MESSAGE
| DATE | 2004-09-04 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir Secretary NYLXS
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [hangout] Re: Advocacy vs. Zealotry vs. Who Cares?!?
|
Billy > I don't see how this is MSFT's fault.
Ruben > > That's actually easy to answer.
> > 5 yard penalty: incomplete quoting of context.
Billy > (WHAT is MSFT's fault, again?) >
There are no yards in Baseball...
The response it to the security faults of the MS foundation Class.
Ruben> > On the windows OS everything works as a single process without kernel
> > specific file permisions on any of the systems foundation libraries.
Billy > I can't extract a coherent technical argument from this sentence.
> I tried.
Billy > What are "kernel-specific file permissions" ?
The kernel in Linux assigns and allocates resources according to user
permisions and ALL processes must have a UID and an EUID attached to them.
In windows there is only 1 process and everything is a thread.
I've looked at this very closely in the last 3 weeks, especially in regard
to porting GTK programs and C programs to Windows. It's a huge problem.
everything in windows runs as Windows.
Ruben > > So when you start a new program in Windows, becomes
> > a thread of the core OS,
Billy > > Stop this FUD!
It's not fud. It's a fact. See the gtk porting website.
> No, this is hardly true of all or most software.
>
Actually it is. Even Visual Basic applications which leverage heavely
the MSFT installs new DLL's and replaces old ones willie nillie.
Also see http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7128
-------------------------
Like most people who read Linux Journal, I am a rabid fan of all
things Linux, GNU and open source. I run Linux on all of my personal
machines, program on them, play on them and evangelize to others whenever
possible. But, a large portion of the programming jobs out there involve
writing applications for an operating system from Redmond, Washington.
For my job, I've had to write some smaller applications for the Microsoft
Windows platform. Because speed of execution was an issue, I was going
to have to write them in C, directly using the Win32 API. It occurred
to me that if I was going to be using a standard language such as C,
I might be able to develop in my nice and cozy Linux home.
This article is a short guide on developing an application for Windows
completely within a Linux environment. I give a short introduction to
Windows programming and step through compiling and testing a sample
program. I also discuss Wine to simplify porting Windows source code
to Linux. Win32 Programming
For those of us raised on the wholesome nutrition of a UNIX-style process
abstraction, the Windows model might seem downright heretical. The Windows
model is a preemptive, multitasking, multithreaded, message-passing
operating system. I'm limiting myself here to NT and its derivatives, 2000
and XP. All processes are considered threads by the operating system. This
makes the process context slightly lighter than the traditional
heavyweight process model used in UNIX-like operating systems. As a
consequence of this everything-is-a-thread model, however, everything
sits in global memory address space. With the correct permissions and
the correct address, one program could twiddle another program's bits.
Another consequence of this is data structures created by the kernel don't
sit at any fixed address. This means it is up to the user program to lock
down the associated memory before using any global data structures, such
as graphic contexts. You also must remember to unlock these structures
once you are done with them, or they may help cause memory fragmentation.
Listing 1, available from the Linux Journal FTP site (see the on-line
Resources section), is a basic Hello World program. Most of it is
boilerplate, and only the portion within the switch statement is of any
real interest. It does seem like quite a bit of code for a basic program,
but that is the problem with using a low-level API. A good comparison
on Linux would be writing code for X using Xt.
Instead of a main() function, a Windows GUI program starts at
WinMain(). It's in this function that your program does all of its
initialization. Part of this initialization includes defining the window
class for the main window and associating a callback function for
it. Next, create the main window and show it on the desktop. Control
then passes to the message loop, and the callback function processes
the messages that are sent to the main window.
A good quick introduction to writing Windows programs is available
from winprog.org (see Resources). The authors of this Web site offer
a good FAQ and a fairly good tutorial covering all of the basics. Of
course, the bible for Windows programming is the massive book Windows
Programming, by Charles Petzold. If you can't find what you need in this
tome, you always can use it to beat the information out of your friendly
neighbourhood Windows guru. Cross-Compiling
One of the amazing things about GCC is that it has been ported to so
many different platforms and operating systems. A great gift that comes
from this is the ability to compile binaries on one platform that are
destined for a completely different one. I regularly compile binaries
for Solaris or Windows on my Linux laptop. This is an amazing advantage,
allowing development to occur in a familiar, comfortable environment.
The purest way to set up is to go back to the source (see Resources). This
way you can compile code with the exact settings and for the exact
platform you want. Thankfully, this work has already been done. The
good people at the MinGW Project maintain a port of GCC for compiling
Windows binaries. This includes all of the associated files, such
as the headers. The sources are available here along with binary
tarballs. These programs also have been packaged for RPM-based and
deb-based distributions. If you are running Debian, you can use apt-get
to retrieve the mingw32 and mingw32-runtime packages. If you are running
testing or unstable, you also should grab mingw32-binutils.
Most of the compilation options in GCC are available here in MinGW,
along with a few extras. If you simply compile a program without any
extra options, it can be run from the console. This is what you would
do if you wanted to write a small, simple program that did not need a
GUI. Because this is Windows, we want a GUI program, so we write all of
the required boilerplate we saw above and add the -mwindows option to
the compilation command. This sets up the macros and library links you
need in order to compile a standard Windows executable. If you decide to
write a more complicated Windows program that uses some other Windows'
feature, you need to add in the libraries explicitly that you want linked.
In Windows you can define resources for your program. These include such
items as menus, bitmaps and text strings, among others. These resources
are defined in a separate file and need to be compiled separately
before being linked to your executable. That job falls to the program
mingw-windres, which creates an object file you subsequently can link
to your executable.
To compile our simple example program shown in Listing 1, we use the
command:
mingw-gcc -o example1.exe example.c -mwindows
Replace the command mingw-gcc with whatever the package maintainer called
the compiler executable for your package. Presto, you now have a Windows
program ready for the world. Or is it? Debugging with Wine
-- __________________________ Brooklyn Linux Solutions
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town that Brooklyn, like
Atlantis, reaches mythological proportions in the mind of the world -
RI Safir 1998
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://fairuse.nylxs.com
http://www.mrbrklyn.com - Consulting http://www.inns.net <-- Happy
Clients http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive or stories and
articles from around the net http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/downtown.html -
See the New Downtown Brooklyn....
1-718-382-0585
____________________________
NYLXS: New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
Fair Use -
because it's either fair use or useless....
NYLXS is a trademark of NYLXS, Inc
--
__________________________
BrooklynLinux Solutions
Somany immigrant groups have swept through our town
thatBrooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportionsin the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
DRMis THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://fairuse.nylxs.com
http://www.mrbrklyn.com- Consulting
http://www.inns.net<-- Happy Clients
http://www.nylxs.com- Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources- Unpublished Archive or stories and articles from around the net
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/downtown.html- See the New Downtown Brooklyn....
1-718-382-0585
____________________________
NYLXS: New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
Fair Use -
because it's either fair use or useless....
NYLXS is a trademark of NYLXS, Inc
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