[Lancaster] Hello

[Ken Hough]

On Sunday 19 October 2008 23:54, Wayne Ward wrote:
> Hello its all quiet on here anyone been doing anything interesting
> Ive just spent a few days messing with a gentoo install with kde 4.1.2
> Worked splendid apart from it has the same bug as ubuntu studio
> when you install the accelerated nvidia drivers the machine cocks up
> bigtime!! So im back on 64studio which works a treat!!!!

Not done much of interest myself. I've been trying to chase down a problem 
that I had during testing of 'wxAstroCapture'. As I've mentioned previously, 
this is a cross platform app for use with a modified webcam for astro work.

I volunteered to do some pre-release testing under Ubuntu, SUSE, Win2000, and 
Win XP. I've got these four OSes installed on two laptops.

I had no problems under Linux, but couldn't get full operation under the MS 
OSes. The app needs to write to the parallel port via /dev/parport0 under 
Linux and LPT1 under Windows. The developers sent me debug versions of the 
Win version of the app. All seemed to be working OK, but no output to LPT1.

I eventually discovered a problem with the BIOS setting for the parallel port.

Under Linux, all was well with the port set to 'bi-directional', but not under 
Windows. When I set the port to ECP, the Windows version worked! Fortunately, 
the Linux version also works with ECP.

I had perhaps nievely assumed that if bi-directional was OK under Linux, it 
should be OK under Windows.

Can anyone enlighten me on this difference?

I've also been trying out/testing my new quad core desktop PC. It's seriously 
fast when running 64 bit SUSE! I've decided that I will remove Windows Vista 
from the hard drive. It's so awful that I'm not going to waste hard drive 
space by keeping it. That's approx 360GB, approx half of the 750GB drive! 
Vista will not allow me to 'shrink' the Vista partion to less than this!!!

Clearly Windows Vista is a dead end. Microsoft have again delayed pulling the 
plug on XP by another six months (31st Jan 2009 to July 2009?) and Windows 7 
is now expected in late 2009/early 2010 (Ref Micromart issue 1026 for both 
items).


Ken Hough