams is drawing the next several PvP strips, and I had to admit that I had no idea whatsoever who he was. I flashed on Nick Adams, whom I saw on a few episodes of The Rebel back in 1961…but a comics guy I’m just not, even if I do follow PvP. (In case you’re as clueless as I, here’s a bio on Neal Adams.)

Odd Lots

Dec 4th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments
  • We broke a new cold record for December 3 last night, when it went down to -3 here. (The previous record was +3, so that’s a significant margin.) Cheyenne Mountain is covered with snow, and it’s a wonderful wintry-Christmasy scene out my office windows, though I have to get out there and clear the walks when the temps eventually get up into double digits.
  • My prediction: We will not quite break 2008’s record for sunspotless days this year. Why so sure? Well, we’re already at 255 days (and just passed 1912’s count of 253) but a sunspot appears to be forming on the back of the Sun, and it will rotate around the far side and come into view in about a week. If it’s a big enough spot, it may be visible for the rest of December. So add 7 to our current 255 and you get 262, which is in cigar territory for 2008’s 266 sunspotless days, but not quite lit. Of course, if the spot lives and dies over the next week or so (which I’ve seen happen for smallish spots) we may still beat 2008. Either way, we’re in the thick of the deepest solar minimum in 150 years.
  • I just ordered a Dell Inspiron Mini 10 netbook, after spending some quality time with Julian Bucknall‘s slightly older and smaller Dell netbook at the Meetup-less Delphi Meetup last night. The keyboard is surprisingly usable, and I don’t expect to be writing any 180,000-word computer books on it. I was looking for compactness, not cheapness (there’s a larger toy budget this year, much thanks to Assembly Language Step By Step and other things) and so I loaded up with a GPS receiver, higher-res display, faster CPU, and (obviously) a bigger battery. All that, and it still runs XP. Windows 7 was an option, but why burden a pocket machine any more than it’s already burdened by just being a pocket machine?
  • Intel has unveiled a novel 48-core x86 processor, arranged as 24 dual-core CPUs communicating through a mesh network with up to 256GB/s bandwidth. Cores no longer need hardware cache coherence machinery, which cuts the complexity and power consumption of the (huge: 567 mm2!) part. I’m still wondering howinhell we’re gonna program these things.
  • Does anybody my age or older remember the TV series Men Into Space? It ran for one season in 1959-1960, and was created by Ziv TV, the firm that also did Science Fiction Theater, Sea Hunt, and Highway Patrol. Remarkably, I don’t remember it at all, even though Broderick Crawford’s iconic “10-4!” is crystal clear in my head. There was supposedly some Bonestell backdrop art in the show, and a solid attempt at factual accuracy, within the limits of weekly TV production of the time. Thanks to Roy Harvey for the link.
  • People who are familiar with my novel The Cunning Blood should take a look at these 3-D renderings of the Mandelbulb. This is almost precisely what I had in mind when imagining Magic Mikey’s views of chaos signatures using the Femtoscope. (Chapter 12, p.196ff.)
  • In a dance-around-it sort of way, Slate admits that there’s no compelling reason to use Office 2010…or 2007…or any version past the one that meets all your needs. Duhh.
  • From Neil Rest comes a pointer to a puppet show dramatizing the Bohr-Einstein debates over spooky-action-at-a-distance. Einstein is played by a stuffed bichon. (What else? You’d cast a Chihuahua?) BTW, this is for real; it’s not a parody but an actual physics lesson.
  • Borders is closing about 200 of its Waldenbooks mall stores in January. Here’s a PDF list of stores to be closed. I’ll admit that I haven’t bought anything at a Waldenbooks store for many years, simply because they don’t have the selection of the “big” Borders stores. (I also don’t go to shopping malls that often.) This may be good news, if it means that fewer of the big stores will have to go down too.

Think Before You Click!

Nov 29th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
No comments yet

I have a stray hour this morning, and I’d like to work in some notes on a few deceptive online mechanisms of various species that came to my attention all at pretty much the same time.

The first of these is Fanbox, which is a spinoff from a site called sms.ac a few years ago. I’m getting emails daily that claim to be from Facebook friends telling me that “Rodney Hornswoggle thinks you will really like this YouTube video. [Click here to] Check it out.” Even though I do know Rodney and he is on my friends list, a pitch like that smells to high heaven, and I’m not dumb enough to click on it. I researched it online and got a faceful. The emails were sent by something called Fanbox. Fanbox is a Facebook service that does various things, but, almost incredibly, it works by asking people for their email account and password, so that it can begin spamming everybody in the hapless users’ address books.

I boggle at the notion, but in fact this is not a new phenomenon. Fanbox’s corporate parent sms.ac has done this sort of thing for years, to the huge annoyance of a great many people. As with other things of this sort, the full story is complex. Google on “sms.ac scam” or “fanbox scam” and you’ll begin to get the idea. The takeaway here is obvious: Don’t give your email account password to Facebook apps. Or anybody else, for that matter. Geez.

Next is Video Professor, which is (again) not a new idea: Selling tutorial DVDs via “negative-response billing.” This is illegal in Canada but not the US, and hearkens back to the “book of the month” clubs or “record of the month” clubs in years past, in which you agree to accept (and pay for) an item every month until such time as you cancel the membership. At least with those ancient systems you had some reasonable idea of what it would cost you. Details of how much you end up paying Video Professor for a number of tutorial DVDs ($290!) are obscure, and present only in some very, very small print. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington wrote about it in the Washington Post , after which Video Professor tried to intimidate both Arrington and the Post with legal threats. It didn’t work, and the effort spawned a great deal of negative publicity for Video Professor. However, they’re still out there, selling DVDs using what I consider an extremely deceptive pitch. Stay well back.

Finally, while we’re talking stuff-hidden-way-down-in-the-fine-print, there are “online loyalty programs.” (More here.) The scam works like this: An online retailer takes your credit card information during an order, but just before the order is completed, you’re invited to join a loyalty program to receive coupons or discounts or something. The program costs $9-$12 per month, but (as always) that’s way down there in the fine print, which authorizes the online retailer to give your credit card information to the loyalty program operator, who then bills your card and kicks backs funds to the online retailer that originated the lead. As with rebates, most of the coupons and other “rewards” are never redeemed, so it’s basically a free monthly slurp out of a great many credit card accounts. Online merchants who use such systems should be avoided. Here are a few mentioned in the article: Priceline (you’re old, Jim!), Orbitz (how d’ya think they could afford that hovercraft?), Buy.com, Fandango, 1-800-FLOWERS, Continental Airlines, and many others. (I printed out the full list included in the article as a guide to my personal boycott of anybody offering such programs.) And wow! Our old friend, Classmates.com, pocketed $70M through its partnerships with the loyalty progam operators.

Don’t be a victim. Think before you click. Read it all, especially on second or third-tier sites that you haven’t dealt with many times before. Check every line on your monthly credit card statements. Google for the name of the site and “scam” and see what others have said. Paranoia isn’t always a mental illness these days, especially online.

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 5: Crossover

Nov 21st, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
11 comments

There have been several attempts down the years to make Windows unnecessary. The most audacious is doubtless ReactOS, which cuts to the heart of things and wants to be a complete Windows XP-compatible OS. Needless to say, this is no small project and will take a long time to complete; right now, I’d call it somewhere between completely useless and intriguingly experimental. (It runs Skype, at least.) I’m also concerned that if they ever do get it anywhere near useful completion, Microsoft will stomp on it hard.

That’s certainly the high road. But how necessary is it to clone the whole damned OS? A Windows app, after all, is just a block of x86 machine code that makes calls into one or more APIs. If you can clone the APIs in an acceptably clean-room manner, you don’t need to duplicate the entire architecture, kernel and all.

And that brings us to one of the oldest and oddest ongoing projects in open-source computing: Wine, begun in 1993 by Bob Amstadt and Eric Youngdale. Wine provides a compatibility layer consisting of clean-room DLLs implementing the Win32 APIs, plus whatever magic is necessary to make the deeper host OS machinery look like Windows to the app. This is easier than implementing a whole OS, with the further advantage that if done properly, Wine can act as a Windows compatibility layer over several Unix-like OSes, rather than only Linux. Currently, Wine can operate over Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD Unix, and x86 Solaris.

After 16 years of dogged work, Wine actually works pretty well. Part of its success is due to a remarkable cooperation between the Wine project and a commercial software house in St. Paul named Codeweavers. Codeweavers sells a $40 deployment/management utility for Wine called Crossover, which basically makes Wine noob-friendly. (Naked Wine is pretty stark.) Codeweavers also tweaks Wine itself to improve app compatibility, and contributes those tweaks back to the Wine project under LGPL. Some financial support is also provided to the otherwise volunteer-based Wine project. Wine’s founder, Alexandre Julliard, is an employee of Codeweavers, where he works full-time on Wine development.

Codeweavers focuses mostly on big-market apps like Microsoft Office, and doesn’t officially support apps beyond a relatively short list of “gold” software. However, I’ve found that a great many Windows apps install and run just fine under Crossover whether they’re on the list or not. InDesign 2.0 is listed on the site as “known not to work” but apart from a minor display glitch, it seems to work as always. (I haven’t tested it deeply so far.) Most Microsoft apps work beautifully (especially older ones) and I’ve been using Office 2000 and Visio 2000 under it without incident since last fall.

Wine implements a sort of runtime environment emulation for Windows called a “bottle.” More than one bottle may be created on a single host OS, and each bottle has its own emulated C: drive and Registry. By giving each Windows app its own bottle under Wine, apps are prevented from interfering with one another in the dreaded “DLL Hell” effect. Because it’s not a VM, the performance hit for running Wine/Crossover is very small, and most important, you do not need to have a legal copy of Windows running in the VM. On the other hand, a bottle looks enough like Windows to be infectable by Windows malware, though one bottle probably can’t infect other bottles on a Linux system, or the underlying system itself. (From what I’ve heard, the low-level system tricks played by many malware packages keep them from running or at least running completely.) There are known conflicts between WGA and Wine, so don’t install WGA if you can avoid it.

Bottom line: If Wine supports all the Windows apps you absolutely must use, you do not need Windows at all. I haven’t tested all the Windows packages that I use here (next up is MapPoint 2004) but for Office and Visio 2000 it’s been nothing short of magical, and I’m guessing InDesign will come along eventually. In a mature software market, time works in our favor: One by one, existing apps will be installable under Wine, and each time that happens, Windows slips a little bit deeper beneath the waters of irrelevance.

Next up: For the hard cases, there’s always virtualization.

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