The 2008 Linux and Free Software Timeline

diegocgteleline.es writes "Here is LWN's eleventh annual timeline of significant events in the Linux and free software world for the year. As always, 2008 proved to be an interesting year, with great progress in useful software that made our systems better. Of course, there were some of the usual conflicts — patent woes, project politics, and arguments over freedom — but overall, the pace of free software progress stayed on its upwardly increasing trend. 2008 was a year that saw the end of SCO — or not — the rise of Linux-based 'netbooks,' multiple excellent distribution releases, more phones and embedded devices based on Linux, as well as major releases of software we will be using for years (X.org, Python, KDE, ...)."

Re:linux kernel: a year of standing still?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_24 [kernelnewbies.org]
http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_25 [kernelnewbies.org]
http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_26 [kernelnewbies.org]
http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_27 [kernelnewbies.org]
http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_28 [kernelnewbies.org]

Those are the 2008 kernel releases. They look exciting to me...

Re:2009

[w0mprat]

KDE4 and Win7 are only superficially similar in looks. There are similarities, but not enough to even justify the implication that someone copied someone of course.

Both seemed to have drawn ideas by looking at the popular themes from the OS skinning community associated with each interfaces. It's a shame that this wasn't done back in the Win9x+WindowsBlinds days when Microsoft thought Luna would impress everyone.

Re:most exciting thing for me: Wine 1.0

[Hatta]

And yet, bug 6971 [winehq.org] is still outstanding. It's the second highest voted bug on their bugzilla, and it's been open since 2006. They call it a "normal" severity bug, yet it clearly meets the definition for a "major" severity bug. That is: "Major loss of functionality for a wide range of applications." Just about every Unreal engine game is unplayable because of this bug. It was supposed to be fixed for 1.0, but it keeps getting deferred. I don't see why this isn't a higher priority for them. It obviously affects a lot of users, just look at all the duplicate bug reports for this one!

Re:linux kernel: a year of standing still?

[ianare]

The Linux code base has done anything but stall, it is growing, and has been growing even more rapidly in the last couple years.
looky here [wordpress.com]

As far as quality of code, good news there as well, 2008 saw some nice updates to kernel scheduling, better virtualization, a completely new kernel-level graphic manager, and the EXT4 filesystem. These are all 'big deals' in both difficulty of coding and improvements they bring.

Re:linux kernel: a year of standing still?

[David Gerard]

Ticklessness is very interesting to me, because it's why I get 3.5 hours' battery life in Linux on the same laptop that gets 2 hours booted into Windows.

Re:2009

[SombreReptile]

It is in Vietnam!

Re:2009

[LingNoi]

There are plenty of good reasons why cross platform is an impossibility right now. One is that major game developers have already invested in making a game engine which relies heavily in windows API calls. Oblivion's Engine was used in Fallout 3. Valve has spent millions on their Source engine which they license to other game companies.

From your post I can see you either haven't used wine for a long time or invested any real time in learning how to use it.

emulation just doesn't work as well as running native code

This is just simply wrong. WINE doesn't emulate anything. The very name WINE stands for "Wine is not an emulator".

What wine does is redirect API calls so that windows programs run.

If for example your windows program calls a d3d9 function example(x,y,z) then all wine does is implement this function as so..

HRESULT WINAPI example(x, y, z) {
(do whatever this function does on windows via linux libraries)
return WHATEVER;
}

There's no emulation (in the virtual machine sense) going on at all, it's all API redirections.

Yes, "calc" probably runs very well under WINE

I don't know about that but users of Fallout 3, Left4Dead have no problems running wine. In fact if you visited wines appdb there's a whole load of games which run.

Fallout 3, Team Fortress, WoW, are all marked as Gold.

The majority of games (especially anything DX10, I'd bet) DON'T, or don't very well.

Like I said earlier they do, so you're just lying about the majority of games not working. There are no games that I know of apart from 2 (both microsoft games) which are DX10 only and I very much doubt there will be any outside of Microsoft which are for a very long time. When that time comes DX10 will probably be almost finished in wine.

DX10 support in wine is already progressing. If you download the latest version of wine you'll see implementations of D3D10 already there, however a lot of the functions are stubbed.

I don't quite understand how you got to that reasoning however like the rest of your post, it is all based on false assumptions.

Re:2009

[LingNoi]

It's nice, and all, that you found a few games marked as "Gold" -- strange, however, that you decided not to mention any of the games I specifically named.

I didn't realise I had to however ok..

Age of Empires 3 - Gold rating [winehq.org]
D&D Online - Platinum rating [winehq.org]

I think I'll stick to the information I've received from the CGA club on campus

Blind leading the blind. Good luck with that.