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#162378 17/10/06 01:36 PM
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Hi,
We have been waiting for Linux version of Mirc about years.
Have you got any good news about it ?

#162379 17/10/06 01:44 PM
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Hoopy frood
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Hoopy frood
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Just as a note, I know people who use mIRC fine in Linux with Wine. The only real trouble they have is that some scripts need changed a bit to deal with the Linux directory/file commands, but mIRC by itself always worked fine for them. I've tested it myself and it worked fine for me as well.


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#162380 17/10/06 01:55 PM
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Hoopy frood
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Hoopy frood
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Why have you been waiting for it, it's been said several times that it won't happen.



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#162381 17/10/06 01:59 PM
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Hoopy frood
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Quote:
it won't happen


That sounds so final. I've always hoped that if Microsoft
continued to be a bunch of greedy peckerheads, Khaled
might change his mind.

#162382 17/10/06 02:40 PM
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Hoopy frood
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Yeah obviously I can't see the future and I don't know what Khaled's thinking. But when there are three "official" statements that there is no intention of developing mIRC for Linux it seems pretty silly to wait for it to happen. Besides those statements though, the circumstances don't seem right to support a Linux version either:
  • There is about 6 months to 2 years between each release for a single Windows version of mIRC. Not unreasonable for a single developer project but I think a lot of the mIRC user base would prefer it to be even shorter than that. Adding Linux support would only make development time longer. Probaby much longer.
  • Vista is (allegedly) coming out soon. No doubt there's a bunch of changes necessary to make mIRC support the new guidelines etc. - Bad time to start developing for an entirely new platform aswell then.
  • There's probably major portability issues:
    -- mIRC's been developed by one man since the beginning - God knows what the code looks like.
    -- Khaled uses MSVS for development so there's going to be huge amounts of rewriting to make it compilable under Linux.
    -- To enable cross-platform development mIRC would have to switch from directly using the Windows API to using a cross-platform library. Especially time consuming since mIRC also uses custom controls for the major part of it's interface (eg. the controls that support coloured text)
  • Generally home-user Linux users expect software to be both free (as in beer) and Free (as in speech) - of which mIRC is neither. With the vast amount of Tcl bots and open source IRC clients which do fit the free ideals of many Linux users, would mIRC even be that popular on the platform?


Of course all that is just my opinion. <Insert standard disclaimer here>. etc. etc.


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#162383 17/10/06 02:55 PM
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Hoopy frood
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You made several good points. As far as mIRC not being
free and that making it unpopular to the home user on a
free os, I'd be more than willing to pay for mIRC all over
again to be able to have it on Linux and I'm sure I'm not
the only one.

#162384 18/10/06 12:28 AM
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Babel fish
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Quote:
As far as mIRC not being
free and that making it unpopular to the home user on a
free os..

If you want a mIRC running on a free OS then get ReactOS


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