Hello and welcome to EasyBCD 2.0!!

It’s rather hard to believe, but EasyBCD 1.7.2 has been out for over 2 years now, and we’ve been working on Version 2.0 ever since. In that time, a lot has happened. Windows 7 has shipped, ext4fs is the new cool kid on the Linux block, GRUB2 is finally seeing some adoption, VHDs are the new wow, and everyone and their grandmother want a dual-boot between Windows 7 and Windows XP.

Worry not, we haven’t been sitting on our (not-so-proverbial) behinds this whole time. In fact, the entire NeoSmart team – developers, supporters, testers, and all – have been working around the clock to make EasyBCD 2.0 the biggest, coolest, greatest, and awesomest thing ever since the invention of the MBR. And now, over a 150 beta builds later and 2 years in the making, we’re super-pleased to introduce you to EasyBCD 2.0. It’s so incredibly overhauled and improved, so stuffed-to-the-brim with features, so much of a true one-click dual-boot experince, so customizable, so powerful, and so EASY that it took a lot of self-restraint to keep from calling it EasyBCD 10.0!

What’s new, you ask? We’ll get to it. But let’s just first give you the download link, because we know you just can’t wait to get your grubby, geeky paws on it ASAP:

Download EasyBCD 2.0.1 (1337 KiB)

(Yes, it really is 1337 kibibytes in size. And, no, we didn’t do it on purpose. We’re just übercool that way!)

So, what’s new? Lots. Lots, lots, and lots of new. And lots and lots of improved. With less and less and less bugs, too. The official changelog is miles long, but here’s the stuff that we feel really shines. It’s so hard to sort them in a way that doesn’t leave one feature in the shadow of the other, but here goes:

• Complete Windows 7 support (including the pretty-boot screen!)
• Total redesign of the user interface to make the stuff you use more often easier to get to and easier to understand
• Automatic configuration and one-click setup of Windows XP dual-boots. No more mucking around w/ boot.ini and NTDETECT + NTLDR
• Support for multiple top-level Windows XP entries. You no longer need to go through a second NTLDR menu no matter how many XPs you have installed!
• Support for GRUB2 and ext4fs (we’re looking at you, Ubuntu *glare*)
• Boot from ISO images and Virtual Harddisk (vhd) files!
• Create bootable USB drives!
• Change the boot drive on your system (including all the partition management stuff) with one click!
• Rewritten OS X support (yes, again *sigh*)
• EasyBCD BIOS Extender to let you boot from network devices, specific hard disks, USBs, and more even if your BIOS doesn’t support it (thanks to PLoP integration)
• Support for multiple top-level GRLDR entries (in the same vein as XP entries above)
• Improved boot device detection, EasyBCD always runs, even if your boot device is inaccessible or the BCD isn’t installed!
• Loading indicator for lengthy operations
• Better support for loading and managing external BCD stores
• Complete EasyBCD portability. Just tell the installer where to stick it, and you’re set!
• Improved high DPI support
• Ability to create safe-mode entries
• Improved MBR repair, BCD repair, and more!

It’s been a real blast working on EasyBCD 2.0, and we’re really excited to have something we can finally share with the general public. Before we leave you and EasyBCD 2 alone together, some final words need to be said: EasyBCD 2.0 would not have been possible without the help of the entire NeoSmart team, testers, and of course, donors.

A big shout-out to Terry (Terry60), Justin (Kairozamorro), Jake (Coolname007), Alex (Mak 2.0), and everyone else that helped in providing support over the past 2 years. Crazy props to the Grub4Dos team and the PLoP developers.

And some links to keep you busy:

• EasyBCD user manual (it’s severely out-of-date, we’re updating it for 2.0 now)
• EasyBCD 2.0 screenshots
• Support forums

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Keep in touch via twitter @neosmart or facebook for constant info and updates!

A Token of Appreciation?

Have we saved you a lot of time, effort, problems, and loss of limb, life, or worse? How much have you saved in support and repair costs? Do you want to say thank you? You can make a donation here:

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In the article, Ben Goodger, lead Chrome UI developer, states

[Google avoids] cross platform UI toolkits because while they may offer what superficially appears to be a quick path to native looking UI on a variety of target platforms, once you go a bit deeper it turns out to be a bit more problematic.” [... Your applications end up] speaking with a foreign accent.

But there’s something we’re not getting here. Obviously given enough brilliant programmers and a good team lead to keep the different codebases in sync, going with native APIs is the better approach. But the reasons Goodger is offering aren’t very convincing.

The problem is…. Google’s Chrome for Windows doesn’t look native. In fact, it’s about as far from native Win32 as you can get. We had originally explained away the non-win32 looks by assuming it was because Google wanted an interface that was consistent across the different platforms and different at the same time from any of the operating systems native UI toolkits: in line with Google’s vision of turning the browser into an OS, regardless of the platform beneath.

A non-native UI that looks the same on Mac, Windows, and Linux would be the answer to such a browser OS. It would indicate that Chrome is its own product – from the codebase to the user experience – and that to the end user it shouldn’t matter what OS you’re on. And that in the future Google could ship a standalone (OS-free) browser that looks like Chrome and acts like Chrome, regardless of the platform beneath?

Otherwise there is no good explanation for the horrendously-different user interface that comes with Chrome. It requires learning the tips & tricks to a whole new UI, and forgetting a number of “niceties” you may have been accustomed to (such as pressing the ‘spacebar’ to OK pop-up dialogs, etc.).

With the preliminary screenshots of Chrome for Mac, the platform Chrome runs on begins to peek through.

Does this mean that Google’s vision of Chrome as its own OS has come to pass – with Google now content to just launch a cross-platform browser without attempting to lull users away from the platforms they’ve come to love?

Whatever the case, it’s sure to be interesting watching and waiting to see what Google has planned for its users. Whether its a cross-platform browser experience that’s different enough to be the same across all platforms while retaining a feel of the platform or if it’s paving the way for the OS to come it’s quite obvious that the gears are now in motion and something big just might happen.

For a device that’s supposed to do Firefox, Skype and not much more, an underpowered PC with a touchscreen isn’t going to accomplish much. For one thing, Firefox is a huge performance drain and a memory hog to boot that underpowered hardware (even on-par with an Eee) simply won’t support and for another, there’s no way to get PC hardware down to the sub-$200 price range.

What TechCrunch wants – whether they know it or not – is an oversized PDA, not an underpowered PC. And it’s not just a question of semantics, it’s a question of foundations and principles – and it makes a huge difference in terms of end-user experience and the bottom line.

For the functionality that TechCrunch is trying to pack into this opensource, mass-market web gadget, there’s nothing that wouldn’t work better, faster, and cheaper on specialized hardware rather than on generic PC components.

While the world is now in the midst of a touch-screen craze, it’s important to keep in mind when and where that works. For a web browser and a VoIP client, a touchscreen doesn’t provide much added value, but it does add quite a hefty amount to the bottom line. A couple of buttons at the top/side of the device that provide basic functionality (Go/Dial, Stop/End) would certainly suffice for most purposes. A thin slide-out keyboard is far-cheaper and more user-friendly than an onscreen keyboard, and would make things like entering site addresses and using email clients and Google Docs quite enjoyable.

A PDA-style ARM processor, running software compiled for the ARM platform could provide a more satisfactory end-user experience with regards to performance and can come in smaller form-factors and/or as embedded systems.

It’s important to bear in mind the difference between consumer electronics and a computer. Whereas Asus had to keep their Eee x86 so that it can run whatever a a PC user could demand from it, a web browsing tablet only needs to run what the manufacturer intends it to. In hardware design, there’s a constant compromise between flexibility and complexity which is directly tied to price, size, and ease-of-use.

A tablet designed to surf the web and run Skype doesn’t need to do anything else; but it shouldn’t do anything else if price and size are of any concern. It’s easy to get caught up imagining a device that can do anything and everything; but you can only go so far before things begin to spiral out of control.

Whether or not MinWin is the very same kernel that went into Vista or not is officially unknown at the moment; but what we do know is that Shipping Seven is either one huge fake, or else that the Windows core programmers at Microsoft are so stupid that they don’t know the first thing about coding, kernels, operating systems and compilers.

The post at Shipping Seven is littered from beginning to end with fallacies, lies, and incorrect deductions that anyone with even the most basic coding skills would know better than to ever post, especially not when attempting to pass it off as the work of some of the more talented coders out there.

Here are some of the more-glaring factual errors in the post that completely strip Shipping Seven of any authenticity or authority it may have on the topic of Windows 7:

How many times has the Ubuntu or Mac OS X kernel been rewritten?

Correction: OS X is powered by a rewrite of the XNU kernel which is a modified version of the Mach kernel which, in turn, is a complete rewrite of the original BSD kernel. And, of course, Ubuntu isn’t an OS in and of itself, rather it’s just a distribution of Linux.

While it can be argued that not every developer at Microsoft is expected to have intimate knowledge of the inner-workings of other operating systems, no one in their right mind would believe that the Windows kernel programmers don’t even know what kernels their strongest competitors are currently using.

We spent a boatload of time during Windows Vista making everything ‘componentizable’ – So that we could (by creating some xml files that our build process uses) create a boatload of different versions of Vista (and Server 2008).

….

You already have MinWin – It is the core system components that Windows Vista needs to function; everything else on the system depends directly or indirectly on it. It is the last thing you could (theoretically) uninstall.

So, if you really really want it, you can get it, I suppose – you probably could (using the command line) uninstall almost every single Windows Vista system component, including the user interface. I don’t know what the hell you’d do with just a kernel and a kernel loader on your machine, though.

Assuming you can get past the way that the post was written (with references like “using the command line” which indicate a general lack of knowledge about computers in general; treating the command line as if it were a “god mode” that can be used to do just about anything), there’s still the matter of factual inaccuracies – and inconsistencies in the article itself.

You can’t change/modify/revert pre-build settings by running commands in the command line. Components that are integrated at compile time simply cannot be removed by running a bunch of commands afterwards – especially not from within the resulting OS itself.

Anyone that’s ever manually compiled a Linux kernel knows this. You can’t strip ext3 support from the kernel after it’s already built any more than you can add Reiser4 support to the kernel without re-building it. As a matter of fact, anyone who’s built anything at all should know this – the same rules apply to any other program as well. For example, you can’t remove PHP support from Apache if you’ve compiled mod_php directly into the binaries.

Shipping Seven is a big, fat fraud. It’s written by someone with only the most basic knowledge of computers, zero knowledge of coding concepts, and absolutely no experience with kernels and operating systems. Shipping Seven is most likely written by the equivalent of script kiddy, eagerly awaiting the first leaked builds of Windows 7 to appease an inner itch – most likely all the while lamenting his lack of involvement in the Longhorn beta. It isn’t worth the time it takes to read, and definitely doesn’t deserve even the questionable authority it now has on the topic.

The problem with Express Gate isn’t that it’s Linux nor that it’s there – it’s the rather more-mysterious question of why it’s there in the first place. If ASUS had thought to make use of this Linux distribution to provide data recovery & diagnostics services, offer advanced BIOS configuration and updating options, or one of the infinite other creative ideas that one can manage with a light and fully-configurable OS that ships embedded with the motherboard, perhaps then we could see a use for it.

Instead, ASUS has opted to ship Express Gate with a Firefox-based web-browser and Skype (out of all things). Again, it’s not a matter of having something against either Firefox or Skype; but just the general lack of context for their being there. These days, a web browser is a means to an end. You don’t use it to browse the web, you use it to interact with the web. A web browser on a Live CD-like Linux installation isn’t as useful nor as productive as the web browser sitting on the desktop of your main OS, be it Windows or Linux.

ASUS’s major selling point is that Splashtop takes 5-seconds to load at most. If you stop and think about, it’s only impressive because it’s being taken out of context. 5 seconds is fast, but just how often do you need quick access to Skype and your computer isn’t already on? Most of us turn our PCs on and off once a day at most – and there are many that prefer to hibernate, standby, or just leave it on indefinitely.

While a “5-second desktop environment” is a highly-desirable feature, a “5-second basic desktop environment without the programs, applications and documents you need” isn’t.

At the end of the day, ASUS has an idea that has a lot of potential but isn’t being directed correctly. That spare desktop has a lot of room for usefulness and productivity, but a primitive web-surfing environment just isn’t one of them. Until Express Gate features a more-compelling feature set, it’s just another one of those PR initiatives. By “more-compelling” we mean “more exclusive” with applications and products that just won’t work as well on your usual OS (like the BIOS management and system recovery options we listed above), otherwise there isn’t any incentive to forgo the extra 10 seconds it takes to get into your real OS.

Express Gate was originally used as a way to get people to spend the extra cash for the higher-level motherboards costing a couple of hundred bucks extra, and now it’s being used to get people to choose ASUS over similarly-featured contenders. That wouldn’t normally be a problem – after all, extra features is always a great reason to choose one board over another – except in this case, it’s just fluff.

All that being said, it certainly is great to see that Linux has finally reached a level of prevalence where major motherboard manufacturers will consider making it a part and parcel of every board they sell – a kind of perverse play on all the anti-trust violations Microsoft has been accused of by convincing OEMs to ship all PCs with Windows from the get-go. And it’s important not to forget the role ASUS has played in bringing Linux to the masses in the past year – from the brilliantly-viral Eee to Express Gate, Asus has definitely done a lion’s share of work in making Linux as common-place as the PC itself. Hopefully future revisions of Express Gate can find a better use for Splashtop Linux and warrant a kinder review.

What are the most common causes of notebook sleep issues?

• A process running on the system does not allow the system to enter sleep mode.
• A hardware interrupt, such as some peripheral devices for example.
• An unstable driver which does not properly support sleep states or is just buggy.

I’ve owned several notebooks over the years, and almost every one of them have had an issue with sleep mode in one way or another, and over time I’ve learned a certain "practice" which ensures that sleep mode generally works when I close the lid of my computer…

1. Make sure that all of the latest updates are installed for your operating system (Windows Update on Microsoft Windows, Software Update on Mac OS X, your favorite package manager on Linux).
2. Close any running programs on the system (and exit any programs which are running in the notification area which is next to the clock on Windows systems).
3. Unplug all external devices (USB, FireWire, etc.) This includes your external keyboard and mouse if you’re using one, your printer, and whatever else you have plugged in. And no, your USB-powered rocket launcher isn’t an exception, even though it is really cool.
4. Use the "Sleep" option in your operating system to put the computer to sleep instead of the lid (Start > Turn Off Computer > Sleep on Windows XP, Apple menu > Sleep on Mac OS X).
5. Once the computer has gone to sleep, close the lid.

You’re probably wondering why it’s not a good idea to always rely on the lid of your computer to put it to sleep, and the answer is fairly simple. Notebooks have a sensor or switch which detects the position of the display (lid) and when the lid is closed to a certain degree it should trigger sleep mode… only that’s not always the case.

Some notebooks take up to one minute to fully go into sleep mode, and general habits have shown that you’re more likely to close the lid and immediately tuck your computer into its carrying case, which means you’re moving the computer around in mid-air before the hard drive head has gotten a chance to park, which could cause damage to the hard drive (and your valuable data). By using the operating systems "sleep" function and waiting for the signal that your computer is snoozing away (whether it be a flashing power light or a pulsating sleep light), you give the computer a chance to park the hard disk head and enter sleep mode correctly.

Mind you, some notebooks with older NVIDIA drivers on Windows Vista may cause your computer to go into a perpetual coma every time it falls asleep. If your notebook manufacturer hasn’t provided you with a newer graphics driver, I’d recommend consulting a sleep therapist LaptopVideo2Go.com, which has all of the latest NVIDIA drivers and modified INF files for installing them on any NVIDIA graphics card.

Unfortunately if you attempt to install Ubuntu with the “/” partition formatted as ReiserFS, JFS, XFS or any other non-standard filesystem, Ubuntu installation will begin like normal and tick merrily along its way until it attempts to install GRUB. At that point, you’ll get a fairly inexplicable and non-verbose “fatal error” message about “grub-install()” failing.

We finally managed to pin down the error thanks to a user at Ubuntu Forums who pointed out that our dual-boot instructions worked alright when using ext3fs instead of our recommended ReiserFS (for speed, size, and performance). In an attempt to reproduce and pin down the error, we dropped down to the console when the “fatal error” message was given, and found out that grub-install was not recognizing the non-ext3fs partition.

Basically, Ubuntu’s copy of grub-install is not configured to write to anything other than ext3fs during setup, and attempts to install GRUB when the /boot/ folder is on a ReiserFS partition and GRUB is to be written to the bootsector were failing. This issue manifests itself in all releases since (and including) Hoary Hedgehog (5.04); including the most recent Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) and Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) releases.

Unfortunately this has been a (little-) known issue ever since March of 2005, but no one has bothered to fix it since. Every once in a while someone “bumps” the bug and confirms that it’s still present, but it hasn’t yet been addressed or even assigned.

We’re not exactly sure what the Ubuntu dev team is waiting for, but this is a rather important issue that needs to be addressed as soon as possible, in our opinion. Other Linux distros like Fedora and SUSE Linux do not exhibit this problem.

Related Bug Reports on Launchpad.net

• grub-install fails for JFS root partition (Mar. 2005)
• grub-install failing in Ubuntu setup (Jan. 2008)
• GRUB Installation Fails if non-ext3 Root Partition (Jan. 2008)

I’ve been doing some thinking, and after having numerous conversations with some individuals who will remain un-named, I’ve come to the conclusion that some people are too wrapped-up around the computer system that they use, to the point where they could very well border-line on “fanboy,” and I feel that this is affecting the credibility of the tech community as a whole.

Example:

“John,” a PHP developer, switches his personal home computer from Windows to Linux, and he enjoys using Linux because of the advanced functionality that it provides to him.

Now, “Jim,” a long-time Windows user and Microsoft supporter, who has conversed with John for several years, criticizes John for his decision, stating that he is brainless and dim-witted because Linux is open-source, and that Windows is the only platform that matters.

John doesn’t care about using Windows, he’s comfortable on Linux and he gets more enjoyment out of his system than he did when he was running Windows, but Jim is unable to see that and continues to insult John for his choice.

What do you see wrong here? To me, I see this constant criticism as being petty, and shows that one is unable to look past their own needs. Just because you’re a supporter of one system doesn’t mean you have to hammer down on everyone else running a different system. Remember, we’re all just human beings sitting behind a computer screen. So what does it really matter what the person on the other side of the screen is running?

I’m not against any platform, I’m currently running Windows XP on two of my home computers, Ubuntu 7.10 on one notebook, and Mac OS X 10.5.1 on my MacBook Pro. They all serve their purpose, and at the end of the day isn’t that what really matters?

I believe that we should all try to contribute positively to the tech. community as a whole, enough of the “flame wars” and the un-necessary bashing.

Also, for the record, I never said that Windows sucks in my previous article. I stated reasons that I believe that Mac OS X may be a better choice for some people, and how overall it has a lower TCO when it comes to upgrading systems down the road. If you want to use Windows, Linux, BeOS, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, or hell even DOS, that’s up to you. It’s your choice. I’m not trying to force my choice on anyone, I merely posted my thoughts on the matter.

The symptoms include incredibly-slow internet access, inability to access certain domains, slow logon times, slow application launch times (under GNOME), and so on and so forth. There hasn’t been any official acknowledgement, but the consensus is that it’s a bug that’s re-surfaced from Ubuntu Edgy Eft (version 6.10).

In short, internet on Ubuntu is useless. There are multiple guides across the net with the solution along with an “explanation” we find to be inadequate and fundamentally flawed. The solution is to disable anything that even smells remotely of IPv6. Remove it from the network settings, remove the definitions from the hosts file, configure your favorite web browser to pretend it doesn’t exist, and you’ll get your internet back.

The explanation, that some will give you, is that Ubuntu 7.10 is configured with IPv6 as the default interface, and if you’re on an IPv4-only network (like 99% of the world’s population) Ubuntu will waste time trying the IPv6 network connection before using the internet-enabled IPv4 connection.

But this is nonsense, because it simply doesn’t explain why it takes so long for Ubuntu to make the switch (from 10 seconds to infinity) and absolutely ignores the fact that Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn worked just fine with IPv6 enabled – as does Windows Vista for that matter.

The problem is that Ubuntu thinks IPv6 has a proper, working internet connection and attempts to use it, even if you’re on an IPv4 network.

If the routing rules were correctly done, Ubuntu shouldn’t have a problem sending IPv4 packets over the IPv4 network, and IPv6 packets over an IPv6 connection. But obviously that is not the case. It shouldn’t matter what is set as the “default” (there is no such thing, really) network connection, Ubuntu should connect ASAP and without all this nonsense.

The bottom line is, Gutsy Gibbon’s TCP-stack is broken and we have yet to see a real fix. Disabling IPv6 is nothing more than a stop-gap solution, and is the completely wrong way to go about doing it. If anything, it makes the general techie wary of IPv6… and that’s not something you want to do, when IPv6 adoption rates are already so absolutely dismal.

All this raises a really important question: what is it with modern operating system releases being RTM’d before they’re really ready? From Vista to Gutsy Gibbon to Leopard, something is definitely wrong. If you haven’t already made the switch to Gutsy Gibbon, stay with Feisty until the next version comes out.

Most people take a look at these three facts, and instantly come to a conclusion.. the wrong conclusion: you can’t properly manage a Windows server because it’s inherently lacking in the shell scripting department.

But that’s not true… Because here’s another fact for you:

Perl scripts are a drop-in replacement for 99% ((We admit, that’s a made up statistic, give us a break though, will ya?)) of all shell scripting needs.

And another fact:

Perl (unlike PHP) runs great (awesome, in fact) on Windows.

Now with these two facts in mind, you can now make a proper conclusion: Shell scripting on Windows doesn’t have to be difficult, limiting, or in any way inferior than on Linux.

Perl is an awesome language. Between the online Perl community and the millions of Perl-scripting samples across the web, it’s quite the well-documented language and no sysadmin has an excuse not to use it. The Perl modules are an extensive array of easy-to-use pluggable scripts that you just reference and run.

Perl was created for stuff like this. It’s the language of choice for hacking quick scripts that get the job done, easily, quickly, and with little pain or effort. A Perl script made to run on Linux will likely run on Windows too, with little to no hacking necessary for most of the stuff out there.

With Perl, you can easily do things like manage (prune, grep, or sort) log files, backup and FTP or email database server dumps, schedule webserver maintenance, and more.

Shell scripting with Perl is even easier than shell scripting in Bash – simply because of the huge libraries available that make even the most mundane and PITA tasks quite easy. It takes all of 6 statements (we’re purposely refraining from counting lines because this is Perl we’re talking about) to compose an email with your MySQL dumps as a GZIP’d attachment.

You can easily schedule Perl scripts to run at regular intervals with the Task Scheduler – but that’s about all you’ll ever need to interact with Windows for.

A quick Google search will reveal millions of results for “Perl server management scripts.” Take your pick, hack it, and run.

Here’s our 5-step guide to managing your server with Perl scripts:

1. Download and install Perl for Windows (ActivePerl, free).
2. Read the Perl FAQs and get familiar with the syntax. It’s nothing too complicated, and very simple to code in (though reading someone else’s code is another story). You absolutely don’t need anything more than the basic syntax, stuff like classes and functions are completely unnecessary for shell scripting – it’s too easy to even be considered programming!
3. Write your Perl script. Use a real text editor like Notepad++.
4. Test it by running it from the command line and ensuring it does what you need. Repeat step 3 as needed.
5. Open up Scheduled Tasks in the Control Panel and set up a new task to run your Perl script however often you like.

Sure, maybe it’s not as easy it looks and it’ll probably take you a day or so to go from absolute zero to cranking your first Perl-based shell script; but soon enough you’ll be doing it blindfolded and with both your hands behind your back. And it’ll only be one line long, too!

The most important thing to realize is, you don’t need to be a programmer (or become one) in order to shell script in Perl.

Just pretend your Perl script is a batch file (yuck!). The Perl processor will run it from top to bottom, in a very straight-forward manner. Put one task/command per-line, stick loops where needed, and test constantly. You don’t need classes, you don’t need data structures, you don’t need object orientation, and you don’t even really need to use variables if you don’t want to!

We’ll be posting more details, guides, sample shell scripts, and how-to’s on Perl-based shell scripting in the weeks and months to come. Don’t give up just because it involves learning something new, this is in an investment that’ll last a lifetime. If you can shell script in Perl on Windows, you can do the same on Linux and OS X with ease. If you can shell script in Perl, you can do anything!

View all articles in the “Shell Scripting with Perl” category.

Wine on the other-hand, is a Linux port of (major parts of) Microsoft’s Win32 library – the core dependencies of the Windows development libraries, and more importantly, the win32 interface elements. With Wine, you can run many traditional C++ win32 executables on Linux, with certain limitations.

Mono’s biggest stumbling block is the GUI and .NET programs that use P/Invoke to call native non-managed win32 dlls – Mono is a pure .NET environment, and can’t handle them. But from the description above, that’s exactly what WINE excel at… So can’t we use WINE + Mono to make just about any .NET program run on Linux fresh out of the .NET compiler?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. Back when the Mono project was first starting out, the Mono development team considered using WINE to implement the System.Windows.Forms namespace of the .NET Framework (which is practically 100% native C++ unmanaged win32 code in .NET wrappers). But they made the right choice in deciding to not take the easy way and go that route, leaving the integrity of the Mono project intact and focusing on true cross-platform user interface libraries instead (the GTK# is now the UI Library of choice for cross-platform .NET applications).

But until the GTK# library becomes a more viable choice or the Mono “port” of SWF becomes more complete (see below), shouldn’t something like this be made possible? It certainly would be great to just type

$ wine win32_NET_app.exe --mono=/usr/lib/mono/

or maybe (depending on what app does the integration):

$ mono win32_NET_app.exe --wine=/usr/lib/wine/

And have Wine hand-off the .NET Win32 application to Mono, and intercept the P/Invoke calls to Win32 DLLs, replacing them with its own ported Win32 libraries on-the-fly.. That would be great, wouldn’t it?

Unfortunately, we’re not the people in charge at Wine or Mono and such an implementation would take some time and effort to get going – though it is our opinion that if such a thing is done it must be Wine that is modified and not Mono – in order to preserve the true cross-platform nature of the Mono project and keep it from the legal quagmire that is the Win32 library.

At the moment, the Mono team is working on a “port” of sorts for System.Windows.Forms which will let almost all programs written and designed for Windows run on Linux without a problem. Instead of porting the actual SWF controls to Mono, the Mono team is working on a “compatibility layer” of sorts that will render the controls on-the-fly, making it look more “natural” no matter what platform it’s running on.

In the mean time, we highly recommend developers consider using the (technically-inferior, compatibility-superior) GTK# UI library instead of SWF for your .NET projects (on and off of Windows); and end-users can install the latest dev copy of Mono to gain access to the SWF “ported” library to make those Windows apps work!

Out of all the Fxxxxx Fxxxxx names Mark Shuttleworth’s Canonical Ltd. could have picked for their all-the-rage Linux distribution, it had to be the (only?) one that breaks the infamous i-before-e rule, didn’t it?

‘I’ before ‘E’, except after ‘C’, or when sounding like ‘A’, as in “neighbor” or “weigh.”

 

Everyone who speaks English was made to memorize that as a child (well, if you’re British you would’ve memorized it “neighbour” instead, but that’s not the point ;), yet here we are: grown coders using software built on exceptions to grammatical laws!

Let’s take a quick look at some of the other names Ubuntu could’ve used:

• Fickly Fish
• Flaunty Ferret
• Flaky Frog
• Frisky Falcon
• Felicitous Flamingo

What wonderful code-names! What beautiful, grammatically-sound, alliterations! Maybe they just didn’t notice the grammatical misnomer – plus, there’s always next time. Here’s hoping for more great Ubuntu releases with gramatically-correct names!

Beat. Beat. Beat. Beeeeep. Beeeeep. Beeeeep. <click>. Beeeeep. <wait>. Beeeeep. <read>. Beat. <relax>. Beat. Beat.

OK, so maybe that’s a bit of an over-exaggeration, but not by much. Microsoft demoing Silverlight on Linux? What has the world come to?! But the subtitle on the PC World article cleared things up: Microsoft France invited the Mono team to demo their own version of Silverlight that runs on Linux. Now that makes more sense.

We’ve commented on Microsoft’s atrocious, constant, and never-ending denial that there is an operating system called Linux that exists and has a real userbase which .NET Developers would like to code “cross-platform” software for time and time again, but alas, it seemed no one would listen; so you can imagine our surprise at those headlines.

Mono is the GPL’d EMCA implementation of the .NET Framework for Linux. Moonlight is the new Silverlight-compatible runtime for the *nix world. Miguel de Icaza, head developer of the Mono Project was invited to demo Moonlight over at Microsoft France during a presentation. This is a surprising twist on Microsoft’s normal “ignore the Linux world” attitude when it comes to developers, “cross-platform,” and frameworks alike.

But the whole point is, almost no one gives Mono the credit it deserves. While we’re the first to point out its shortcomings and even complete failure at being a “drop-in” replacement for the .NET Library in its current condition, its developers deserve a lot more recognition for their work. Miguel and his team are addressing a particularly “turmoiled” sector of the computer market – Windows developers coding for Linux. Microsoft pretends these people don’t exist, and the rest of the Linux world frowns down and mutters things like “use Java instead,” “forget about Microsoft and .NET,” and “Why waste your time on a closed-source framework?” (forgetting, of course, that Java has only recently become open-source itself).

The Mono Project has done a hell of a job with the limited resources it has, the constant need for developers, the sheer size of the .NET Framework, the lack of cooperation on both sides of the Windows-Linux fence, and the fact that a large portion of the .NET Framework is just managed wrappers for Windows-only code.

Sure, the Mono Project isn’t anything you would actually consider to be a “Linux version” of the .NET Framework thanks to the rather-conspicuous yet well-hidden fact that it doesn’t have a compatible UI Library (well, not yet anyway) and that, in reality, it’s a port of the CLR and C#, not of the .NET Framework itself; but nevertheless, Mono is pretty amazing.

So why can’t companies like PC World and their ilk write proper well-attributed titles like “Mono Creates, Demoes Silverlight for Linux” rather than “Microsoft Hosts Demon of Silverlight on Linux?” Why is it so hard for these people that do Microsoft’s dirty work ((seeing as Microsoft feels having a OS X and Windows implementation of anything suffices to consider it “cross platform” – whether it be Internet Explorer, .NET, MSN Messenger, or now, Silverlight)) to get the recognition the deserve? Because acknowledgement is what powers the free software world. Microsoft isn’t paying the Mono Project to create these libraries and to put these years of work into making the .NET Framework something that is truly cross-platform, it’s the fact that they’re making a difference, fulfilling a need, and getting the proper credit that does.

But on a more positive note: Moonlight really is a ”drop-in” Silverlight replacement for Linux!

Silverlight (and now, Moonlight as well) uses XAML to create the UI and make all those pretty little ponies dance around that computer screen. Silverlight and Moonlight’s jobs are to take that XAML code and render it on the screen. Unlike the .NET Framework on Windows where you use certain APIs to design the form, in Silverlight/Moonlight, everything is WPF and now, fully portable to Linux.

Well, to be fair, Moonlight isn’t ready yet. It’s really close, but not yet there. But what matters is, it does have a working C++ XAML parser, and the main UI interface/library will be truly cross-platform compatible with Windows.

Congratulations Mono Team, you really deserve it!

If Microsoft Corporation doesn’t have the biggest and baddest team of lawyers law firms, who does? It’s probably safe to assume that more than half of these patent infringements really are just that. Put aside the legitimacy of software patents in the first place and just look at the facts as they stand. Open source software gets its code from millions of developers and no amount of auditing or quadruple-checking will ensure clean-code. Despite Microsoft’s claims of “openly and knowingly” engaging in patent-violations, that’s most probably not the case.

But the real reason Microsoft does fear revealing the actual numbers and patents behind the IP-violation claims is that they can be worked around. 235 patents. 235 different issues, components, technologies, programs, and ideas. Most likely somewhere between 30-50% are extremely vague and fringe-cases that can disputed either way from here to kingdom-come and as such aren’t of any real significance.

But the remaining 150 or so issues – they’re the real meat, and that’s where Microsoft is afraid – most rightly so. US patent laws – despite all their ridiculous demands and restrictions – do provide for time to rectify errors/transgressions assuming they weren’t knowingly committed. Now if you told every single open-source contributor, every avid Linux programmer, every commercial entity whose entire existence depends on the free availability of open source software exactly what was wrong, to what extent, and how it needed to be changed to no longer be an issue – how long do you think it would take for all these violations to vanish into thin air?

It is much more in Microsoft’s benefit to have the open source community in “its debt,” so to speak, paying “royalty fees” and constantly under fear of being shut-down than it is for Linux and other open source projects to be 100% clean and out of legal quagmires. It makes too, in a twisted sort of way. If you can’t get everyone to buy your products, why not make money off of those that don’t as well?

The fact of the matter is, no matter how serious these patent violations are, any patent clearly-worded and not vague in purpose is addressable. It may take some time, effort, and tons of money to make it work; but chances are, it’s doable. So long as Microsoft hasn’t patented the right-mouse context menus, the concept of a desktop, or the word “Office,” the open source can – if the need arises – clear all these issues up and move on ahead.

That’s what Google says anyway. There’s “xfy Blog Editor“ for Mac OS X and Linux – except it’s a 32MB download of a trial version for a paid program that’s bloated, slow, and unintuitive. There’s Bleezer, a free Java-based blogging client (so it’s supposed to work everywhere), but it’s even worse. It’s ugly, refuses to connect to WordPress, out of date, and very buggy. Plus, it’s Java. And of course, everyone’s favorite: ScribeFire (aka Performancing). Except we’re talking Linux, not JavaScript; and we’re looking for more than a pretty face and a couple of options.

Why is there no decent blogging utility for Linux? Just because people choose to use Linux and don’t mind a bit of CLI and some kernel hacking doesn’t mean they’re willing to write a couple-thousand word article in Emacs.. It’s not a website, it’s just an article for God’s sake! So all this begs the question: when’s someone (or some company, organization, group, whatever) going to make a down-to-earth (free) WYSIWYG blogging utility for Linux users?

Are you a Linux-loving blogger? What do you use when it comes to making your blog post of the day/week/month? Are you forced to use limited online publishing interfaces or do you just go with the flow and churn out that HTML? And most importantly, what would you like to see in your ideal Linux blogging utility? Because, you never know, we might just find some way to help!