I have four legacy suites of map software (Garmin and three others that I care less about) and four different GPSs (all Garmin), with a dozen years' accumulation of waypoints, routes, etc.
Wine under Fedora usually (not always, for some reason) lets me install and run the Garmin suite and one other; but it does not enable the software to talk to the GPSs (which all use a serial port -- and no serial/USB adapter I know of helps).
I've looked, every couple of years, at various linux-native map software, and always found a learning curve that would be beyond whatever life and strength I may have left -- even if I were sure it could digest my legacy data.
So, afaict, the alternative is to install a virtual M$ under one of the virtualization packages, and run my legacy software under that. It will almost never get a connection to the Net, other than updates from Garmin.
Has anyone here done this? Is one package more user-friendly than another? The last time I looked at one, two or three years ago (and I disremember which), it had a learning curve as daunting as linux-native map software ....
Is there a pons asinorum for such a project anywhere??
On Thu, 21 Apr 2011 16:15:20 +0000 (UTC) BeartoothHOS wrote:
So, afaict, the alternative is to install a virtual M$ under one of the virtualization packages, and run my legacy software under that. It will almost never get a connection to the Net, other than updates from Garmin.
If you need the virtual machine to talk to a physical device (like via USB), I have heard that virtualbox is better at that than most other packages (though I have never tried it myself - I have tried connecting a USB printer to a KVM virtual machine just for grins, and it made the windows KVM bluescreen, so that didn't work at all).
On Thu, 2011-04-21 at 12:37 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
On Thu, 21 Apr 2011 16:15:20 +0000 (UTC) BeartoothHOS wrote:
So, afaict, the alternative is to install a virtual M$ under one of the virtualization packages, and run my legacy software under that. It will almost never get a connection to the Net, other than updates from Garmin.
If you need the virtual machine to talk to a physical device (like via USB), I have heard that virtualbox is better at that than most other packages (though I have never tried it myself - I have tried connecting a USB printer to a KVM virtual machine just for grins, and it made the windows KVM bluescreen, so that didn't work at all).
VirtualBox is fine. Note that for USB access you need the non-free version. It's easy to set up and I use it to sync and update my iPhone.
poc
On Thu, 2011-04-21 at 16:15 +0000, BeartoothHOS wrote:
and no serial/USB adapter I know of helps
Tangential question: Is via USB the only way you can add a serial port?
On Fri, 22 Apr 2011 06:57:57 +0930, Tim wrote:
On Thu, 2011-04-21 at 16:15 +0000, BeartoothHOS wrote:
and no serial/USB adapter I know of helps
Tangential question: Is via USB the only way you can add a serial port?
I'm not sure I understand the question -- perhaps because I don't speak hardware.
All my PCs in recent years have been assembled by friends to suit my usage. So they all have actual serial ports. But I've only managed once, even so, to establish connections -- for a month or so.
At that point, thinking the last barrier surmounted, I gleefully cleansed the house of the XP installs on separate hard drives to which I had been dual-booting. And then, as Murphy would have it, the capability evaporated, and has yet to be restored.
Users and developers of Wine/CXO seem almost all to want to run games a/o office software; hunters, fisherfolk, et hoc genus omne are all but unrepresented -- while cartographers, wardrivers, et al. stick to linux-native map software, all of which has invariably required a learning curve unimaginable to those advanced enough to write it.
I perceive a consensus, among Alpha Plus Technoids of my acquaintance, that virtualization beats dual-booting; so I'm trying to tackle that ....
Tim:
Tangential question: Is via USB the only way you can add a serial port?
Beartooth:
I'm not sure I understand the question -- perhaps because I don't speak hardware.
Well, on a computer without any real serial ports, there's several potential ways to add them:
On a laptop, you have adaptors that connect via the USB ports, or the PCMCIA card slot, or express card slots.
On a desktop box, the obvious routes are serial port cards plugged into PCI or ISA slots (ISA on very old PCs).
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Beartooth -
Patrick O'Callaghan -
Tim -
Tom Horsley