PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

after 5 years of good services (like the ability to drive 30 asio tracks in sfp) , the hd on my sony vgn-a617b died like a dog pulling way too much on a steel choker
the thing was wired to a magma box holding 2 pulsar 2 cards
what to do? the battery is dead, it only has 1 gig of ram and the stuff is fairly outdated. what about getting a new one, apart from the burden of spending a week of research and find one that has texas instrument chipsets and whatever it takes to be comfortable about the idea of building a decent daw on a laptop, along with its price tag
did that been there before
thing is, the crippled hosts TI chipsets across the board so
i decided to try a new hd on it, namely a seagate 250gb momentus 7200 rpm drive (the one which just dropped a pile of shit on the floor had a 5400rpm hitachi(e))
installed fedora 12 and voilà, the thing is blazing fast despite its long beard and abundant fleas
faster than ever before
like 3 seconds to boot gimp
dual boot it with win 7, why not?
what else?
SC doesn't have linux drivers, but i've seen m$ office and enterprise architect install and run flawlessly on wine

so my question is, what about installing drivers on wine? is it worth testing SCs?
i'm into testing the thing right now so if anyone can steer me away from being such a fool, please state your advices
cheers

WINE just replaces the high level Windoze programming interface - it has no access to the hardware at all.
In fact it doesn't even know what hardware is ...
Your card(s) would be unknown, orphaned devices for the OS.
btw some years ago I stepped into the same trap with Virtual PC as it had this freakingly 'real' BIOS Screen...

cheers, Tom

oh, so wine is a virtual thing?
thanks astro

not exactly, it's rather 'real' - as the name implies: Wine_Is_Not an_Emulator
it's a kind of library that pretends to be M$ .dll stuff towards a Windows app.
I use a commercial version (Crossover, which is much easier to configure) under MacOSX with a Windows developement system and 99% of the generated code runs flawsless under OSX.
There are some inconveniences with character encoding and file system references, though.
Of course on a 2nd thought that's exactly what you would expect, but it's easily missed at first glance

But one can indeed develope a low level interface that's capable to map hardware in a similiar way the standard Windows calls are handled by WINE.
Some (standard) USB devices are managed this way in WINE already.
The implementation has to be done under the native OS, though - almost identical to the frequently requested Linux (or OSX) driver.
Not sure if there's any advantage in the procedure.
The GUI stuff is much more demanding as WINE preferably fails in this domain, if at all.
Probably due to the Windoze way of doing things

cheers, Tom

ok, makes sense
i'll have to drag a dual boot solution then
arf, 250 gb for 46€ won't leave me out of disk space

you were right, from http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-c9e6502 ... 757a6738e3 :

"3.5. Can I use Wine to install drivers for my hardware?

No. With the possible future exception of some printer drivers, Wine requires your hardware to already be working on your operating system. The technical reason for this is that Wine, like most applications, runs in user mode and not kernel mode."

what about ndiswrapping the SC drivers? arf, sorry ndiswrapper is for network devices....

ah well farkit then