Some good news to report: I have the IAR Embedded Workbench -- a software development platform for the MSP430 microprocessor -- running on Linux. Twice!

The developers at IAR who created this software deserve kudos, because as far as I can tell, this Windows application runs perfectly under Wine (with one limitation, below). I had actually installed Embedded Workbench under my previous Linux distribution, by using the Wine Configuration application to launch the IAR .exe file. Accepting all defaults, it installed easily, with the only hiccup being that it was unable to show the release notes.

When I moved my home directory over to the new Debian system, Wine found and used that previously installed software. Presto!

There is, however, one crucial limitation: like many such development suites, IAR uses the parallel port in a somewhat nonstandard fashion to download software to the attached microcontroller board. This function did not work. Wine does not provide direct access to the parallel port -- you can use parallel printers, but only by using their Linux drivers.

EZ-Logic is a very old (Windows 3.1 vintage) Computer-Aided-Design program which does electronic schematics and printed circuit boards. I've done a few boards with this, and would like to access my old files. And, since an up-to-date commercial replacement [1] would set me back a pretty penny, and the open-source equivalents are not yet sufficiently capable [2], I'd like to see if I can keep using this.

One of the nice features of this package is that it's simply a set of Windows executable files; no special installation is required.

Scdbackup, fixed. You may recall that my reinstallation of scdbackup split my files strangely over multiple DVDs. It turns out that there are two "magic numbers" used by sdvdbackup_afio. The first, sdvdbackup_max_size_value, is used by the backup planner to decide how many megabytes' worth of files to put on the first disk. The second, sdvdbackup_media_cap_value, specifies to the archive program afio how many bytes will fit on a DVD-R. For a normal single layer DVD this is 4480 MB (4.7 GB).

Because afio will add some overhead, the first number must be smaller than the second. The default for the first was 4250 MB, which caused the second limit to be exceeded by 68 MB. So it wrote a whole new DVD to save 68 MB. I've reduced the first limit to 4150 MB. In the directory scdbackup-0.8.8/conf/, I issued the command

and now it splits DVDs efficiently.

Printer sharing. This has been something of a chore. In my previous distro (Xandros) I was able to share a printer by simply right-clicking on it in the file manager and enabling sharing. Likewise for folders. Samba (for Windows networking) was already configured, and the PC was visible on the network. But when I tried to share my printers and folders from Debian Linux, they did not appear on the network.

I've always liked Kate, the K Advanced Text Editor (part of the KDE project), except for one extremely annoying detail. I work with both Linux and Windows/DOS text files, and the two systems have different end-of-line conventions (LF and CR/LF, respectively). And while Kate would let you specify which to use, it wouldn't deduce that preference when it opened an existing file. So every time I opened a Windows/DOS file with Kate, I had to remember to click Tools > End of Line > Windows/DOS, or it would save the file in Linux format and screw up the Windows application. I'd usually forget this, and then I'd have to go back later and fix the file I edited.

I'm happy to report that Kate version 2.5.5, which came with my new Debian installation, now handles Windows/DOS files automatically. Hooray! A tip of the hat to the development team for making Kate so much easier to use.

My early tests have already revealed that some of my Windows applications aren't going to run under either Wine or CrossOver. Since I don't want to dual-boot Windows and Linux on the same computer, that means I'm going to have to install some version of Windows to run under Linux. And for me that means using Win4Lin, VirtualBox, or VMware. I may also download a trial version of Parallels Workstation (normally $50).

Like many unfortunates, I find myself in the position of needing to run software that is only available for Windows. There are many ways to do this. Previously I have used Win4Lin 9x and CodeWeavers' Crossover; now, with a freshly installed Debian Linux, I'm going to try a few other alternatives.

My requirements are a bit peculiar, because the main reason I need to run Windows software is to develop software for microcontrollers. These are the really small computers that live inside your car, your microwave oven, and such. Unlike PCs and Macs, the market for microcontroller development tools is small, so many vendors only release one version...for Windows.

However, I'm not the only one in this predicament. Recently, for example, I heard from someone who would like to switch to Linux, but has years' worth of Pagemaker files which can't be abandoned. Pagemaker is not a "fringe" application.

So, to try different techniques, here are the applications I will attempt to run on my Linux desktop:

I've been using Debian for three weeks now. I'm still getting everything set up the way I like it, with the same applications and utilities. And I'm finding a few small bumps in the road.

Kprinter. One reason I like the KDE desktop is the excellent "K" utilities, like Kprinter. But every time I tried to run kprinter I got the message 'Library files for "kdeprint_aps.la" not found in paths.' Searching for "kprinter kdeprint_aps.la" on Google took me to, of all places, the Xandros Linux forum, where I found someone with the identical problem. The solution is "...go to the Control Center, Peripherals, Printers. Click thru the error messages. Change the print subsystem to CUPS at the bottom right. You need to do this for every user." Oddly, the print subsystem was already set to CUPS. So I said what the hell, clicked on it, and re-selected CUPS. That fixed the problem! (I guess something is a bit odd in the default setup.)

Scdbackup. This is the backup program that I have been using for the last nine months to back up my hard drive to DVD-Rs. To get this to run under Debian, I had to repeat the installation procedure from the very first step. And then I discovered that it needs several library files like "stdio.h" and "stdlib.h" in order to install. My previous distro had these in /usr/include, but the standard Debian install did not. At first I tried installing linux-headers from the repository

and when that didn't work I tried the kernel source

and that didn't work either. Finally, Googling the words "stdio.h debian package" told me that I needed to install the libc6-dev package:

(although I actually used Synaptic, rather than apt-get, to install this). Now it seems to work, except that it wants to divide the backup into 4.7 GB chunks, but genisoimage afio only writes 4.48 GB to the DVD-R, and then prompts for a new disk. Well, I'm sure that's a configuration option somewhere.

Daily backup. This was easy. I simply had to copy my old daily "rsync" backup script to the new /root/bin directory, and then add the same line I used before to /etc/crontab:

to run the program every day at 12:05 pm.

I stumbled upon this the other day, while searching for open-source alternatives to Microsoft Outlook. Spicebird seems to be a Thunderbird derivative with more of the "organizer" bits that Outlook users expect:


One advantage of Spicebird is that it's available for Linux and Windows. The project is still in "beta" test stage, but I'm sure they'd welcome new users to provide feedback.

Linux users have the well-established Evolution as another alternative to Outlook. There have been several projects to port Evolution to Windows, of which the most successful appears to be here.

I've been wanting to compile a list like this for some time, so it's with a sigh of relief that I tip my hat to David Williams of ITWire, for "The complete Christmas shopper's guide to Linux-based netbooks." (The list is on page 3.)

There are thirty-nine models listed! Linux is really making an impact in the "subnotebook" or "netbook" market. I've only seen a few of these, and I haven't evaluated any of them. I do know that the keyboard on the Asus EeePC is a bit small for my fat fingers; the Acer Aspire One that I saw seemed to be a better fit for my hands. Not that I'm planning to buy one anytime soon. (But you never know when some Goodbye, Microsoft reader will want to send a Christmas gift.)

Glyn Moody on the Computerworld UK blog observes that consumers and businesses are buying used computers with Windows XP, rather than new computers with Vista:


Update: Even Business Week has picked up on this trend.