Today's installment is a lengthy (but hopefully informative) piece on mirroring controllers. Ever had weird problems with a FastTrack TX2000? Are you curious how well HighPoints RocketRAID boards are really supported? Ever wondered which controller gives you the best performance for every dollar spent? In true Slashdot tradition, we're taking the issue and throwing it out to you, the readers. Futurepower(R) is willing to start us off with a wealth of information on his experiences, and I'm hoping a few of you are willing to do the same.

miladus writes "eWeek reports that Walt Disney's feature animation unit (along with 2 other unnamed studios) are using Adobe's Photoshop in Linux. They use the Wine emulator to run the software and the 3 studios 'not known as team players, all three agreed that a project that would benefit the entire open-source community while delivering a technology they needed--was worth their cooperation'."

Thanks to InsertCredit for pointing out the freely downloadable PC game, Frontal Assault, which has been entered in the same Finnish Assembly demo-scene party games competition as the recently-covered Truck Dismount. Frontal Assault is a puzzle-action game where "The idea is to perform various moves on breasts. The move icons float [on] to the screen and you must make the move before the icon disappears." Moves you must replicate by on-screen bosom twirling, using the PC's mouse, include the 'bounce' and the 'helicopter' in this decidedly bizarre title, which has also been tested by the authors to work under Wine for Linux users.

The last Slashback of July brings you updates on the open-source Blender and Diebold's approach to voting security, and a skeptical look at the design origins of the Dragon V CPU, John Poindexter's very own future, and more. Read on for the details.

miguel writes "The Mono project keeps evolving and is quickly becoming a mature platform for running .NET applications on Linux. SourceGear and Ximian have entered into a partnership to make their .NET-based Vault client software available to Linux and Unix users by implementing the missing web services support in Mono. The formal announcement is here and a developer overview is here. OpenLink has also contributed the functionality to turn Wine into a library that Mono is using to implement the System.Windows.Forms namespace. Another recent progress bit is the fact that Mono can run Eclipse with the IKVM Java VM for .NET"

Bryan Porter asks: "I've been using various Wine based products lately (ex. WineX, CrossOver, etc.), and have found several companies basing portions of the software on Wine (I believe Virtuoso 3.0 utilizes Wine to some extent). My question for the Slashdot community is, is Wine destined for specialization only? We've got well-working versions of Wine hacked into a cross-platform gaming system, hacked into cross-platform productivity systems, etc. Will we ever download just one Wine, or is the best solution a customized one?"

Wynken de Word writes "An article in Canada's Globe and Mail says 'vineyard owner Don King is coaxing 30,000 plants to grow grapes of exactly the right colour, size and sweetness to produce great ice wine and other fine vintages...with the help of judicious watering, a knowledge of the age-old art of viniculture -- and electronic sensing devices linked together in a wireless network.' Using an Intel-based TinyOS and TinyDB, multiple sensing devices monitor grape micro climates and help determine irrigation and frost patterns."

Naturally, when answering your questions, he boosted his company. (Wouldn't you?) But I assure you, he wrote these answers himself instead of having them laundered by a PR team. Whether or not you agree with Michael and the way he runs Lindows (and used to run MP3.com) you've got to give him credit for speaking more openly than most other modern American CEOs.

GonzoJohn writes "When I first subscribed to Transgaming's WineX 2.1 product last year, I was pleasantly surprised that nearly half of the games I had were supported to a degree. The games that did run ran pretty flawlessly. The games that didn't work had varying degrees of success, all just short of actually being able to play the game (the installers seemed to work). With the release of WineX 3.0 from Transgaming on April 17th this year, it looked like it was time to revisit the wonderful world of Wine. This time around, Transgaming WineX 3.0 has some new tools as well as improvements in the number of games supported and gaming speeds. In this article, we're going to take a look at the new features of WineX 3.0, with a focus on their new GUI installer called Point2Play."

An anonymous reader writes "TransGaming's announcement of the availability of WineX 3.0 got a lot of pixel dust, but that wasn't the only recent news about WINE. The Microsoft monopoly also reached out to touch the project when Whil Hentzen, a leading proponent of Visual FoxPro (VFP) development on Linux, was contacted by an Microsoft manager and told it was a violation of the VFP EULA to run it on Linux." I guess thats one way to stop emulation. update Oh well, its a dupe. Whatever, it gives people something to complain about I guess ;)

bltfast32 writes "I don't know how many people have been following this, but this is definitely worth keeping an eye on. Whil Hentzen, prominent FoxPro and Linux advocate, has received some heat lately for publishing a HOWTO in the March 2003 FoxTalk issue for running Visual FoxPro 8.0 on Linux with WINE. Of course, the aforementioned heat, is coming from Redmond. Here is a link to a nice summary of the interactions by Whil." That summary mentions the Register article online here. bltfast32 also points to another article which requires registration.

An anonymous reader writes "Brian Vincent of Wine Weekly News fame has started a new series of interviews with the Wine developers, over at the newly redesigned WineHQ site. The first interview features Über-hacker Ove Kåven, while the second one (hot off the press) features long-time Wine hacker Dimitrie O. Paun. Cheese anyone?"

miguelk asks: "I'm helping a company (in Brazil) legalize their desktop operating system licenses by migrating to Linux on the desktop. WINE was tried but unfortunately did not work out for this particular case, so the idea is to install a Linux server with Win4Lin Terminal Server for 5 users, since the company has 5 Windows98 licenses to use for this purpose. All of the other 50+ desktops would be running Linux and would access these 5 licenses as needed, whenever they use a legacy Windows application. I have a question about the legal aspect of using the Windows desktop remotely. From all I have researched so far, this is legal since the actual Windows code will be installed on only one computer and will not be loaded in RAM on any other computer. I see it as equivalent to having 5 PCs on a desk and users walking up and using whatever PC happens to be available. I suspect that a direct, unprepared question to Microsoft is not a good idea, so I want to prepare first. Can anybody comment on this solution or share their experiences?"

e8johan asks: "I have been thinking about trying to sell a Linux based thin client solution to different markets, like schools. One of the big problems with migrating to Linux is the loss of old applications such as Microsoft Office. Has anyone tried to combine Wine and the LTSP? Does it work? If so, it would enable me (and anyone else) to sell services based on a free (as in libre and beer) server running both open office and their proprietary equivalents in a Windows-like environment, thus reducing the migration costs and making the offer more attractive." While this would be an interesting to tackle, would the licensing terms on some proprietary packages complicate such a system?

now3djp writes "Interesting article over on CodingStyle that demonstrates how I successfully eliminated wasted time maintaining an MS-Windows computer when I could build natively from my GNU computer! /. has followed other cross compilers in the past. This article is different because I used MS's own compiler! This allowed me to get on with real games porting; with only a proportional increase in compile time. Wine has really come a long way in supporting simple apps, let us hope it reaches a 1.0 soon."

S asks: "In my opinion, one of X11's most underrated features is the ability to export the display of an [X] application to an X-Server that can be physically separated from the application's host (use a remote display). I have used this countless times to dramatically increase my ability to 'get stuff done' from a distance. Recently I discovered Cygwin's ability to run XFree86 in rootless mode (startx -- -rootless) where there is no main X root window, and imported displays get their own 'native-looking' window on the Microsoft Windows platform. This also has saved me much headache when working from a Windows machine to do Linux-type things. My question is: Is there some way to export the display of Microsoft Windows windows to a remote X-Server? I'm not talking VNC/RFB here, and terminal services (via rdesktop) ALMOST fits the bill, but I don't want a root window. I want to simply export the display of (say... photoshop) to my X workstation. Googling is not an easy task; 'windows' is too much of a generic term to get usable results. What I have found, however, suggests Wine as a buffer between native Windows GUI calls and the X protocol, but offers no actual solution. Does anyone know of software that allows allows Windows to export the display of its windows to an X server (ie, an X-Client wrapper for Windows)?"

metamatic asks: "I'm planning to buy a notebook computer in the near future. Currently I'm looking at an iBook; however, they're a bit larger and heavier than I'd like. PC users are always telling me that PCs are faster and cheaper, and I'd be happy enough running Linux for what I want the notebook for. So: I'm looking for PC notebook computers that outperform the iBook. Must have USB and Firewire, built-in ethernet, and 802.11b support somehow (via a PC card slot is OK). Small is important, lightweight is important, long battery life is important. I don't care about screen size so long as it can do 800x600. Performance isn't a major concern, as I'm not going to be playing 3D games on it. Sounds easy? Here's the catch: I will not purchase Windows!" After all that this industry has gone through in recent years? Does one still have to pay the Microsoft tax when purchasing a laptop?

davorg contributes this review of Wiley's new Red Hat Linux 8 Bible, writing "I've never been much of a fan of large computer books and, to be honest, this one hasn't done much to change my opinion. These large books often seem a little confused about their target audience. They often cover everything from very basic concepts to very complex ones, and I don't really believe that anyone really needs that breadth of coverage. Or, at least, not all at the same time and from the same book." You'll find the rest of Dave's review below.

telecaster asks: "My kids are aged 11, 7 and 3. All of them are computer savvy. They use the computer for basically three things: Games, writing papers and chatting with friends, as well as browsing sites that are frequented by children their age (Nick, Cartoon Network, How Things Work, Yahoo!Kids, and others). All of this is supervised and watched by my wife and I -- we don't use any parental filters since we've found they just don't work, and it's just better to keep a watchful eye anyway. I would like to move them off Windows XP and introduce them to something less expensive (free) and more reliable. I'm rebooting this machine probably four and five times a week, not to mention the forever problem of lockups and hangs which seem to happen during the times where the 3 year-old is using the machine. I know the crashes are mainly due to the older games that the kids play which are not totally compatible with XP, but hey, they USED to run just fine under Windows98."

taviso writes "Ever wondered what would happen if you could compile and run cygwin under wine ? What about compiling wine under cygwin ? well these guys have, and are planning to nest the two environments as many times as possible to see if wine can take the strain, and not without good reason: 'Having such virtualization environments run within each other is an important milestone in the lives of these projects, it is a remarkable technical feat that requires a great deal of maturity'. "