Ignalum Linux - A Bridge to Windows?

linux slacker writes "Ignalum Linux 'is an intuitive graphical environment that works right out of the box and offers unrivaled compatibility with Microsoft Windows' or so says their website. The company is owned by four university students in Ontario, and one of their goals is to allow companies to incorporate Linux into their Windows environment, so users could still run Word, Excel and other popular Microsoft fare."

Slashdotted already

[jimicus]

after less than a dozen comments. Google cache: http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:UpTSilLJE-MJ:ww w.ignalum.com/+ignalum+linux&hl=en Proudly karma whoring since 2003.

Current google cache link doesn't seem to work

[pcmanjon]

Current google cash posted above doesn't seem to work -- try this one instead people

http://66.102.9.104/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe =U TF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.ignalum.com%2F&btn G=Search

Win4Lin

[datan]

Personally, I use Win4Lin [netraverse.com]. It's runs windows as either a separate window or in full screen mode (think X Windows but running Windws). I sometimes like to run win4lin in full screen mode and confuse people since it's almost impossible to tell you're running it under linux until you try to do low-level stuff like configuring device drivers & network stuff. It's a really great product; but only runs Windows 98 (heard they're working on Win2K version), and doesn't do directx games. Other than that, everything works -- Microsoft Office, IE, Kazaa, chessmaster etc. I'll be happy to provide more details on request. Oh yes, I have no links to said company other than being a very satisfied customer.

Re:Ignalum Linux 9

[Darth Hubris]

They were Red Hat v1 through 8; this looks to be based on Red Hat 9.

Re:OS/2

[d99-sbr]

Yes, it was Win16. And yes, they did have the Windows source code to build it from. I believe this happened because of OS/2 originally being a joint IBM/MS venture.

As for the name, I never understood why they called it OS/2 _for_ Windows. It wasn't as if it ran on top of Windows, as many people seemed to believe. It simply had a nifty way of letting the Windows kernel run inside OS/2 and display windows as if they were native PM windows.

Re:On another note

[zz99]

I like the microsoft ads at the top of the slashdot page.

I click on it every day I see it.

I wish there were more ways of diverting funds from M$ to the community :)

Re:Winning the battle

[Mr_Silver]

In many companies, a much easier battle is to get the company to move, say, for Microsoft Outlook to Thunderbird

It is? Have you used Outlook in a corporate environment? Do you know what not only does it support email, but also a calendar, contacts, journal, notes and tasks? That you can book appointments and have it automatically send the requests to them, check availability and add it to their diary, review and manage other people's diaries, act as a delegate for sending mail on other peoples behalf, assign tasks to individuals and track their progress and 101 other things which I don't have the time to type in here right now?

Because, and without sounding harsh, if you did know all that, you'd realise that getting a company to migrate from Outlook to Thunderbird is nigh on impossible given the different feature sets of the two products.

Re:Another one

[stray]

no, as i read it, they say applications developed for THEIR engine will run on linux with opengl and on windows with direct x. from the article:

> The development of a Multi-Platform 3D Graphics
> Rendering Engine and the creation of a hardware
> accelerated Ignalum Linux OS based on OpenGL
> allows applications/games developed for the engine
> to run using OpenGL or DirectX

or do i miss their point?

Ninnle Linux already does this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ninnle has been doing this for some time now. This is nothing new.

Re:Questions to pose:

[eugene_roux]

1) Is Ignalum a source distribution, built from LFs, or an enhanced version of an existing distribution?

From the Google [66.102.9.104] cache of their (hopelessly slashdotted) site:

Updated ISO images of Ignalum Linux 9 Beta 2 are now publicly available on a number of FTP mirrors.

The Ignalum advanced Internet-sharing and IPv6-over-NAT capabilities are not included in this release, but will be incorporated into the next release of Ignalum Linux which will be based on the latest Fedora Core.

Looks like it's either a RedHat 9 or a Fedora hack...

Re:OS/2

[tiger99]

It was actually Win 3.1 applications, and yes, they did run very much better, and the OS did not fall over several times each day. The split between Bill and IBM happened before Windoze 95.

The only thing that I remember as being wrong with OS/2 was the installation, at a time when few people had a CD drive, I think there must have been nearly 50 floppies in the box. Admittedly a few of them were not needed every time, but...... Yet the installed system ran beautifully on a 486DX33 with 16MB RAM, and 340MB HDD (SCSI, which Windoze does not handle very well). WordPerfect ran perfectly, also lots of DOS programs, in fact the claim that it was a better DOS than DOS was certainly true.

Sad that it failed as a result of deceptive tactics by the Monopolist, not for any technical reason. And, of course, the Monopolist got a licence fee, rumoured to be about $20, for the Windoze content, for every copy sold.

This is classic!

[Gleng]

" ... Based on his belief in Linux, Daniel founded Ignalum Software, Inc. in 2002 and created the Ignalum Linux OS, when it became clear that without some of his input making its way into mainstream Linux, Linux will likely continue to suffer as a high maintainence Operating System."

Hahaha! Cheers mate! There was me slaving over a hot server, and your mainstream Linux input has made things so much more low-maintainence!

Good luck with the slashdotting :)

THEY ARE NOT DOWN -THEY BLOCKED /.

[lcsjk]

Go to www.ignalum.com but not through the /. link.

Re:Unfortunately

[Mr.Ned]

I call bullshit. The user in OS X doesn't run as root, and no one calls that 'unusable' or 'hard'.

Importing from Outlook

[paulproteus]

Outlook:

In Linux, you can use the program "readpst" provided by libpst, libpst.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]

In Windows, Mozilla Mail will import it (through the OLE interface), and Mozilla Mail's mailboxes are in standard MBOX format. Everyone in UNIX, and many many Windows programs, can import MBOX.

Re:Or...

[jdavidb]

Actually I've suffered through said migration, and I'm happy to say that the non-technical users were not happy with the change; they much preferred UNIX.