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Take a look at the prototype of the new documentation page here.

Take a look at the items at the bottom of the Wine 1.0 todo list here.

Take a look at the plans for revamping the apps database here. BTW, we need help. Wanna quit complaining and give us a hand?

However, I do have to agree in one important point - many Wine users have a tendency to get an app up, and then that gets reported to Slashdot. But, the reality is, it doesn't work well, so everyone stampedes to try Wine, and gets disappointed. The key thing we're trying to get to with the new apps db is *honest* and verifiable app reports.

With the announcement in May about Corel hosting WineHQ, does anyone else find the small investment that Microsoft made in them earlier this month a little odd.

Could Microsoft's substantial investment have any influence on the direction of Wine? I leave the answer as an exercise for the reader...

Or for that matter, does WINE run any other number of sought- after Windows programs?

Many answers can be found through this search engine at winehq. I highly recommend taking a gander at these...

Not going to happen. The basic idea behind Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is that your x86 Linux box can already run windows executables they're compiled to x86 machine language anyway. It just needs a little help with the various operating system/GUI functions. To quote directly from the horse's mouth:

Wine is an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer. Wine provides both a development toolkit (Winelib) for porting Windows sources to Unix and a program loader, allowing unmodified Windows 3.1/95/NT binaries to run under Intel Unixes. Wine works on most popular Intel Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris.

So anyway, you're going to need something that emulates an Intel chip before you can run windows programs on a Power PC under any operating system. I would imagine that your best bet would be to use Virtual PC although this does require the actual installation of a copy of windows.
________________
They're - They are
Their - Belonging to them

(This is completely off-topic but had to post anyway)

Actually you don't have to boot Windows to play Counter-Strike. Half-Life works with WINE under Linux with modern 3Dfx, nVidia or Matrox card for sure. I'm not 100% sure about FreeBSD, though. Check out Emulated Half-Life for downloadable scripts but you don't have to be a guru type to figure out how to run it yourself.

and Score -1, Mindlessly Posting

Anyway, in the mean time, Wine anyone? (or whatever other programs that allows you to run Windows programs)
I haven't tried it, and the Application Query page doesn't have anything regarding this.
---
dd if=/dev/random of=~/.ssh/authorized_keys bs=1 count=1024

and Score -1, Mindlessly Posting

Anyway, in the mean time, Wine anyone? (or whatever other programs that allows you to run Windows programs)
I haven't tried it, and the Application Query page doesn't have anything regarding this.
---
dd if=/dev/random of=~/.ssh/authorized_keys bs=1 count=1024

Reading through the posts is kind of funny. Half the people are freaking out... "OH MY GOD! /. HAS BEEN HACKED!!!" and the other half are going "Phhhft... Yeah right..".

Whats the worst that can come of a successful hack against the /. database? A password leak, a few karma points added/deleted, a few posts getting majored?

Guys and girls, if you use the same password on /. that you use on other services around the internet, then you're begging for trouble. It doesn't matter if its /. or any other service, you should always use a different password for each. As inconvenient as it is, its the only real way of being secure. There are plenty of programs out there that will let you mantain a "secure" database of all your usernames/passwords if you really think you're going to have a hassle remembering them all. Just search zdnet or any of the other major shareware/freeware sites. Admittedly most of them are Win32 based, but using things like wine you can usually get around that problem.

The biggest issue is the possibility of the articles being tampered with. I don't know what else is done on the box that hosts slashdot, but if the usual rules are applied, the database should be secure on a seperate machine to the web server.

This is a blessing more than it is a curse. The great wonders of opensource have shown us that even the mighty /. has an exploit in it now and then. I wonder if this would've been made so public if the slashcode wasn't opensource. As it stands, the flaw has been located and supposedly fixed.

Oh well, could be worse I guess. ;) At least they didn't deface the site or destroy the database or any other number of things that could've been done.

<panic>OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!! SLASHDOT HAS BEEN HACKED!!!!!!!!!!!!!</panic>

Now, if the console companies seem (and they do at that!) to be doing well for themselves without DirectX, why on this Earth would it be an issue for this machine?

Errrrrr .... because they are consoles? Do you not think that this is just a tiny bit different from PC gaming?

Who mentioned PC gaming? The Indrema is a console.

Particularly when they know that the target market of this console is notorious for its desire to pick up all of its software, DVDs and music without paying for it?

Have you taken a look at any of the links above? The target market is the same as that of the other consoles. It's not being marketed for free software advocates. Even if it were, free software is about freedom, not price. I'd rather pay for open software than get closed software for free.

Face it, unless Linux has suddenly developed drivers for a whole load of modern graphics accelerator cards through some form of magic

Sorry, no. This isn't a PC we are talking about here. It's a console. That means that it needs support for only a couple of graphics accelerators - and the Indrema folks get to pick which ones.

Why the hell can't the "community" just bite on the bullet and produce DirectX support?

http://www.winehq.com

A combat flight sim for Linux would be cool, although, you might be able to use an existing sim from the windows world if you use wine. X-Plane works great under Linux using wine. IMHO, it's one of the best flight sims out there, but it does lack the ability to shoot/kill other entities besides yourself. I wonder how tough it would be to get flightgear working?

Wine allows you to run windows programs on linux. It is getting better every day, and who knows it might even run a program you want.

If it doesn't work, make it work.

Yes you can start from scratch and write you own educational program. If you have the time, please do. Might I suggest a generic game engine that can be used to write Myst like games for linux. It appears to me that most educational games a based on Myst on the high level, (but with a lot more things to click on, and more obvious solutions) with sub games. Let an artist make the game screens and play. This allows linux to get many educational games once you get your engine working.

Exactly. A real competitor would be the Wine Project
It is also a Windows Emulator, does not need any windows dll's and is fairly advanced (version 1.0 will probably be released this year).
It is a volontary open-source effort, with some support from Corel and others.

Come on, do you people really believe there are hundreds of hidden APIs that only Microsoft knows about? Get real!

Exactly! Microsoft would never lie to us little consumers. NT Workstation and NT Server are completely different operating systems, too!

Most of these so-called 'undocumented' APIs come from programmers forgetting to log certain changes or new implementations being made after the MSDN/WinAPI books go to press.

I wonder how you know this? Do you work for Microsoft? Even if you did, then that would work against you. It would mean that the truthfulness of everything you say is immediately suspect.

At any rate, the Windows API along with COM is a very flexible and extensible architecture that really does work pretty well.

This is a non-sequitur. We were talking about undocumented APIs, and then you start fawning about how "flexible and extensible" COM is.

In my line of work developing RAD applications, there is literally no other platform besides Windows, simply because the tools and interfaces for that type of work don't exist on Linux.

In other words, Microsoft can't have any hidden APIs because you really like the Windows development tools?

Your pro-Microsoft rant is pointless and your argument is pathetic. Perhaps you should contact the Wine developers and ask them if there are any undocumented Microsoft APIs. They should know, shouldn't they?

If Microsoft needs to use emulation if the new processor is so different, I think our friends at WINE may get a visit...

Think about how much windows code they can run with incomplete documentation. It's not that slow either.

/. is complaining about "Invalid Form Keys", but my username is daedalus587 and you can eMail me here (take off the "_NOSPAM"!): daedalus587@crosswinds.net_NOSPAM

At first, I liked the idea of this non-Sun OpenWindows, but if you think about it, it's probably simply a waste of their time. Of course, I am referring to the non-Sun OpenWindows in this post.

I can see the benefits of WINE. Then you could run a few Windows games on your Linux box, without having to put up with memory-hogging commercial (more importantly, Microsoft) bloatware. There is a large base of potential WINE users. But, who would want to use OpenWindows?

There is exactly one distinct market for OpenWindows: Windows lusers (oops, I mean users) who are sick of the Microsoft bloatware and upgrade cycle, but are not intelligent enought to see through the FUD, so they are "afraid" to use GNU/Linux.

Other than that, you really have to ask, who needs to use it? All you can run are Windows apps! So, instead of using proprietary Windows, you get to use an alternative! And, of course, there is no way that any alternative can completely reproduce M$'s brain-dead API, so it (due to gaps in the API) doesn't work as well as the Windows you got (free) with your computer!

I could see uses for this, if only WINE didn't exist. But, it does, which is good. Anyway, why use a Windows clone? When you can use WINE software, running under GNU/Linux, that lets you run Windows apps under GNU/Linux! IMHO, the OpenWindows team should collaborate with the WINE team, rather than using up valuable hacking time writing an OS with no future.

To summarize, normal users will want to stay with the M$ bloatware (M$ Windows 9x/2000/NT), for "stability, security, and compatibility" (the compatibility may be a valid point; how can you make something "more compatible" than the product you're trying to clone?). GNU/Linux users, on the other hand, will use WINE software, so they don't have to exit Linux and boot another OS. Therefore, there is basically no future for this product. Plus, the name "OpenWindows" is already taken by Sun Microsystems, although that product is only Windows 3.x compatible.

This isn't a flame. Good luck to the OpenWindows team, but I really hope they consider collaborating with the WINE project team, so they can spend their valuable time working towards a more valid goal: making M$ Windows apps run under GNU/Linux.

.net_NOSPAM is not a valid domain suffix. (take off the "_NOSPAM" when you eMail me...)

From reading their manifesto, it looks like they are trying to clone Windows 9x, not Windows NT. They talk about FAT, FAT32, real-mode drivers, and MS-DOS. There is no mention of NTFS, UNICODE, security, or WDM protected-mode drivers.

If this is true, the mind boggles. Let me see if I understand this. They want to clone an OS that has no security, no crash protection, and which (after Windows ME) Microsoft has declared there will be no follow-on versions. Is this right?

And they're throwing in a clone NDIS/TCP/Winsock stack, and OLE (the whole graphical nightmare, not just COM), and DOS support. Hey it's just an all-nighter right? Have they seen Ralf Brown's INT 21 list for DOS? It is the size of a phone book. And that's just for DOS. In short they aim to clone $10+ billion of bug-compatible legacy software created over 15+ years, basically from scratch.

Compare this to WINE, a serious emulation project with modest goals to emulate the Win32 API over Unix. They are working on the GDI, DirectX, DLL interception, security, etc. These people are working on genuine technical issues related to Windows compatiblity. Meanwhile the Open Windows guys are soliciting for snapshots of screen layouts that look cool.

It's like your kids building a sand castle and they say "this is going to be as big as your house Daddy!". You just have to smile and wish them luck.

No, it's not (the suite you're thinking of is Wind/U); neither is it built over MainWin or WINE. It would be even slower if that were the case.

"I want to use software that doesn't suck." - ESR
"All software that isn't free sucks." - RMS

Due to tight project schedules, the Corel WINE team has been working pretty much in isolation for the last few months. With the graphics release behind us, we're looking forward to working more closely with the WINE community. We're really excited about some of the recent WINE developments (like address space separation) and want to help WINE move towards a 1.0 release. We will soon be actively working on merging our WINE changes back to the WineHQ public WINE source tree. We also hope to contribute where we can towards the 1.0 WINE release.
Again our thanks go to all of the WINE developers. The credits page for our applications list all of the WINE authors. Without WINE we would not have been able to port these applications to Linux in such a short period of time. It's also a testament to the maturity of WINE (and Linux) that these highly complex applications run with full functionality and good performance.

I think we're missing the point here.
The X-box is an example of the fruits of capitalism.
You see, Capitalism is a double-edged sword.
With competition comes competitive products, and theoretically, competitive prices.
However, separate groups do not benefit from each others accomplishments leading to large amounts of duplicated (read: wasted) effort.
Under communism, we probably would have no x-box, and there would be no N64 or Dreamcast
There would be a PlayStation 7 and a N256.
They would play every game on the market, have stunning graphics, run blazingly fast, and cost very little to produce.
The missed point here is that the Open Source movement is parallel to Marxist Communism.
Each person gives according to his ability, and recieves according to his needs.
While the open source movement is aided by the fact that the cost of getting the product to many people is not significantly more than getting it to a few, The fact remains that under the right conditions such a system can be very succesful.
I agree that greed is a very real and necessary motivator, but it doesn't mean wanting more than the person next door, it means wanting more than you need.
This definition makes the matter clearer:
To want/get/have more than the person next door is childish and futile.
To want/get/have more than you need is natural and normal.
The world may not be ready for communism, but the general trend of civilization is that technology allows for needs to be taken care of with less and less effort, and for increasing focus on wants.
Some day, maybe not long from now, software will generally be free, and people will pay programmers for customization, custom solutions, and added features.
Some day, maybe not long from now, food will generally be free, and people will work that extra hour to get a PlayStaion 7.

To be more on topic,
If microsoft made a game console that used a slightly faster version of the same processor as one of their competitors, they could write a program that would be less of an emulator than another implementation of the other game console.
This is, ironically, parallel to the (Marxist?) project that will some day, maybe not long from now, be their downfall.

They could teach a thing or two to the Wine and VMware people. MAME's success in emulating the most oddball hardware/software configurations imaginable is nothing short of heroic. And yes, you guessed it, I'm an early-80's arcade nut. :)


"Standing up to an evil system is exhilarating." --Richard Stallman

I like the /. icon (not logo) better for the story positings, personally. Not because the Wine logo is bad, but because it does not capture the essence of what Wine is all about (running "Windows" programs). To someone unfamiliar with WINE, the /. icon is self-explanitory.

So unbundling is now legal in Germany, what about Microsoft no longer selling anything in Germany?

How is that a bad thing? Computers will come with a BSD or GNU/Linux system installed on the HD. If the Deutsch want their precious Winblowz apps, software developers will contribute to Wine.

what if ... Billy says "Naw, screw it, I'll just close the company instead."

Again, how is that a bad thing?

Because you hadn't agreed to the license agreement

While we're on that topic, why not have your grandma, your toddler, or your cat click the "agree" button? That's the fatal flaw of shrink- and click-wrap license agreements. This would also help the Wine project, as it allows legal reversing of Windows.

Hmmm, the Wine logo seems to be a bit unstable on my system. :-)

BTW, how was the logo made? It would be cool if it was drawn with a tool running under Wine...

"At it's best, it's crappy windows emulation with worse performance

"Wine is an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer."

"Is Wine an emulator?

Unfortunately, no. Wine provides low-level binary compatibility, but currently only for OSes running on Intel-compatible chips. "

"At it's best, it's crappy windows emulation with worse performance

"Wine is an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer."

"Is Wine an emulator?

Unfortunately, no. Wine provides low-level binary compatibility, but currently only for OSes running on Intel-compatible chips. "

No luck on Diablo 2 yet (or Tribes apparently), but Tribes 2 will be ported to Linux (mentioned here)... hopefully at some point the majority of PC gaming titles will be available with native Linux clients. However, the only way to bring that about is to support what's there already, so be sure to put your $ where your convictions lie :)

Come on, man, how hard is it to type www.winehq.com</a>???

In conclusion, I hate you.

Wine is apparently approching a stable 1.0 release sometime in the next several months, I believe (my source is previous Wine news updates on WineHQ).

A 1.0 release won't mean everything will be complete, but it will mean tha a known set of application will work with it. The most frustrating thing about Wine is how applications may work in one version, not the next version since the code is always changing. As a result, one often has to have several versions of Wine loaded for specific applications that run well with that particular version.

First of all, this API is crap. Anyone who has done some coding with OpenGL wouldn't touch DirectX with a 5 foot long stick.
Second (related to first) DirectX is too tightly tied to COM and win32. (Surprised? Why would M$ implement a generic API?) Implementing DirectX would essentially involve implementing COM and parts of win32. There are people who've been doing this for quite a while. Unsuccessfully.
___

I've been trying to replace my mac with a linuxbox for several months now and Helixcode.com is the best begining to doing this. Not only does it come with a great set of software and a vastly enhansed set of features over the standard Gnome Desktop they are also creating the "killer email client" for Gnome called Evolution. This isn't avaiable yet and I do strongly suggest trying Balsa fro the time being. I love the automated updates and the smooth installer program. Here's my list of programs to start with Gimp (images) Abiword (wordprocessor) gedit (text) gnumeric (spreadsheet) navigator (web) balsa (email) bluefish (html) amaya (web layout) gftp (ftp) Also WINE is a wonderfull program for running the "nessary windows" programs. Their application compatability database is wonderfull for finding what can and will work. The primary reason I still use a mac for my "Production Computer" is Macromedia's Dreamweaver 3 and it's inability to run through WINE.
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macbert@hcity.net

Since the core of the OS X is unix. Does this mean that quicktime will be ported to other *nix systems?(i.e. linux)

People keep asking this, and the answer is probably not. The BSD layer is in the middle, underneath all the GUI stuff. Anything graphical is written using Apple's proprietary APIs.

I can imagine, though, that if you're running on PPC, something like Wine might work out. And of course, you can run MacOS under Linux/PPC right now with Mac-on-Linux. (Hey, anyone know if MacOS X will work under that?)

YOu need to install Wine in order to be able to use windows biniaries, it isn't akernel thing. As a sidenote, not all probably will work, even with wine.

Yeah, post to comp.emulators.mswindows.wine about it.

Also, check WineHQ for info.

Many folks have complained about TKWine being unmaintained; your changes would be quite welcome.

As for a UNIX version of Windows, see WINE:
http://www.winehq.com/

Anyways, with the API, why build a clone of windows in the first place? The APIs could be used heavily in the completion of fine OpenSource projects such as Wine. It has been thought that they have mis released some product specifications. It would explain why there's a slight performance edgein some M$ products. (C) 2000 Mr. Roboto enterprises. All APIs of this rant have been published

Not just slightly offtopic;-)

Anyway, I used to run Win NT on VMware (not the latest version) in my last job. We had a license for Win Maple, but not for Linux, and sometimes I had to write some Maple stuff for teaching. Worked fine, and I certainly tried some other apps, and besides sound everything worked fine (haven't tried to fix that). When I have to use a Windows app, I like it to run in a X-Window, so I still can use my preferred system.

I will probably have to use the W98 partition of my current notebook under VMware in my new job, too. But I definitely would prefer using Wine to run them. Tried it recently again, and they did a great job since last. So, if the Win-apps you have to use run with Wine, forget about VMware, if not, it's a good 2nd choice.

try http://www.winehq.com/

• The MS APIs are probably the best-documented in the industry.

Say what?!?! The way MS has been insuring that MS Office and other MS-AP products work better than anyone else is through the use of non-documented APIs. If you really think MS has published documents for all it's OS APIs, talk to the WINE people who are attempting to duplicate it.

--Benabik Alvar

Just check out http://www.winehq.com/Apps and search for the programs you're interested in. You have to be aware that the revievers are not necessarily talking about the same WINE snapshot, so look for the most recent reviews.

I totaly agree with Passion. I don't think the Judge realises that he just opened up a Pandoras box concerning the emulation of software. This paves the way for WINE to reverse engineer the Microsoft library to better emulate windows for running the windows software. If the happens, I am sooo there.

Isn't Linux a matter of choice ?

I can't see why a Linux implementation of OpenGL/ Direct3D/Glide/Grits3D or any other 3D API I can think of would hurt anyone.

If Linux's creed was unification, it would hurt, but Linux is about choice. So if you think OpenGL is the best 3D API, it's OK. But it's OK if some folks decide to implement Direct3D too (and they do !), it's OK too.

Stéphane

It even runs fine under Wine :)
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sig sig sputnik

Whoa there cowboy! Are you bitter or what! Lets cover a few things here...

1. Our linux version is _free_ you can download it now from our web page.

2. why do you ask if I'm trolling about our freedoms? Are you one of those open source people who think freedom is secondary to functionality? Sorry bud, not me.

3. Yes, my managers ask about API's. All of our owners are programmers that work on our projects and the director of R&D worked as one of the main developers of our linux version. Sorry your company is lame, mine isn't.

4. As for an emulation layer. Do you know what winelib is? It wasn't as easy as a recompile, but we had to modify about 1% of our code to get it to run.

5. As far as the GPL comment, I was talking about the standard API we, the linux community, decide on.

___________________________
Michael Cardenas
http://www.fiu.edu/~mcarde02
http://www.deneba.com/linux

:) I must admit I can't imagine what their code looks like - I've never worked in a closed-source environment or any other environment motivated only by salaries.
However, this particular thing should be VERY easy to track down even in totally messed up code.
We all know the password is stored backwards in the binary, so it all comes down to searching for the string
"!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN" in the code, then looking where it's accessed and
removing that code.

Anyone @microsoft.com: Here's an offer. Give me the source code (to all of Windoze and this dll) and I'll fix this backdoor in less than 5 minutes. Only condition: I want to be able and allowed to
submit the code to wine for whatever use they see fit. ;)

Wine does not work with XFree4.0, because of libpthread vs. Wine's own clone-based threading mechanism. See http://www.winehq.com for more details.

I wouldn't be very surprised if this license agreement only applies to vmware versions of win98+nt or winnt+2000 and does not apply to linux+win bundles.

Think about it:
1. If I want linux on win I can go for a umsdos based distrib or get lnx4win from mandrake which runs from an image and saves file permissions etc.
2. If I want win over linux; I am already a linux user; why not use Wine? or just dual boot to a win partition? a couple of scripts to dd the partition and restore it for multiple install testing. No performance hit, no svga problems, no fake peripherals in a virtual machine.

This is probably cements marketshare for vmware in msdn where developers need to cope with the plethora of different ms oses. Vmware is probably also concerned about plex86 eating into their win on linux market!

YOU LINUS PEOPLE ARE FOOLS, YOU CANT EVEN DIAL UP TO AOL YET!

Wine is not an emulator, but it does run some versions of the AOL client through an ISP and BYOA.

>So as long as WINE is GPL (it is, right?)

Uhhhh... no.

It's under what (I guess) is called the WINE License which is a lot closer to the BSD license than the GPL.

And no, there's no provision (as far as I can tell) that stipulates that all files you link into an original work have to be open. Derived works have to be, but not the original, as long as it's linked in, not included in the source code. So linking closed-source VBScript/JScript would be ok. Of course, this is only my interpretation and IANAL (duh).

--
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
- Sean