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from the yes...-it's-the-year-of-the-chinese-linux-desktop dept.
China is one of the countries where Windows XP continues to be one of the leading platforms, with some stats pointing towards a 70 percent market share owned by the OS version launched by Microsoft in 2001.
From Ecns.cn:
China's Ministry of Industry and Information of Technology (MIIT) urged Windows XP users in China to switch to domestically made computer operating systems, China Central Television (CCTV) reported on Saturday.
The local government has apparently found a solution to move users off Windows XP by developing its own Linux-based alternative which would not only be offered with a freeware license, but also work on low-spec PCs, such as the ones that are currently powered by XP.
Work on this new Linux-based OS has already been started, with local authorities hoping that Windows XP users would actually give it a chance and abandon their existing operating systems that are more or less open to attacks.
It remains to be seen how many people are actually prepared to give up on Windows.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Wootery on Thursday May 15 2014, @05:30PM
Not the Silverlight DRM'ed stuff though. Netflix/LoveFilm/NowTV/etc are a real pain to get working in Linux.
Yes, Wine works, but it's really slow at Silverlight video playback, to the point that it's unwatchable unless on a powerful machine.
Aside: don't believe the bullshit when they say Netflix will move to HTML5. They're going to develop a proprietary, platform-specific binary-blob, which interacts with the browser via an HTML5-standardised interface. It will not necessarily mean Linux support.
(I don't know what TBL was smoking when he decided that HTML5 officially supporting DRM was a good idea, but I hope he's kicked the habit.)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Friday May 16 2014, @06:46AM
Ubuntu users can just install a repo from here [compholio.com] for Netflix and have what is, basically, a simple install and "run this program for netflix" setup.
Anyone else can use this one [fds-team.de] and a user agent switcher for the browser. Also works for other things than just Netflix.
Could you provide more useful information here? Silverlight via pipelight works perfectly well pushing HD content to a 1920x1080 display on an Athlon X2 (dual core, 3ghz), which means it's from somewhere around 2006-2008.
That leads me to wonder what your idea of a "powerful machine" is, considering a 6-8 year old desktop can handle it. What did you try to run it on that you're basing your claim on, a Pentium 2?
Unrelated, but I find that Silverlight via pipelight actually works better than Adobe's horrible Linux flash plugin. Less CPU use and fewer overall problems, amazingly. I've seriously considered trying to use pipelight's flash support instead of the native one for comparison purposes.
(Score: 1) by Wootery on Saturday May 17 2014, @11:46PM
64-bit single-core AMD CPU from years back, 2.0GHz, Socket 754. (i.e. old but should certainly be up to the task.)
(I forget if I had the proprietary nVidia driver installed, but I think I did.)
I ran Windows Firefox + Silverlight, in Wine. The Netflix performance was horrendous. I've now installed Vista, and it now runs fine. (Admittedly I'm no longer with Netflix, but the NowTV service I'm now using is also Silverlight-based.)
I didn't try Pipelight. Would it perform better than Firefox-for-Windows in Wine? Less indirection?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday May 18 2014, @05:21AM
I've only noticed silverlight/wine via pipelight using one core, so that should still be acceptable, though it might make multitasking while watching a bit crap. Not sure how badly the 2ghz (yours) vs 3ghz (mine) would affect it, so it might only work at non-HD for you. If it can't, it's probably just barely past the "works fine" threshold.
Using nvidia binary driver here, too. Admittedly my GPU isn't crap, so that could be a factor, but probably not much: although the GPU will assist with rendering the video, it won't be used for decoding, so CPU would matter more there.
(Note: this is my experience with using Pipelight directly. I don't use Ubuntu so I didn't try the netflix-desktop package, which is supposed to abstract the work away for you.)
It probably works better, yeah. I haven't tried using a Windows browser with Silverlight to compare, but Pipelight uses wine for the minimum amount of code possible. Pipelight works in two parts: a wine executable (pluginloader.exe) that loads Silverlight, and a native browser plugin that communicates with the exe. The end result is you get a wine instance, running Silverlight, embedded in your Linux-native browser window. Same way KDE's kparts plugin can embed KDE apps into the browser for handling filetypes. (Okular inside a Firefox tab for PDFs, for example.)
One really nice thing about the Pipelight setup is you can use it with any browser that supports NPAPI plugins and UA-switching, so you aren't limited to Firefox or Chrome. I tend to use Uzbl for it, since it has almost no UI and I can make the window small, stuff it in a corner somewhere and run it while doing other things.
Also, since it looks like just-another-plugin to the browser, it generally "just works" on anything that uses Silverlight. Or some other plugins; it has some extra plugins such as unity3d and flash, too. The flash support could become a big deal, since Adobe quit updating the native Linux one.
I've only noticed a few issues with it, none of which are performance-related, and two of which aren't actually Pipelight's fault.
1) Most sites do user-agent checks before loading, so you tend to need a UA switcher. Not a Pipelight issue.
2) Window resizes do odd things with the Silverlight frame for me. Workaround: resize the window first.
3) Since it's using wine, it screws with my gamma/colour correction that's set by nvidia-settings. This is a long-standing wine bug and not Pipelight's fault. Workaround: nvidia-settings -l after Silverlight's loaded, just like with anything else (Minecraft, any wine games) that mangles your gamma for no reason.