Rick wrote: > Let's discuss some of the FUD mentioned below. > > 1. If you can do "everything" in Linux then you are the exception to > most of us. My personal experience is that I have to forgo too many > amateur radio programs to move away from the MS Windows OS's. Obvious > examples being Ham Radio Deluxe/Digital Master 780, Multipsk, and the > DXLab suite of programs. Never said I can do it all on linux, just that I'm slowly moving that direction. And have moved some PC's at my house entirely to Ubuntu, and love it.
My shack computer is still W2k due to the exact programs you mentioned above. I will move it to OEM XP only when forced to. But for my household applications ubuntu is working peachy keen. With less hassle, better driver support, and higher security than the household windows machines. Much of this is due to the excellent WINE capability. I click on an install exe, linux see's it as win32, and wraps it with a support layer to match the windows system calls with equiv linux. Works great for pretty much all but .net applications, which unfortunately rules out DX Labs and some others. But MS office, and most of my other household apps work transparantly and at same or faster speed than on windows directly. (WINE is not emulation, it executes at native system speed) Don't want to convert anyone. use what you want. It's a ford/chevy/import preference as far as I'm concerned. There are pro's and con's to all the offerings. > Also, for those experimenting with new digital > (and other ham programs) e.g., RFSM, Outpost, Q-Forms, etc., there are > no Linux equivalent at this time. MARSALE runs under WINE. Some do work, some do not. Again, the subject is not why Linux is great for ham radio usage. It's that Vista has some real issues that make it even harder than linux to use for radio > And speaking from my experiences with > virtualization, I question whether many will even attempt this approach! > WINE may be a possible solution, but consider that they have been > working on this for 15 years and still do not have version 1.0 quite > there yet? > You clearly have not used WINE recently. I have, and am amazed at how clean it is. Again, unless the program uses proprietary .net calls, it's click and run. And even .net is being mapped. > 2. Most of us just want to load the software and have it work. Windows > does this extremely well. Linux is far more difficult due to the many > steps required unless you are installing from a repository and that > often means older software versions. A You've not used current Ubuntu releases. I've got it on three machines. What you are describing is simply not an issue. It's magic, it updates cleanly, and with much less interaction than needed on Windows. And vista addresses this how? It updates all your applications automatically how? (Hint: It does not) > 4. Where did this claim come from that Vista can not do duplex sound? > When the original ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) bus was first > developed, it is true that the early soundcards were only half duplex. > Over the years the technology improved so that PCI cards were full > duplex. What information does anyone have that factually states that > Vista can no longer do full duplex? > Not a claim, it's a fact that there are significant changes in vista soundcard operation and modes. Which forces many programs which are used to having record and play functions open at the same time to be rewritten. Or like MixW, run in virtual XP mode using virtualization. Even heavily used programs like Skype were stopped dead by Vista, and only now sort of working. (results seem to vary, and it took from version 3.2 to version 3.6 of skype to even get the current mixed results) At the minimum, many ham soundcard programs required changes to work with vista (I recall multipsk did) Some are still not working, and not likely to. Many, many audio editing programs lost critical functionality if they work at all. None of this was due to old drivers, etc. It was a specific design choice MS made caving to the RIAA and other big media to try to close a lame & little used piracy loophole. (Someone might record a streamed media during playback) Likewise, here's some background on the network performance DRM related issue: < http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=724 > It's real, is a problem, sort of was address in the very late SP1. And entirely due to caving to big media. You'll never see serious server operation on Vista with issues like this! > 5. WinXP software does not require major rewrites to run on Vista. There > can be some issues with sound, since that has been changed. But > certainly less issues than the on-going sound problems with sound > programming in Linux! Funny, I can get some of my ham soundcard programs running in WINE, and they are locked out under Vista. > 6. Bottom line is that if you have an existing XP machine, you will want > to keep using it with XP. If you have Win 98 or older, you will not be > able to run all the software available now since it is not adequate. And > if you buy a new computer, other than Mac, from most sources, Vista will > be on that machine. Simply not true. XP is still available for corporate users, you have to go way out of your way to get Vista due to lack of take by large corporations. And the initial forced removal of XP for new PC's had a substantial and measurable impact on new computer sales, to the point that MS backed off it's original constraints on XP sales for new computers. It took major & combined effort by the hardware mfgs to get that to happen, but it finally did. > Before you spend money to buy a new XP license or > install a Linux variant I would ask you to take a look at the quality of > the screen, particularly the font rendering. It is better than XP and > much better than Linux. Again, this makes me think you've not used mac's or any modern Linux release like Ubuntu. Does not address the hamradio issue. I'm not advocating linux as a single ham radio box. Probably enough said on this. If you like vista and it works, then use it. Many of us don't and won't. Have fun, Alan km4ba
