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Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 11:22:12 -0500 (EST)
From: Jeffrey Juliano <juliano AT cs DOT unc DOT edu>
Reply-To: juliano AT cs DOT unc DOT edu
To: Cygnus - Admin <cygnus AT ncohafmuta DOT com>
cc: cygwin AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com
Subject: Re: stupid question??
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.10.10002250958550.23773-100000@clipons.ncohafmuta.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.10.10002271041200.11659-100000@capefear.cs.unc.edu>
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I'm a few days behind...

On Fri, 25 Feb 2000, Cygnus - Admin wrote:

...
> And my question is, WHY? If you want all these unix programs, why not just
> use unix?
...


My situation includes the other poster's points of making Windows
usable and sane.  But I haven't seen mention of my main reason for
being forced to run Windows instead of linux.  Without cygwin, I
wouldn't be able to use my office PC (for my work), except as a dumb
terminal.


I'm in the graphics group at UNC.  Traditionally, our apps run on
expensive SGI machines.  Recently, PC graphics cards have improved to
the point that some types of graphics apps run fast enough on them.
We've got (relatively) inexpensive PCs in our offices, with decent
graphics cards.

AFAIK, everyone here uses OpenGL.  Until the graphics cards have good
linux drivers available, we've got to use Windows or give up hardware
acceleration, which means not running on the office machines.

Cygwin makes it possible to port our unix graphics apps to run on
office PCs, with only a few headaches.  Porting to native windows is
just not feasable, especially in an academic environmnet.  But even if
it were, the apps still need to build/run on the SGIs.


Another, similar but different, problem is that there are many
commodity PC cards available that are either not avail for SGIs, or
are just too expensive for SGIs.  An example is an A/D card used to
communicate with 3D trackers for virtual reality, that we place into a
PC dedicated to running a tracker.

Unfortunately, it's even harder to get good drivers for A/D cards than
for graphics cards.  We struggle just to get WinNT versions of those
drivers.  (They are generally avail for 95/98 only, and require some
of heinous hacks to work in NT.)


-jeff


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