Tom Ring wrote:

Hint hint Roy. There are a lot of us out here that use only, or almost
only, Linux.

The "lot" comprises about 5% of the total market at the outside. Are you
willing to pay 20 times as much for EZNEC as Windows users?

That being said, is anyone running EZNEC under WINE?

At last report, EZNEC won't run under Wine. Wine malfunctions a couple
of places when attempting to run EZNEC, although I think I could
probably work around them. (Of course, there's always the danger that an
update or upgrade would break the program again, since there's no way I
know of to find out which Windows functions Wine emulates correctly and
which it doesn't.) I won't, however, make any attempt to work around the
Wine problems until Wine is able to open the manual, which it is wasn't
able to do at the last report I got. The manual was created with
RoboHelp, a popular help authoring tool, and there isn't any way for me
to work around Wine's inability to read it. If and when anyone reports
that Wine has advanced to where it's able to open the manual (EZW4.hlp),
I'll look again at the possibility of finding workarounds to Wine's
other problems with EZNEC.

EZNEC works fine under at least one Mac emulator, SoftWindows.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

Roy Lewallen wrote:

Tom Ring wrote:


Hint hint Roy. There are a lot of us out here that use only, or
almost only, Linux.


The "lot" comprises about 5% of the total market at the outside. Are you
willing to pay 20 times as much for EZNEC as Windows users?


I would gladly pay double without a blink, and I doubt that it would be
that much work, in the long run, to make a Linux version. Your SW and
your call obviously, but you are making a very wrong assumption that
porting a version that runs under a different OS takes nearly the same
development effort.

I would gladly assist in making it work. I have no idea what language
it is written in, but as long as it is not in something MS specific it
shouldn't be that hard to port.

tom
K0TAR

Tom Ring wrote:

I would gladly pay double without a blink, and I doubt that it would be
that much work, in the long run, to make a Linux version. Your SW and
your call obviously, but you are making a very wrong assumption that
porting a version that runs under a different OS takes nearly the same
development effort.

I would gladly assist in making it work. I have no idea what language
it is written in, but as long as it is not in something MS specific it
shouldn't be that hard to port.

*Sigh*. I get this a lot.

The main program, 70,000 lines of code at last count, is in Visual Basic
6 and incorporates many direct calls to the Windows API for speed and
increased functionality. The calculating engines (a few tens of
thousands of lines of code) and some main program routines are in
Fortran, and make use of commercial math libraries for fast calculation
of some complex functions. The Fortran routines also make a limited
number of Windows API calls.

The port of a functioning EZNEC program from DOS to Windows, back when
EZNEC was somewhat smaller, took me about two years of full time work.
After some short experiments with VB.NET, it looks like a port to that
(Windows) language probably would take something like six months, plus
an unknown amount of time to find and solve the huge number of subtle
bugs caused by the port. But not only would the user not gain anything,
there would actually be a negative impact, so I don't plan on doing it.
Converting to a C Windows program would probably be a one or two year
project. That might make it easier, although by no means simple, to port
to Linux, but would be of no benefit to Windows users so the Linux
market would have to pay for the effort. Sorry, you'd need to pay a lot
more than twice the current price. (I happily run my EZNEC business for
a fraction of what I can make doing consulting, but I don't work for
nothing. Contrary to what seems like a common perception, I'm not
retired but earn my living from EZNEC and consulting.)

I encourage anyone who thinks it's a simple matter to develop a Linux
program of the level of EZNEC to have at it. It's an untapped market.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

Roy Lewallen wrote:

I encourage anyone who thinks it's a simple matter to develop a Linux
program of the level of EZNEC to have at it. It's an untapped market.

And it points out that when people look into buying a computer or
operating system, they should pick what tools (software) they want to
run, and build their system around that. Most people buy a computer or
install an OS, then want vendors to write for that.

I'm coming in a little late on this discussion, has EZNEC been tried on
the Intel based Mac's running windoze?

- 73 de Mike KB3EIA -

Roy Lewallen wrote:


I encourage anyone who thinks it's a simple matter to develop a Linux
program of the level of EZNEC to have at it. It's an untapped market.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

Sorry, I didn't know it was in VB. I can understand how that makes it
nearly impossible as I have worked where we had to do what you did going
from DOS basic to Windows VB. I was hoping it was in something like C.

I know what it's like to have an outsider ask you to port something
that's large and then be surprised when told how long it would take.
Ericsson was a bit miffed at me when told how long to port my US
(Honeywell) version of the MD110 PBX database regenerator to an
international version, and mine was all text based C.

Thanks for the response Roy.

tom
K0TAR

I'd like to add a question.

Why, instead of trying to get the Windows program developers to spend
countless hours developing programs for the minuscule Linux market,
don't the Linux users spend a little time getting Wine to work properly?
If it seems to simple to port programs to Linux, why is it so hard to
get open-source Wine to work?

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

Roy Lewallen wrote:
I'd like to add a question.

Why, instead of trying to get the Windows program developers to spend
countless hours developing programs for the minuscule Linux market,
don't the Linux users spend a little time getting Wine to work properly?
If it seems to simple to port programs to Linux, why is it so hard to
get open-source Wine to work?


I have a computer with Linux installed. Perhaps I is a dummy, but even
just installing programs, or searching for drivers is a nuisance. I'm
always told how such and such flavor of Linux doesn't have that problem,
but I'm on flavor number three, and still waiting for I don't have
enough experience in it to make a firm judgement, but I think we are
supposed to be happy if the operating system and hardware just works,
let alone the software.

Awaiting my one-way trip to Linux hell for what I just wrote....

- 73 de Mike KB3EIA -

On Sat, 04 Nov 2006 11:16:13 -0500, Mike Coslo
wrote:

Awaiting my one-way trip to Linux hell for what I just wrote....

Hi Mike,

Did you purchase your ticket through Red Hat or Suse's vendor support
for a fee? Or did you roll your own for free?

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC

Richard Clark wrote:
On Sat, 04 Nov 2006 11:16:13 -0500, Mike Coslo
wrote:


Awaiting my one-way trip to Linux hell for what I just wrote....


Hi Mike,

Did you purchase your ticket through Red Hat or Suse's vendor support
for a fee? Or did you roll your own for free?


Rolling my own here Richard. Started out with Turbolinux, then another
I'm afraid to say I forget the distro, and now have Fedora. I'm told
SuSE is wonderful - and I was told that of the other flavors too. So I'm
a little skeptical by now.

Problems have been with installing software, hardware incompatibility,
Internet connectivity - nothing like having to spend time looking for
drivers - going to bbs's - eventually I found out that my wireless card
simply wasn't supported AT ALL! That was special.

I'm still hoping to find a flavor of Linux that won't give me indigestion.

- 73 de Mike KB3EIA -

On Sat, 04 Nov 2006 13:28:47 -0500, Mike Coslo
wrote:

Rolling my own here Richard. Started out with Turbolinux, then another
I'm afraid to say I forget the distro, and now have Fedora. I'm told
SuSE is wonderful - and I was told that of the other flavors too. So I'm
a little skeptical by now.

Hi Mike,

I've traveled the same path over the years. About a year ago I wrote
a step-by-step guide for installing Fedora into a cold, bare machine.
I also wrote a step-by-step guide for building servers (Apache/MySQL
and the rest); and then followed up with a step-by-step guide for
specialized application servers, Wikis and CMS packages. Of late I
have also ventured into RubyOnRails with another a step-by-step guide.

Problems have been with installing software, hardware incompatibility,
Internet connectivity - nothing like having to spend time looking for
drivers - going to bbs's - eventually I found out that my wireless card
simply wasn't supported AT ALL! That was special.

Hint: Support for "special" costs. Yeah, cold comfort - sorry.

I'm still hoping to find a flavor of Linux that won't give me indigestion.

Try Rolaids, or pay for support by buying into a vendor with a good
reputation (you already indicate you know several).

Almost every connectivity and configuration issue I researched was
answered through a google newsgroup search, and then going to the
links offered in their discussion. I presume you've already mined
that approach. I have periods of this idle time, like now, that allow
me to research these issues interspersed with intense demand for my
attention. I also make it a habit to keep a journal in a nearly
publish quality format. Memory (wet ram) is for the good things,
ephemeral details like Linux configuration is for filing.

I have nothing to offer for your specific driver need, sorry. However,
for others, feel free to contact me for these guides.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC