Celestia under Windows 8 (Developers' Preview)

[selden]

It works!
======-
As many probably are aware, a Developers' Preview of Windows 8 is now available.
It's a free download from Microsoft. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/home
It is not even beta, yet, so it shouldn't be used for anything but testing software.

For my amusement, and to test a few software packages, I installed Win8 in a virtual machine running on my laptop using VirtualBox under Windows 7.
VirtualBox is available for free at http://www.virtualbox.org/

Installing Win8 took about 15 minutes, and it boots in about 30 seconds. Graphics drivers updated for Win8 are not yet available from VB, so only Microsoft's software OpenGL is available under VB for now. As a result, Celestia's performance isn't great, but it runs. Supposedly Nvidia's current graphics drivers work under Win8, so Celestia should run a lot faster on a system running Win8 natively, which I don't plan to do.

[piellepi]

Hi Celestians!
I installed Windows 8 on a partition of my Samsung netbook.
30 seconds and my PC is on!

Then I installed Celestia 1.6.1 from scratch but obviously it lacks a decent OpenGL driver:
and when I press Ctrl-V nothing appears!

this is what "OpenGL Info" reports
---------------------------------------------------
Vendor: Microsoft Corporation
Renderer: GDI Generic
Version: 1.1.0
Max simultaneous textures: 1
Max texture size: 1024
Point size range: 0.500000 - 10.000000

Supported Extensions:
GL_WIN_swap_hint
GL_EXT_bgra
GL_EXT_paletted_texture
---------------------------------------------------
impressive!!

Ciao
Pierluigi

[selden]

Windows 8 includes only Microsoft's OpenGL v1.1 emulator. To get OpenGL v2 or better (which is what you need to get better performance and to see all of Celestia's eye-candy) you need to install a Windows 8 graphics driver provided by the manufacturer of your graphics hardware. Supposedly the most recent driver available from Nvidia is compatible with Windows 8. I don't know if compatible drivers are available from AMD or Intel yet.

[selden]

Remember that Windows 8 is still in pre-beta test mode. Many things are still in development, and the Preview has lots of bugs. It'll stop working entirely when its builtin license expires in March. Presumably there will be several Beta versions released between now and the final ReleaseToManufacturing version, which probably won't happen until late next summer or fall. Since most people won't be running Windows 8 for a while, here's a screengrab showing the new start menu.

Windows 8 replaces the traditional start menu with their new Metro interface, which is the same user interface provided by Windows Phone 7. When you install a non-Metro program (like Celestia) its start menu entry is added to the Metro page. When you click on its button, it switches to the more familiar Desktop and starts Celestia, as shown in the first post above. So far, the only programs I've installed are Celestia and Dexpot.

[Reiko]

I think I like that metro interface. Looks easier to navigate than the regular start menu.

[Fenerit]

I wonder about the reason of doing a desktop prompt like that of a smartphone. Premise that such desktop prompt can be achieved even in Xp by installing free gadgets, widgets and dockbars, it is the shift from an OS which might help people to runs applicative and programming software, to that of a simply "Internet connected" machine that I do not like; this latter way, surely useful, is negative however in cognitive terms for who use the computer to make softwares. Such interface is thought for touch-screens devices, and I do not see how touch screens can help when one does press a button on a program filled with lots of buttons and options and this latters are then covered by the hand during the movement. Why a software house would rebuild its program's interface from scratch to fit the whims of the OS? What economy-ergonomics there is in doing so? The hands must moving into a separete space from that of the screen to achieve the better performances even for the hands-handling of the softwares. Thus the computers will be perceived like household appliances, i.e a washing machine or a TV and not like a computational machines. Stuff for children, imho.

[selden]

Fenerit,

Win8 will run on ARM and x86 tablets in addition to x86 laptop and desktop computers. They'll all have the same user interface. Microsoft gave out 5000 Samsung tablets running Win8 to attendees of the BUILD conference.

Tablet sales are increasing rapidly while PC sales are not. For home use by an individual, a tablet is much more useful than a desktop computer.

[Fenerit]

Fenerit,

Win8 will run on ARM and x86 tablets in addition to x86 laptop and desktop computers. They'll all have the same user interface. Microsoft gave out 5000 Samsung tablets running Win8 to attendees of the BUILD conference.

Tablet sales are increasing rapidly while PC sales are not. For home use by an individual, a tablet is much more useful than a desktop computer.

Absolutely the tablets are the right dimension for office uses, much more of notebok/laptop/netbook itself; and the touch screen with the virtual keyboard is perfect. My wonders are about the the Z-buffer of the graphic processor in order to achieve the suited depth to manipulate single polygons (cut points, edge and face) on a 3D modeler through touch-screens. Most probably organic modelling will supersede the polygonal ones in such concerns, if only.

[danielj]

I think it?s interesting,but not so important since Windows 8 is many months for launch,in the best of the cases.It will be much more useful if Celestia is converted to a mutithread (MULTICORE) program or a 64 bit program (that uses more than 4 GB RAM!)