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September 05, 2004
Dosemu
C|Net appears to have run yet another story Friday about Linux posing a threat to Microsoft. It's not clear how Linux poses a serious threat to Microsoft. Perhaps if you run a monopoly you need to pretend you're in danger from the competition. The more your friends in the media publish the story, the more true it sounds to people who only have a dim understanding of what's going on.
It's kind of like the folks in Washington saying the US is in danger of being invaded by Iraq, and the press falling into line. Or I take that back. Microsoft will probably stop short of dropping huge bombs approximately on people who write open source software.
Anyway, we still have two systems running Windows. Tim has the old Pentium 100 based PC running Windows 95. And I have an old Vaio laptop running Windows 98, because I was too lazy one afternoon to figure out whether Sun's Java Desktop System includes support for Sony compatible memory sticks. It probably does, but I had a couple of photos to upload, and took the easy route of reinstalling the laptop from the boot CDs. I figured certainly Sony would support the memory stick, and they do. It's kind of a drag to have the system crash on boot about 1/3 of the time, but I only use it every other week.
Tim occasionally runs Windows 95 to play games. His games include Adibou and Tibili. Under Linux, he also likes to play a Quake demo we downloaded, but that one would never run on the old system anyway.
Emma's computing is system independent. She plays Flashware at Barbie.com, and that's it for now.
Beyond the drivers for handling the memory stick, I have one lingering possible use for Windows, that of opening some old Cakewalk for Windows files I created in 1996. Any time I get nostalgic, I can use dosemu to play old shareware, like Duke Nukem 3D.
Interestingly Duke3D works better in dosemu than it ever did on my on the PC Tim now has. It even runs in 800x600 instead of 320x200. I wonder if somebody has updated that one to run it on a more recent underlying platform. Quake is humorless by comparison.
Posted by Mark at September 5, 2004 06:12 PM