5.1 Merge window part 1

Posted Mar 18, 2019 16:55 UTC (Mon) by deater (subscriber, #11746)
In reply to: 5.1 Merge window part 1 by dvdeug
Parent article: 5.1 Merge window part 1

> In any case, proprietary code has been rare on Linux, and
> definitely pre-1995.

Not necessarily true. A lot of software back then depended on the Motif gui library, so even nominally free software ended up being statically linked against that.

I know I had an a.out "xmcd" binary that I used for many many years after the ELF transition, though I do admit I no longer run a.out files on a regular basis (though I do regularly run binary-only software written in the 1980s, just not on Linux).

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5.1 Merge window part 1

Posted Mar 19, 2019 8:33 UTC (Tue) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] (1 responses)

Wow, https://www.amb.org/xmcd/ is still up and that page is a blast from the past. Last change was in 2004, so you might be able to compile a new version, but I don't know how well it would work with PulseAudio.

Hopefully current virtual machines would handle the need for running Motif-linked binaries. It seems unlikely a GUI program would need the blistering speed of native hardware, and the more complex library-wise you get, the more headaches you get trying to install that on a modern system.

5.1 Merge window part 1

Posted Mar 26, 2019 13:12 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The painful part might be actually accessing a CD drive from inside the VM. Even with various forms of USB and ATA passthrough, in my experience it's still a toss-up whether that sort of thing works or causes an obscure and ridiculous error or even crashes the host (not with USB, but ATA/PCI passthrough is evil).