The Inside Track on Firefox Development.

« Post of the Day | Main | Disappointing, Not Surprising »

July 22, 2005

Desktop Linux

Asa has been blogging lately about the flaws in desktop Linux and some of the things it needs to do. This is something I've been interested in for some time - although I'd go further than Asa and say a truly seamless install would achieve equivalent compatibility that OS X achieves - install into NTFS, run Windows apps from the shell via double click, and reading resources from the Windows executables for display in the shell. Users should be able to transition what is effectively a new "shell" and still run all their productivity apps - MS Word, Photoshop, etc.

Posted by ben at July 22, 2005 12:41 AM

Comments

"run Windows apps from the shell via double click, and reading resources from the Windows executables for display in the shell."

You can do this with both Wine, or related products, cedega from transgaming.com or crossoverx from codeweavers.com

For .NET applications, there is mono at go-mono.org, mono 2.0 will have full winforms support for windows GUI applications, mono 2.0 is supposed to be released early next year. Right now there is full console compatibility.

As for reading PE .exe resources out of the PE file and displaying them in the shell, I have no idea why that would be useful for most people. What's common practice for elf linked files is to store your resources as char[] arrays and use them that way.

Say you have a PNG you want to store in the file as you would in a PE as RC_BITMAP or whatever it is, you'd do this from the shell
xxd -i image.png
Then copy paste the output into your C/C++/Java linux program and reference it as a byte array.

This works just as well as win resources in the PE, except that they are done that way because of the Win32 API, whereas, there is no resource API on linux yet.

Linux has files called launchers, where you can associate any icon image on the system to a shortcut. If you wanted to get the default icon out of the PE to display in the shell, a good alternative would be just to distribute a launcher file or desktop shortcut.

On the other hand, there's nothing stopping you from coding a PE resource reader and embedding it into X or Gnome to display the icon in the Windows PE file. I've never seen a project like that on sourceforge.

If you're going to do that, then shouldn't microsoft make Linux desktop launchers work on it's platform too?
Why should linux do that for another OS, when the other OS doesn't do it for it's file types?

Posted by: Beer29 at August 2, 2005 2:38 PM

©1997-2006 Ben Goodger. All Rights Reserved.
Opinions expressed here are my own, and not those of any organization that I may be affiliated with.
Reload icon is © Stephen Horlander;
Firefox logo is by Jon Hicks, and is a trademark of The Mozilla Foundation.
GetFirefox buttons are from rakaz