Subj : Re: GIMP Up To : Barry Martin From : Ky Moffet Date : Sat Sep 06 2025 09:47:00 BARRY MARTIN wrote: > Hi Ky! > KM> there are still functions with no x64 replacement, and as someone > KM> pointed out, every time you drop support for the older stuff, you > KM> lose that subset of programming skills, and the "new" stuff > KM> becomes that much buggier. > > Right: I have a few old applications that fall in that category. The > good news I can run them on a VM but that has some other inconveniences. Yeah. I still miss LIST. 16bit DOS program, and no real replacement. (ZBList, which runs on x64 Windows, is not quite right.) > Tangenting to the Raspberry Pi, apparently a lot of businesses use it, > and a lot are still using the old-old ones and cannot upgrade, sometimes > the new processor isn't compatible, a lot of times physical constraints: > positioning of the ports have moved in newer models and the original > wiring harness cannot be altered to accomodate. There's a lot of that out there. Consumer devices are a drop in the bucket. The vast majority of the specialty and scientific cards (which go for 5 to 6 figures and may not have an available replacement) are 32bit or even 16bit. That's why there are still specialty motherboard being made with 16bit (ISA) slots. Which are also in demand among retro gamers, for their support of ISA Sound Blaster cards. I bought one a while back, to replace the one in Moonbase, which at age 22 finally succumbed to aging capacitors. For my $170 I expected to get a used board designed and built in 2005. I received a brand new, recently-made, $480 board! > As you indicated sometimes easier said than done! ...A few days ago I > was trying to find where the storage location is set: couldn't find it > in the on-line manual (which is extensive), couldn't find it wandering > around the screen, eventually found a lead on Google but was outdated, > Started looking in the config files: I knew where the default storage > was located so tried to find that and work backwards. Nope. I hate when things are stashed gods-know-where like that. It's why I use portable versions or portabilize everything I can. > KM> Yeah, VM is more reliable as a long-term solution, but if it's a > KM> low resources PC you may not have that option. My Win11 netbook > KM> will run VirtualBox, but VBox on that low-resources netbook > KM> cannot run WinXP -- the most "hungry" VM it can run is Win2K > KM> (which can scrape by on very scant resources), with whatever > KM> limitations Win2K brings with it. (I just use it to get a > KM> non-glare-white screen in my little editor that maxes out at 32k > KM> of RAM, so it's fine, but there's no way the VM would run even an > KM> old GIMP.) > > Well I was thinking more of running the VM on a capable machine, not one As one hopes to do, but not all who boot have more brain than a rock.... > barely scraping by, but yes, that low-resource issue is going to be a > problem. Heck, this computer (the one I'm on currently) is fairly > powerful, and yet when I ran the VM from the hard drive it was > annoyingly sluggish. Moved to the NVMe -- scoots right along. Main problem is many VM images are HUGE (my Win81. image is 24GB). So the faster the read, the better the performance. Silver has an NVMe dedicated to swap, temp, browser cache, and VMs. All stuff that benefits from raw speed. > KM> So you find last year's Fatdog ISO, which would necessarily have > KM> last year's GIMP, and use that. In a VM, no one can hear you > KM> scr-- er, no one cares if you never update it. > > Just don't update the VM! ...I wonder if antique VMs are still able to > run? VMs are just glorified disk images. If the virtual machine host can run the disk image, it will run. DOSBox is actually geared toward running in a VM. The main thing you run into is whether the VM image can run the Guest Additions (which necessarily matches the version of VirtualBox), without which you don't have interoperability with the host machine, proper mouse behavior, or full gamut of screen resolutions. > KM> Or you just find last year's GIMP, and install it in your mini VM > KM> of Puppy or whatever small distro, and never update the VM. Not > KM> so difficult. > > True -- though I have a question and it might be just because the coffee > hasn't kicked in. Here I have several Virtual Machines (VMs) running > under VirtualBox (VB). One of the VMs is running XP. I have a slew of 'em that were experimented on and never deleted.... some work better than others. The newest version of VirtualBox that will run on XP64 is 4.something. It runs XP, Win2K, Win8.1, and ReactOS, and those are all well-behaved. (It will not run Win10 or later.) Various sorts of linux are all ill-mannered to some degree; frex Mint gripes about video settings, but won't run with the ones it wants, and ignores the Guest Additions. PCLinuxOS is just fine so long as I never eject the "install media"; if I do, it gripes "No boot device" (despite that it was installed to the virtual disk). Technically, I could install VBox 6.something on the Win8.1 VM, then use it to run Win10 or 11 !!! However, only crazy people use VBox to peer into the future. More typically we use it to explore the past. I've never gotten a Mac VM to run, not even one of the prebuilts floating around out there. > VB gets updated every so often, which I would presume also updates the > VM. Maybe not because of backwards compatabilty. Let's assume that No, the VM is its own thing. VirtualBox does not update the VM image. It may update whatever it uses as an init file to find the VM and get it running, I dunno. But not the VM itself. > specific VM is not updated. The problem I see is if the VB is not > eventually updated it won't run under whatever OS the base machine is > using. So the simple solution would seem to be not update the OS, but > eventually the hardware will fail, and not updating the OS creates > potential security problems. Yeah, you just let VBox update as it wishes, or in the case of PCLinuxOS, use the VirtualBox Manager as needed, since VBox is done as a third party repository, not part of the system update. > > (I need a coffee refill after that one!) 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