After 10 years of supporting Linux, IBM continues to challenge Microsoft on multiple fronts and aims to push Linux even further into the enterprise. While IBM has competed and partnered with Microsoft over the last two decades, the Microsoft-free PC effort is perhaps its most direct assault yet. "The idea of Microsoft-free personal computing has been in the air for a while," Inna Kuznetsova, director of Linux at IBM, told InternetNews.com. "We're just partnering with Linux distribution vendors and hardware vendors to make it happen."
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Member since:2005-12-02
"Basic X binding is problem free, xlib comes as static library, BSD. OpenGL ditto. Not sure about sound, but I would expect it is the same. These all are low-level stuff. Simple to handle. And all you need to do game.
Anyway, the first problem comes with text rendering. Xft does not have a static version. And AFAIK it is LGPL anyway, so it cannot be embedded into commercial app.
And then, if you want to look&feel native, you absolutely need to link with GTK shared libraries. And those differ a lot."
Fair enough, and that makes sense. Just makes me wonder though how VMWare and Parallels do it then?
Member since:2006-02-15
Basic X binding is problem free, xlib comes as static library, BSD. OpenGL ditto. Not sure about sound, but I would expect it is the same. These all are low-level stuff. Simple to handle. And all you need to do game.
Anyway, the first problem comes with text rendering. Xft does not have a static version. And AFAIK it is LGPL anyway, so it cannot be embedded into commercial app.
And then, if you want to look&feel native, you absolutely need to link with GTK shared libraries. And those differ a lot.
Most games have some sort of a launcher that is done either with GTK+ or Qt. And well, what's the problem with linking to shared libraries? They link to f.ex. libgtk+2.so which is infact a symbolic link to the actual version of libgtk+ installed. They don't link to a specific minor version of the file, they link to major version and all distros create symbolic links for those. Try installing Linux, do ldd on a file and just check for yourself 
If an application states that it requires version Gtk+ 2.4 then it will work just fine with 2.4.2, 2.4.59 and so forth. Usually it will also work with 2.5.*, 2.6.* and further.
Member since:2007-03-06
Member since:
2005-11-20
Well, I would say binding to the X server, sound libraries, graphic libraries, etc. in order to run would be the same scenario, or am I missing something? The games use the system libraries, as would any other application. Certainly more bindings than say a word processor, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc would need?
Basic X binding is problem free, xlib comes as static library, BSD. OpenGL ditto. Not sure about sound, but I would expect it is the same. These all are low-level stuff. Simple to handle. And all you need to do game.
Anyway, the first problem comes with text rendering. Xft does not have a static version. And AFAIK it is LGPL anyway, so it cannot be embedded into commercial app.
And then, if you want to look&feel native, you absolutely need to link with GTK shared libraries. And those differ a lot.