[Openicc] Drop size calibration

[Hal V. Engel]

On Tuesday 05 February 2008 00:53:43 edmund ronald wrote:
> Barbieri made an interesting response extending my VM suggestion, they
> said that the same VM trick might be used on *all* platforms
> (including Win, Mac) thereby ensuring that by using a single VM
> distribution *all* platforms are perfectly synchronized with respect
> to their instrument, and meaning they only have ONE set of drivers to
> write and validate. Gerhard made the same point earlier.
>
> As to Hal's justified concern about obsolescence, let me note that as
> long as the host VM emulator is updated the original "firmware" VM can
> still run on successor platforms. 

The concern about obsolescence is that the hardware vendor will stop 
supporting the solution.  This means that bugs are no longer fixed and new 
hardware becomes unsupported.  The VM is much less important in this regard 
since there are open source options that, if used, would eliminate this part 
of this solution as a consideration with respect to obsolescence and lack of 
vendor support.  In fact this does little to calm our fears about this issue 
since this situation is not very different from the vendor supplying system 
specific binary blobs since all this really does is makes it easier for the 
hardware vendor to support a binary only solution without addressing any of 
the open source communities concerns about a binary solution.

> I believe Virtual PC player is actually free software, solving this issue 
nicely.
>
> Edmund
>

Virtual PC only runs on top of Windows and only runs on top of x86 and x64 
hardware.  It can not be hosted on a Linux box and it can not run on SPARC, 
MIPS, Alpha, S390, PPC, PARisc ... hardware which are all supported by Linux, 
Unix and BSD operating systems.  So Virtual PC will not work as part of a 
general solution.  See the Virtual PC system requirements page for details:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/virtualpc/sysreq.mspx

And then there is this little gem from the overview page:

"Use virtual machines to run operating systems such as MS-DOS, Windows, and 
OS/2."

Notice that they do not list any *nix OS as being an option for a virtual 
machine.  If this is correct this means that users will need to pay for a 
license for a commercial OS to run this even if it worked on a *nix host.  
This is another no go.

Some of the realistic options are VMWare and QEMU and VMWare is not free for 
commercial users so this is probably out.  But it would be possible to use 
QEMU since it has a GPL license.   Unlike Virtual PC QEMU works on virtually 
every OS and has CPU emulation that works on virtually all hardware 
platforms.  There may be other options as well.   

Hal

> On Feb 5, 2008 6:53 AM, Hal V. Engel <hvengel at astound.net> wrote:
> > And this concern is very real.  Many Linux users have been burned by
> > hardware vendors who promised to provide drivers and either did not or
> > only provided binary blobs and then stopped supporting the hardware
> > leaving users who purchased thier hardware stuck with hardware that was
> > useless.  If you took a poll here perhaps 20% to 30% of us have had this
> > or something similar happen to us.