Re: Windows Line Endings

Hi Bob,

On 6 ต.ค. 2012, at 1:28, Bob Friesenhahn <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sat, 6 Oct 2012, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
>> 
>> I actually run a lot of virtual machines on my Mac, including a couple
>> of versions of Mac OS and Linux, and I certainly wouldn't want to
>> squander perfectly good hardware on an OS that I don't use, and wasn't
>> aware of the 180 days trials, so I'll take a look into that next time I
>> have half a day spare.
> 
> I just forked out $350 for Windows 7 to support free software development.  There just did not seem any way around it.  The pain is severe.

Ouch! I can't think of anything I'd like to waste $350 on less
than a piece of paper from Microsoft authorizing me to
depress myself by using their software! My Dell Mini came with Windows preinstalled, and cost only $255 from the Dell refurbished online store... of course the very first thing I did after taking delivery was reformat the disk and install a nicer OS. :-(

>> Do they also have similar trials for MSVC?
> 
> There is "free" MSVC ("Visual Studio Express" in Google) available. It is really intended for .net/C# developers, but by following instructions on the net and adding downloadable "free" SDKs (requires manually editing some configuration files), one can create a Visual Studio capable of building C and C++ code without spending any money.

Thanks for the tip, I'll look into that :-)

>> Any idea what the least painful version of Windows for a VM is these days
>> (I'm guessing XP is still the best)?
> 
> Windows 7 runs very well in VirtualBox.  My wife has been running Windows 7 in VirtualBox running on Ubuntu for almost a year now.  I wouldn't recommend that anyone start with XP these days since it is 12 years old, patched beyond all repair, and quickly becoming defunct.

Apart from the number of years you quoted, isn't that true of every version of Windows? I think I might go with XP despite your advice though, as I notice that one of the stickers glued to my Dell Mini is an XP license number, although curiously I didn't get any reinstall media with the netbook - not that it contains a CD drive to reinstall from. I can probably find an XP disc at one of the street vendor stalls in the center of town for a couple of dollars though.

I will try to install it directly in Parallels, rather than in Virtual Box on GNU/Linux in Parallels on Mac OS, and then type in the number from the sticker on my netbook... and then I'll have to learn how to install mingw and MSYS.

> It is good that you are willing to suffer for the cause.  The cmake build system is quickly becoming popular since it works well for Windows and it is a threat to the GNU build system (as we know it).


We might have better staying power if the Autotools shipped together as a single project, and the integration was tight enough not to need a bootstrap script just to get things going...

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)