[Openicc] Drop size calibration

[edmund ronald]

On Feb 5, 2008 7:42 PM, Hal V. Engel <hvengel at astound.net> wrote:

I'm genuinely sorry I talked about Virtual PC, I meant VMWare or QEMU
of course ! Something that is open-sourced, documented and maintained
as part of current distributions. It doesn't have to be particularly
fast, either.

As for Hal's concerns about obsolescence, frankly if the virtual
machine is supported by the manufacturer as part of the instrument
hardware, and the manufacturer supports the main Linux distributions
for five years or so, then I'm not more afraid of the virtual machine
ceasing to run than of the hardware itself failing and being
unrepairable. An instrument is an instrument, it spits out values and
I don't expect to user-upgrade it. My cameras have embedded OS es
too,but I really don't care what they are as long as they communicate
with me by means of image files. It's the responsibility of Canon or
Nikon to ensure my camera focuses accurately - I don't expect to
involve open source maintainers in this.


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.
>