[Lancaster] Re: Greetings + Odds and Sods

[Martyn Welch]

Hi Ken,

On Saturday 16 December 2006 13:50, Ken Hough wrote:
> Recently, I've been spending time on trying to get some Windoze apps
> running via wine. The apps that I'm interested in are mainly used for
> astronomical image aquisition and processing, particularly 'RegiStax'
> and 'K3CCDTools'. These two apps are more or less the accepted standards
> for use with webcam and other images and are really very good.
> Unfortunately, they are 'closed source'.
>
> I've got RegiStax running under wine/Linux and have been in
> communication the the author. Consequently, there is now a Linux tab on
> the RegiStax web site. This info' is also in the current user manual, so
> I've got a bit of publicity for Linux.
>

Always nice to see someone acknowledging the existence of Linux, even if it is 
just that their binary blob will run under wine.

> I'm still having problems with K3CCDTools. wine correctly runs the
> K3CCDTools installation file and the appropriate files are installed
> under ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files directory.
>
> Typically, wine issues a lot of info relating to what it is being called
> upon to do. In this case, I get absolutely nothing. When I enter the
> command 'wine K3CCDTools', there is a short pause before the prompt
> returns. No useful screen output at all!
>
> Any suggestions?
>

Afraid not, not had a lot of dealing with wine to be honest.

> The comment in my previous message (Re: [Lancaster] Fw: Mouse disapears)
> concerning Ubuntu wasn't entirely flippant. I've been playing with it
> and initial attempts with v6.06 resulted in one case in the installer
> crashing (OK, Ubuntu was polite enough to report that the installer had
> crashed), and in the other, reports of packages not installed.
>
> Subsequently, I had a go with v6.10. This was successful, but I found it
> the actual installation to be a bit of a pain.
>
> Firstly, because a complete 'live' installation has to be loaded before
> a 'proper' installation can be done  --- takes some time.
> Secondly, the partitioner/formater got itself in a mess  --- it reported
> (on the second page) that one of the partitions that I had correctly
> created (via the first page) was of zero size. I could not proceed and
> had to reboot/reload to clear this.
>

Yeah - I find having to boot into the full graphical environment a pain as 
well, especially on a machine with 256meg of RAM. It's more than enough to 
run it normally. bit of a pain when a fair percentage of it is being used as 
a ramdisk...

> Also, having this information split between two pages is a nuisance. It
> is neccesary to remember all of the partition info from the first page
> so as to correctly set up the second page   ----  not a patch on the
> SuSE/YAST system.
>
> So far I'm unable to understand why Ubuntu is so popular, except maybe
> for the number of CDs, etc that have been sprinkled around the world. It
> doesn't seem to offer me any advantages over SuSE. What am I missing?
>

I think he fact that they have no "retail" version, they are fairly community 
driven/focused (all of the development down to the development communications 
between canonical employees, who do quite a bit of the work on Ubuntu and 
which work from home, is done in public IRC channels and mailing lists) and 
they have a nice philosophy.

> BTW, my attempts to explore Ubuntu again were sparked by the recent
> Microsoft/Novell anouncement. I'm looking to hedge my bets. I like SuSE,
> but I don't want Microsoft to be calling the shots or trying to provide
> any so called 'genuine advantages' for Linux users.
>

Funny thing was, the week before there announcement I was playing around with 
the Latest SuSE, I got a copy at Linuxworld. After the announcement I lost 
the appetite. Think I'll see how that all pans out before spending anymore of 
my time playing with it.

Martyn

-- 

Martyn Welch (martyn at welchs.me.uk)

PGP Key : http://www.welchs.me.uk/martyn/pgpkey/
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