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Windows 8 Consumer Preview edition

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview edition was out Feb 29th. I've downloaded it in ISO image form from here. I have tried installing it in vmware player virtual machine a couple of times, but I have not been successful yet (had an error message when scanning for devices, and haven't really had the time to look at it further since).

Update: I have successfully installed it on a leftover acer PC with quadCPU, 4GB RAM, and 2x 500GB drives. Runs quite well with essentially no complaints.

At first glance, it looks pretty good. I look forward to trying it a good thorough try. I like the look of Metro, but they need to have right-click do something intelligent in it, if it's ever going to be used for anything real.

Anyway, let's hope that in the great rush to send everyone into mobile mode using cordoned-off App world with limited freedom, our industry doesn't lose sight of the fact that many of us still want (nay, need) to really use our machine every once in a while.

/software | Posted at 21:58 | permanent link

Using virtual machines at home

I have been architecting, recommending, and specifying the use of irtual machines at work for years, but I had never really used them seriously at home yet until recently. I had looked into using either Parallels or Fusion on my Macs to run Windows seamlessly, but in the end had always reverted to just using Apple's bootcamp, which always did the job for what I needed (except for the @!$&#^!%# graphics drivers in bootcamp which never seemed to be up to snuff).

However, given my recent purchase of a decent PC, I looked into the possibility of running FreeBSD in a virtual machine to take advantage of the CPU speed and sizable RAM to compile kernels for some of my smaller machines faster (running a whole buildkernel buildworld installkernel installworld cycle on a Soekris net4801 takes over 24 hrs which isn't fun).

I investigated various options, but it turns out that the best/most convenient is to run the vmware player under Windows 7 on my PC... using that, I can install FreeBSD 9 in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode, and just "play" whichever version of FreeBSD I need to run tests (or compilations) in a window. There is something inherently fun in having FreeBSD boot and discover the hardware of the virtual machine. Quite useful, quite powerful... just fascinating.

Of course, we are living in a world where one can run a full PC emulator written in javascript in a browser, and boot linux onto it, as I have blogged about recently here. The IT world is fascinating: every 5 years we reinvent the impossible.

/software | Posted at 01:03 | permanent link

Compilers in the Open Source world

When Gnu started, way back, one of the first bricks to be laid out in the open source building, was the gcc compiler. Okay, first there was emacs, but that was always a bit of a peculiar animal (to this day, I will sometimes use alternatives such as Gnu Zile instead of plain old emacs).

So, gcc was one of the first bricks that led the open source edifice to be built: compilers were always expensive and complicated software packages before that, but then suddenly, one could compile C code freely, and the compiler wasn't too shabby either: being developed by a large group of individuals from industry and academia, it produced very decent code and its optimizer generated pretty fast code too! (I remember using gcc on a project in 1990 because the code it generated on our project under ultrix ran quite a bit faster than the code generated by the native ultrix compiler).

So it's a bit strange these days to see that there are a number of alternative compilers being used by my favorite open source projects (notably FreeBSD): the old pcc is back, and FreeBSD seems to favour the clang compiler (see also this comparison).

Of course, there's also the question of which language to code in: C, C++ (there's a new 2011 flavour of that), Objective C (hey, isn't everyone doing an iPhone app these days? :-), Java, Scheme, python, Ruby, or any number of weird and wonderful languages. Even 'lowly' Javascript is geting quite powerful... Fabrice Bellard has written a PC emulator in it that's powerful enough to run linux in your browser!

Anyway, lots of possibilities. Just have fun coding!

Update: take a look at the TIOBE Programming Community Index of language popularity.

/software | Posted at 01:06 | permanent link