Working in Ubuntu 12

[Charles Pegge]

Vista has served me the dreaded 'Blue screen of death' - probably a bald spot on my hard drive caused by the relentless thrashing it gets whenever the PC comes out of hibernation. Anyway, before rushing out to buy a new PC, I thought it would be a good opportunity to work in Ubuntu and Wine for a while, which has no problem in accessing the Windows partition. It will be interesting to see what the strengths and weaknesses are. I will miss MS Anna, the voice. She is stern,  but Mr (Ubuntu) eSpeak has no charm whatsoever

[JRS]

That sucks!

Try cleaning up the temp directory and maybe even renaming your windows memory manager cache file. I would do a file scan of the Vista partition
and see if your guess of a weak sector is the cause. Backing up all those Windows files would be tops on my list.

FYI: Hard disk failure is not picky about what it destroys and what partition it does it on. I'm glad you built that Linux partition as it's the safety net that may have saved you from a very expensive disk recovery charge.

[Mike Lobanovsky]

Hello Charles,

Your development work under Wine may be severely compromized when you come back to an original Windows 7 installation. Especially those parts of it that are kernel32-related low-level stuff. Wine is only an emulator despite its name and ambitions.

Please note that "windoze" and linuxoid OpenGL canvases and techniques are somewhat different. Also, it is reasonable to use nVidia's proprietary driver if your videocard is some kind of nVidia brand. And finally, make sure to stay away from Mesa. There's no such thing as Mesa for Windows any more and many Mesa-based projects are not compatible with Windows' native OpenGL.

You can safely experiment with GDI graphics in the meantime though.

[Charles Pegge]

Thank you, John and Mike.

I'm ready to order another box if anything else goes wrong, and to experience the delights of Windows-8. Vista, I will not miss.

After endless fiddling, I've got all the essentials running. This is a 64-bit version. (I tried 13.10 - too many glitches to stand a chance).

The generic nVidia driver had to be activated for OpenGl to work properly, and to avoid the black screen of death whenever the PC is brought out of 'Suspend'. I did not encounter 'MESA' - I don't think I will have to do anything Linux-specific in the Wine environment.

3D ttf fonts come out flat, and the letter 'e' is missing from the Arial font. I hope the other fonts are not so affected

To get Wave Audio and MIDI working, 'Timidity' had to be installed.

The Skype microphone was initially inactive, until going into the Skype options menu/audio. No further action was required.

Subjectively speaking,  Wine seems to run programs at at about 1/3 speed, which is tolerable for now.

[JRS]

Charles,

I gave Ultra Edit Linux version another try since it was first released some time ago. I have to say the current version is up to the standards of the Windows version and I can now retire my Windows version of UE running under Wine.

John

[Mike Lobanovsky]

@John

Code::Blocks has been my editor of choice under Windows for many years. It's only natural it's with me under my eOS too. A perfect match under the both operating systems gives me equal ease of use and confidence in what I'm doing.

@Charles

Raw Ubuntu still looks somewhat alien, gloomy, restrictive and sometimes unpredictable to me. I'm happy I came across elementary OS Luna -- a light-weight Ubuntu 12.04-based distro which will enjoy LTS (long-term support) till 2017 together with its parent. Its UI is beautiful and familiar even in its raw form and it can also be tweaked (although not so easily as one would like) to look and behave very much like the most beautiful graphical interface ever, which is undoubtedly Mac OS X:



Of course, as Russians say on their forums, this is only my own "IMHO".

Also, be sure to install the latest Wine 1.7 directly from Wine Headquarters. The package offered at the Ubuntu Software Center seems to be of some ancient build.

[JRS]

Thanks Mike!

Upgraded to Wine 1.7.14. Everything seems to work fine that worked before.

[JRS]

From my Linux partition I was able to copy all of my files from my Windows 7 partition to my 4 TB USB drive. Microsoft feels they own 4 of the files and they couldn't be copied. (security, profile, ...)  It even copied the pagefile and hibernate system files. I'm sure the registry hive files made it as well.

[Mike Lobanovsky]

Hehe, OTOH MS Windows refuses to recognize linuxoid Ext1/4 partitions at all. It simply reports them as unallocated. A sow is no match for a goose, so to speak.

[Charles Pegge]

Wine 1.7 is a lot faster - comparable with Vista with the OxygenBasic examples. The only problem is that MIDI has gone. May need to load in some sound fonts.

With Wine 1.7 The letter 'e' in Opengl scalable typefaces has been restored. Actually, this problem only affected bold fonts (Wine 1.4).

Elementary OS Luna looks very attractive, but I will stay with Ubuntu for a while, since its is the most popular of the Linux distros. I need to get familiar with it.

[Mike Lobanovsky]

Hello Charles,

Perhaps this info will help you cure your MIDI?

[Mike Lobanovsky]

Hello John,

You may sleep tight tonight. You've just christened yet another potential Linux developer!

[Charles Pegge]

Thanks Mike, I can see the Midi Ports already set up but no instruments / voices attached. I think these Linux systems are full of pot-holes 

[Mike Lobanovsky]

Yes Charles,

Linux is the most dreadful "dll hell" I ever saw. You may actually get your MIDI samples with some other package that's got nothing to do with MIDI. There are too many dependencies but you actually get used to it with time. Linuxoids just don't fully realise how lopsided their universe is. But I have to admit it was much worse than that some two or three years ago.

I'm glad to see they are catching up with the rest of the world though.

[JRS]

Keep in mind that you can use Windows native DLLs in most cases if the Wine version isn't compatible enough. Check the Wine site for information on using Windows DLLs.

@Mike - You have been a Linux user for a long time. You can only sit on the fence for so long before common sense finally kicks in.