A is for awk, which runs like a snail, and
B is for biff, which reads all your mail.
C is for cc, as hackers recall, while
D is for dd, the command that does all.
E is for emacs, which rebinds your keys, and
F is for fsck, which rebuilds your trees.
G is for grep, a clever detective, while
H is for halt, which may seem defective.
I is for indent, which rarely amuses, and
J is for join, which nobody uses.
K is for kill, which makes you the boss, while
L is for lex, which is missing from DOS.
M is for more, from which less was begot, and
N is for nice, which it really is not.
O is for od, which prints out things nice, while
P is for passwd, which reads in strings twice.
Q is for quota, a Berkeley-type fable, and
R is for ranlib, for sorting ar table.
S is for spell, which attempts to belittle, while
T is for true, which does very little.
U is for uniq, which is used after sort, and
V is for vi, which is hard to abort.
W is for whoami, which tells you your name, while
X is, well, X, of dubious fame.
Y is for yes, which makes an impression, and
Z is for zcat, which handles compression.
— THE ABC’S OF UNIX

This is because of the very stupid way they package the program: To install you download an EXE which downloads an MSI installer, which the setup program then runs. This is fine, except that setup won’t download the installer Wine. If you download and install the MSI manually, you get a message that says “You can only install this software through the setup.exe program”. Even after using Orca to attempt to edit the MSI file all I had was a corrupt MSI file.)

True, I probably could have copied the files over manually and then mucked around in the registry, but I didn’t do it. I also wanted to be able to run Delphi “on Linux” so that I could fix bugs in QuickI (the invoicing program we use)–and believe me, it has bugs. Apparently you can run Delphi 6/7 through Wine, but it doesn’t work too well (e.g., debug features don’t work, when you hit compile and run, the program compiles but doesn’t run, and other random stuff like this.).

This didn’t really appeal to me, so I tried the trial version of Win4Lin Pro. This program allows you to run Windows NT, 2000, and XP Service Packs 1 and 2 on Linux. This version doesn’t require you to patch your kernel, so I thought I would try it and see how it worked. I downloaded the RPM and used rpm2tgz to convert the RPM to a Slackware TGZ package. It installed fine and I ran the setup program. After taking about 2.5 hours to install, I booted up Windows 2000 on my Slackware 10.1 computer. It was terribly slow–unusable, in fact. Apparently you can use KQEMU to make it faster, but I didn’t bother.

I removed Win4Lin Pro and decided to try Win4Lin 9x. The core of this version is an implementation of DOS which any DOS based version of Windows (Windows 3.x, 95, 98 and ME) can run on top of. It also requires that you apply some patches to your kernel, which I did. After that, the install was very easy and took only about 45 minutes to go from nothing to an running Firefox installation on Windows 98 (minus the time it took to compile my kernel 3 times :)). All I can really say is that Win4Lin really rocked–I bought it the next day. Currently I have Delphi 6 and the USPS Shipping Assistant installed. I hacked on QuickI last night, and found it a pretty easy environment to work under.

There are two different version of Win4Lin 9x–Home and and 9x. The “Home” version limits memory consumption to 64MB (instead of the 128 which is the max) along with a few other limitations (see here). If you’re a cheapskate, then check it out (only $30.00 compared to $90.00 for 9x). I can’t vouch for the Home edition as I didn’t try it, but I’m sure that it would probably work pretty well given the fact that a top-of-the-line computer had 128MB in 1998.

Sooo…if you are tired of using Wine (or CrossOver, which also rocks–and which I have bought as well), then try Win4Lin–it’s cool!

Also, you may enjoy the Ten Top Words that are Not in the Dictionary–I did.

Quote of the day:

“That young girl [Trillian]”, he [Marvin] added unexpectedly, “is one of the least benightedly unintelligent life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.”

Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” — Theodore Roosevelt

How true, how true.

“It’s terrible,” De Raadt says. “Everyone is using it, and they don’t realize how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, ‘This is garbage and we should fix it.’”

And…the quote of the day (from the same article):

BSD guys make fun of Linux on message boards and Web sites, the gist being that BSD guys are a lot like Linux guys, except they have kissed girls.

For those of you who don’t know, XSLT rocks. I’ve just finished 2 XSL style sheets. The first one was for Luau files (example here), and the other was a template to transform the FreeDesktop.org mime-type spec (which is XML) into the KDE implementation (which is INI-file based). It was really very easy–cool!

Oh, and I’m home. Yay! It was a fun trip, but 21 days in a white mini-van is pretty long–in other words, I was glad to be home.

If A equals success, then the formula is A = X + Y + Z. X is work. Y
is play. Z is keep your mouth shut.
— Albert Einstein