Ionic Wind Linux Project

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

Yes you will get both products for a contribution.

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

No but lack of other things has delayed Aurora temporarily.  Working on the Linux versions is keeping me busy with time that I wouldn't have much else to do with otherwise.  And it is something that I really want to do.

Paul.

Sounds good.  The cross-platform capability was one of the features that attracted me to Aurora.

Will this delay completion of the documentation for Aurora?

I would prefer to have documentation for Aurora before another Linux IDE. 

Randall

[Mike Stefanik]

Several years ago most of the major tech journals in all surveys were showing Linux as the #2 OS in use by the average home user. 

The last study that I've read was from June-July of 2006, and showed Windows at about 90%, Mac OS at about 5% and Linux at about 5%.

Major retailers like Walmart have been selling preinstalled Linux machines for several years in stores and online and they have been a huge factor in making Linux machines readily available for the average home user.  Our local Walmart has some nice Linspire and Xandros machines.  Excellent choices for the average home user, and extremely user friendly and handles anything the average home user would want to do on a PC.

I don't know that I would describe those systems as nice. The ones that I have seen have been low-end boxes, manufactured cheaply. Personally, I wouldn't buy one anymore than I would by a "Sanyo" television instead of a Sony. And given that most of those folks who buy one are going to want to run Windows applications, that means they've got to cross their fingers and hope that they work under WINE and friends.

As far as "anything the average home user would want to do" on a computer, I guess if you're talking about surfing the web or using OpenOffice to write a letter, sure. But if little Johnny wants to play World of Warcraft, or lilttle Suzy wants to play Barbie Mermaid Adventures, then good luck there. Not to mention that software the Mom and Dad might want to run, say TurboTax, Quicken, etc. are a no-go as well. So I think the use of "anything" is overstating it just a smidge.

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

Let's not turn this into a Linux vs Windows vs Mac thread please.  The thread was an annoucement as to how I am going to provide the products under linux, and to lay out the plan for the future.  Here are some interesting facts from my perspective as an author:

About 1 out of 5 emails I currently get ask about Linux support, from prospective customers that don't yet own our software.  In 10 years that adds up to 1000's of potential users.  Not to mention the requests from actual businesses that were looking for a new development system for Linux.  Business people would pay for support, and that income is something we really need.

I have received, over the last 10 years, perhaps 2 emails asking about Mac support.  The only request for Mac support is from about 5 of the users here on the forums.

The Mac is constantly changing, it is only now that they are producing Intel based Macs that I would even consider porting Emergence or Aurora. Whether I would do it or not depends on the availability of hardware and development tools.  If Apple wants to provide me with a free Mac so we can port our software then fine, but I am not going to take food out of the mouths of my family to buy overpriced hardware.  Especially considering what OSX is based on.

As far as "anything the average home user would want to do" on a computer, I guess if you're talking about surfing the web or using OpenOffice to write a letter, sure. But if little Johnny wants to play World of Warcraft, or lilttle Suzy wants to play Barbie Mermaid Adventures, then good luck there. Not to mention that software the Mom and Dad might want to run, say TurboTax, Quicken, etc. are a no-go as well. So I think the use of "anything" is overstating it just a smidge. Wink

If we embrace Linux then there will be more developers writing software for Linux.  Not that I would ever want to see a port of "Barbie" on my machine .

Linux is really quite an easy OS to write code for.  Once you get used to the nature of the file system and how shared and static libraries are handled you'll love it as well.  I think the stigma that "Linux is hard" was perpetuated by the hacker types that flocked to it in the beginning.  They flocked to it not so much because it was free, not because it wasn't Windows, but because it was a programmers OS and there isn't anything 'hidden' in Linux.  Hell it took a court order just to get Microsoft to reveal some of the internal API functions that we already knew existed, and had been using for years.

Linux is a good desktop OS, and is a mainstream OS, and is used by millions of users worldwide.  With Emergance and Aurora for Linux you will be able to write programs for those users using the same code base you do on the Windows versions.  And as Doc has already stated those users don't mind paying for quality, unique software. 

Later,
Paul.

[Dennisc]

And in South Africa and other countries, Macs are either not available, too expensive, or just not popular. Windows and Linux - go for it. I am going to convert one of my machines to Linux in anticipation.....

Dennis

[Doc]

Thought you folks might want a peek... image attached.

-Doc-

[Tom Cone Jr]

Indie Language

Revealing the pitiful state of my vocabulary, can someone enlighten me as what this means?  The term's been used several times in this thread and everyone seems to know what it means but me.   Thanks.

-- tom

[Rock Ridge Farm (Larry)]

Since I have been one of those asking for Linux - I just sent my contribution.

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

Thought you folks might want a peek... image attached.

-Doc-

Doc,
Glad it worked.  I will have some more test programs this evening for you to run. 

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

Indie Language

Revealing the pitiful state of my vocabulary, can someone enlighten me as what this means?  The term's been used several times in this thread and everyone seems to know what it means but me.   Thanks.

-- tom

Independantly created language made by someone other than a large software company, such as Microsoft. 

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

Since I have been one of those asking for Linux - I just sent my contribution.

Thank you.  You have the honor of being the #2 Linux Contributor

Paul.

[Rock Ridge Farm (Larry)]

BTW I have my own home made version of Linux. I built it a couple of years back.
2.4.22 Kernel.
The program ran fine here.

[Bruce Peaslee]

This says it all...

[Doc]

Glad it worked.  I will have some more test programs this evening for you to run.

That sounds great, Paul!
The screen shot was of it running on Simply Mepis Linux, taken this morning before heading to work...
I'm getting ready to install the latest Ubuntu version here in just a few minutes since I'd rather do all my initial testing using the same distro you are using. I'll be ready to roll here in a bit.

-Doc-

Edit: Ubuntu fully installed and updated, with everything working flawlessly. Ready to roll.

[seberbach]

I do not see any real disagreement possible about Windows vs. Linux. vs. OSX.

Linux is new, it is a developer's OS because it is an enabling technology for developers who want some control over their destiny, and not depend on the generosity of a large corporation to share internal, read essential to developers, information.

I notice Apple planning to use OSX in cell phones.  I do not think it will be too hard to port Aurora and EB applications developed under Linux to Apple's cell phones in a few years, or to Nokia's cell phones, for that matter.

Porting to Linux seems to me simply a good way to open up Aurora and EB to people who wish to develop applications which are future-proof and will be portable to most platforms created in the future.

The big issue to me, is will i be able to maintain hardware control in my little applications I am learning how to develop now, down the road when corporate moguls try to lock people in with digital rights management, as proprietary lock-in is now so-called.

Steve

[barry]

That's what I love about the OS wars; flowery language and well adorned slogans.

All true.  All important to someone.  None important.

There is no good OS.  That's our hope for the future.  There is no bad OS.  There is no wrong OS and there is no right OS.  There's only "I want" and "I need" and "I like" to consider.

The same thing is true for word processors, text editors, CPUs and the miriad other religious icons of the computer wars.

Programming languages are the exception, of course.  There is a bad programming language but it's name, "brain****" can't be mentioned in a family forum.  And it's excuse is that it was very carefully and cleverly designed to be the worse possible programming language.

Barry

[Mike Stefanik]

I don't know, FALSE is pretty much as bad as Brainf--k is in terms of syntax with code like:

Code Select Expand


ÃÆ'Ã...¸[^$1_=~][,]#
99 9[1-$][\$@$@$@$@\/*=[1-$$[%\1-$@]?0=[\$.' ,\]?]?]#


Of course, BF looks like ASCII art, so it's hard to say which is worse. What motivates folks to make stuff like this, I'll never understand myself. 

[Parker]

I thought that was a regular expression with the []'s at first. It sure doesn't look like a language to me...

[Bruce Peaslee]

There are developers out there who compete with each other over who can write the most obscure language.

[Zen]

Whitespace was always a fun one to look at.

Lewis

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

Stay on topic please

Attached to this post is another test program compiled with Emergence for Linux.  It is the old heapsort demo.

Download the attachment, RENAME TO REMOVE THE .ZIP extension, chmod 755 to make it an executable and run in your terminal with ./heapsort

Let me know if it works on your system.

Thanks,
Paul.

[Doc]

Works perfectly!

-Doc-

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

Thanks.  I picked the program because it covered string commands, random numbers, math, etc.  The only change I had to make between windows and linux was the call to GetTickCount which of course is a Windows API function.  Cut paste and compile

What I will probably do is change the MILLISECS command, which in windows points to GetTickCount, so that it works in either OS.  Wasn't hard to come up with the alternative either, under Linux the gettimeofday function returns the number of seconds and microseconds elpased since January 1st 1970. 

[Doc]

Sounds like a plan.

BTW, it's pretty darned quick too:

Sorted 1000000 items in  7.2900 seconds -------

-Doc-

Edit:
Figured I'd better mention that I'm using an old 1.4Ghz / 512RAM laptop with the latest Ubuntu distro for testing purposes.

[Doc]

Heh... being the goof-ball that I am, I really trashed the system pretty good for awhile.   

I bumped the heapsort test up to 2000000 and it gobbled up all the system resources. That wasn't good enough so after killing the process and rebooting the system, I tried it a second time with the system monitor running. When it finally locked up again, here's what was reported:

CPU - 10.9%
User Memory Used -  97.8%
Swap File Used - 48.8%

Sorry, but I was obviously unable to get the results of the test.   

-Doc-