Slashdot Mirror

Let's get one thing clear: I am NOT Balmer trying astroturf.

No, you are some other guy astroturfing for him, right?

Don't try to tell me that Linux is faster. It's not. Don't try to tell me that Linux can do everything that Windows can do. It can't.

I don't believe you. Now what? Can you present actual arguments without googling for "linux" "unsupported" and posting some crap about CMYK in GIMP? Or is it the best that Microsofties could come up with?

I won't tell you that Windows is just as secure, or that Windows can do everything Linux can do, as they are also lies.

No. Actually EVERYTHING you have said is a lie. What you are trying to hide by pretending to be "fair and balanced".

What I will tell you is that the software I needed is there.
What I will tell you is that the hardware support I needed is there.

Hardware? Really? You are talking about hardware support ON A NETBOOK THAT WAS SPECIFICALLY MADE TO BE COMPATIBLE WITH LINUX???!!

What the fuck did you smoke before writing that?

Perhaps sometime down the road when the various flavors of Linux

There are no "various flavors of Linux". All distributions include and support the same software, however never actually using Linux you wouldn't know that.

support Pure-Edge

grants.gov provides a Citrix ICA server to access that shitty software from non-Windows systems (no one else actually uses it). Wine supports it better than Vista (see thread). Did you notice that it doesn't run on your sparkling new Vista box? That's right, you didn't because you never tried.

and CAC readers

They are supported. Of course, you didn't know that, you just assumed that a random obscure piece of hardware used by US government is unlikely to be supported. Guess what, you were wrong, and now everyone can see how little you know about something you so passionately denounce.

, I will be able to return. Otherwise you'll just have to wait at least three more years before I get out.

Your attempts to find Linux deficiencies on Google happened to be a total failure, so I don't think, you are going to "return" anywhere. Most likely you never used Linux in the first place.

What I will tell you is that the [*]ubuntites are a confusing squirming mass of trustafarians who eat their own, and find spinning cubes to be of more importance than achieving real productivity in a high pressure work environment.

What I will tell you is that the software I needed is there.
What I will tell you is that the hardware support I needed is there.
What I will tell you is that the [*]ubuntites are a confusing squirming mass of trustafarians who eat their own, and find spinning cubes to be of more importance than achieving real productivity in a high pressure work environment.

And here we can see your true face. You hate us. You are trying to find some way to demonstrate your supposed superiority, a way to convince (yourself or others) that your decision to always use Microsoft software is somehow justified, and your opponents are somehow deficient.

The problem is, we don't care what you think about us. You aren't convincing anyone -- us, linux users, or your supposed audience, potential netbook users. You sound like a Microsoft marketdroid, and you may or may not actually be one, however one thing is clear -- you are too stupid for us to care.

Hey look, a used car salesman got hired as a Microsoft astroturfer. Let's listen to him because he said, he can use perl.

Go, fuck yourself. (posted from OLPC XO running Ubuntu)

In my experience a lot of people (normal users) will always ask you for IE and Office, simply because they are use to those programs and don't want to change. (creatures of habits).

I think the solution is perfecting Wine to the point that you can run all major windows application without big problems. (excluding IE that is a virus disguised as a web browser)

For applications that can't be executed in Wine maybe the soultion could be using something like Fusion . But of course, this is not an option for Netbooks because of the resources constraints.... (I don't know if there is something that works as well as fusion in Linux)

Don't ever dare compare the OS X operating system to windows or even Linux with WINE in terms of gaming ever again.

You do realise that WINE is available for OSX? It's working pretty well so actually OSX has parity with Linux plus the advantage of quite a few native titles being available.

s (Ventrilo doesn't work on linux yet...).

yes it does

Sounds mysterious... ...my own XP PC, and the one I had at my last job did not show that problem. But it certainly sounds like you did your homework in checking for viruses. Maybe it is a "legitimate" application that steals the resources. So I'd try the following things:

1) Take an affected PC and clean out the various autostart mechanisms. Take notes and observe if killing a particular service/application fixes the problem. A nice tool to help you there is available from Microsoft: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

2) If 1) fails, check if your Windows-only software runs on WINE (http://winehq.org/). If yes, Linux is an option again.

Code written in [ECMAScript over the HTML and CSS DOM] needs to run on multiple different implementations with no properly accepted standards. Contrast that to C, which yeah, has a number of various flavors, but it only matters that you have a compiler that understands that dialect.

You need 1. the compiler, 2. the libraries, and 3. the loader. Even if you have a compiler for the architecture, that doesn't mean you have the libraries. Windows home editions doesn't come with POSIX and X11 libraries, nor does GNU/Linux come with Win32 libraries unless you install Winelib. Missing libraries are to C as missing DOM elements are to JavaScript. And even with a compiler and libraries, it may still be impossible to run your program because a lot of platforms' executable loaders throw an exception if the executable isn't correctly signed by the platform owner.

Wine Is Not An Emulator.

WINAE? Is that a fork of WINE? ;)

Meanwhile we've got Python and Ruby applications they don't have to compromise for powerful GUIs and they're available everywhere.

.Net isn't what new Linux development should use. It should only be used for compatibility, like Wine.

Indeed. Arse!

Oh well, this is the sort of thing VirtualBox was made for ;-D

"Can I run photoshop in linux? Nope. "

Uh, yes you can. See Wine AppDB. Photoshop CS3 support isn't that great but CS2 runs just fine.

"Can I run 3dsmax in linux? Nope."

Run Blender.

And yet for many users they must manually edit and configure xorg.conf to get anything to work, and sometimes they never get it to work.

The chronometer on your time machine is malfunctioning -- it's 2008.

Xorg is painfully slow

It's so slow that my Windows games running under Crossover games/Wine which actively translate DXSL to GLSL in real time for a graphics server that isn't even running on ring-0 (like Windows and OS X are) is able to beat both OS X and Windows XP/Vista in performance and quality (I can boot the quality settings right up without performance issues) on the same hardware.

Now try Gentoo which doesn't autoconfigure X and see how X performs with your hardware.

I'd rather be gaming with my already good enough, better FPS than Windows/OS X setup. I'm not that much of a tweaker.

No, we don't want to run your fucking OS. Get that through your head.

I have gotten it through my head.

What I still am unclear of, is why you have to bitch and moan? If you don't want to use it, don't use it. Simple as that.

By the way, Linux does run 'serious' programs. As I sit here idly working away at a personal project on my Gentoo Linux 2008.0 install... I am also running a complete legal (open the setup.exe and click-click-click) install of Adobe Photoshop CS2 (Not the latest, I know. But I own this one) I've been running it under WINE since February this year. I also have Macromedia Flash 8 (which I own as well).

Not to mention the huge database of applications that run under WINE.

Anything you can do on Windows, I can do better on Linux.

According to posts in Bethesda forums (see http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index.php?showforum=36 ), some people have got their game not to crash by tinkering with ffdshow settings, installing codec packs, (un)installing seemingly random programs. Some people have reported the game not working when a not-so-common sound card is installed.

Just for reference, the game doesn't work in Wine either. See
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15839

- Quicken

Quicken, Quicken 2007 - 2008 works decently in Codeweavers.

- Civ4

According to, http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=2514 apparently runs very well.

- Neverwinter Nights

Also apparently runs very well.
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=870

- web (using Firefox)

- copy DVDs

I'm assuming you know of k3b.

Three of those can be done natively in either Linux or Windows - the other two require jumping through several, arguably complicated hoops. What's the point?

I pretty much stick to using Crossover over Wine for my games and everything. It uses a brain dead UI (my games work well with it - some of which have more FPS than under Windows natively).

- Quicken

Quicken, Quicken 2007 - 2008 works decently in Codeweavers.

- Civ4

According to, http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=2514 apparently runs very well.

- Neverwinter Nights

Also apparently runs very well.
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=870

- web (using Firefox)

- copy DVDs

I'm assuming you know of k3b.

Three of those can be done natively in either Linux or Windows - the other two require jumping through several, arguably complicated hoops. What's the point?

I pretty much stick to using Crossover over Wine for my games and everything. It uses a brain dead UI (my games work well with it - some of which have more FPS than under Windows natively).

But how does it compare running Photoshop CS3, or Adobe Lightroom?

Not as well, but it still runs fine.

Epic fail.

From the Wine website: "As Wine's name says: 'Wine Is Not an Emulator'"

Maybe try learning how Wine works?

The name of wine stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator", not "WINdows Emulator". See Wine Myths for more information.

Great! Can you give the URL for where I can download the version for Ubuntu?/P

Ubuntu comes with Wine by default, and it works fine with Word Viewer, so simply downloading the Windows version of Word Viewer and installing it, should be sufficient.

Great! Can you give the URL for where I can download the version for Ubuntu?/P

Ubuntu comes with Wine by default, and it works fine with Word Viewer, so simply downloading the Windows version of Word Viewer and installing it, should be sufficient.

Download winetricks then run:

sh winetricks dotnet11 dotnet20

Bingo. .NET under wine.

you can run Portal and Starcraft perfectly in wine.

WoW also works fin in wine. you may be able to get rid of windows depending what other MMORPGS you play

you can run Portal and Starcraft perfectly in wine.

WoW also works fin in wine. you may be able to get rid of windows depending what other MMORPGS you play

you can run Portal and Starcraft perfectly in wine.

WoW also works fin in wine. you may be able to get rid of windows depending what other MMORPGS you play

Does valve hate linux?

Nope, they have released a CLI steam client for downloading, updating and installing Linux game servers.

Anyway has anyone had success running steam and valve games in VMware or should I just not bother?

Steam runs fine under Crossover games for me. However due to a screw up by the team at X.org, the X11 server on Ubuntu hardy has some issues that could be problematic for some games.

Don't forget that Microsoft still need to be backward compatible as much as possible. It is possible that MS rewrote the image handling code, but kept it compatible with the way Win3.1 handles images such that they share the issue.

Another possibility is that MS are keeping the Win3.1 binaries to run 3.1 applications, as 3.1 applications are 16-bit. Microsoft are known for (as can be seen by the huge WinSxS folder in Vista) for keeping older versions of their libraries around. For example, comctl32 is kept around for programs that display the classic look (you need to opt in for the themed look), and all of the d3d[8/9/10]x_[26/../39/..].dll files that populate your system.

Also (not being a developer at Microsoft), I don't know how extensive the rewrites are, I can only deduce this from what I read about from sources like Paul Thurott and wikipedia.

Also, the Wine test results at http://test.winehq.org/data/ give a good indication at this. Those indicate a large variance in behaviour between the versions of Windows, but also show similarity between some of them (e.g. 95 and 98).

The Wine team are busy fixing these so that the tests should pass on all platforms, therefore some of this variance is being lost. (NOTE: some of these problems are differences in platform setup.)

According to the Crossovers Compatibilities list, Outlook 2007 is rated meh (my interpretation of bronze) with a few silver ratings by other people. http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=2841
This is of course for Crossover's version of wine with their proprietary fixes, for good ol gnu wine has Outlook 2007 listed as garbage.

Personally, I would nag on the IT people to free themselves from depending on an untrustworthy company.

On the Forex front, MetaTrader4 works great under wine - after installing a couple of .dlls.

There appears to be absolutely no mention of WINE.

I'm sure you've tried it, but just sayin'.

If there is no support, perhaps go do some hacking around yourself? Or use all of those earnings and put a bounty on a Win program to be ported?

For the humor impaired I'm aware that vmware does not run on CE.

Just for interest for people who didn't know, if you started with a netbook with a hard disk and Linux ... you can install Virtual box and then run Windows or even Windows CE I suppose under that.

http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-virtualbox-2.0.0-on-ubuntu-8.04-desktop

No cost ... apart from the Windows and the Windows applications you might want to run.

A higher-performing and simpler option might be to install Wine. You wouldn't be guaranteed to able to install and run **EVERY** Windows application (especially applications that explicitly try to make sure they are being installed on "genuine Windows") ... but you should be able to run most Windows applications this way.

Wine is up to version 1.1.4 these days:
http://www.winehq.org/

It has fairly extensive compatibility ... except as I say for applications that deliberately try to self destruct if they suspect they are not running on "genuine" Windows.

I have even heard a rumour that there are some applications from a certain near-monopoly supplier that attempt to discover if the OS is running native or under a VM and will stop working if they see a VM. Now **THAT** is truly going to great lengths just to be difficult and to try to rip customers off.

Wine proper uses X. There is a darwine port that was originally for PowerPC, that now maps onto quartz (see http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX).

CrossOver has a Mac version that they helped out to write with the Darwine team. It looks like the code for the native quartz driver got merged into wine 0.9.56, but I don't know what it's current state is.

Well, like a lot of
Windows apps Chrome does some, uh, interesting things that you might not expect a them to do :) For instance it does all the multi-process and security stuff. But then it also does what a lot of Windows programs do these days and replace the standard window management stuff as well. It relies on parts of Internet Explorer as well (like the HTTP library).

If you want an example of the sort of fun they had making things work, the bug this patch fixes was "Chrome URL bar has a black background" yet the fix is to the low level assembly generated by Wines build process. That's because Chrome shims BeginPaint/EndPaint by patching the in-memory system DLL headers, so it can muck about with the Windows richedit control internals and the Chrome IAT patcher didn't support Borland style imports.

For a program that has such complicated interactions with the OS, and is so heavily reliant on it for functionality, 11 days is remarkably good actually. A good sign of Wines increasing maturity.

In case anyone is interested, the important parts of this work are available in a Free form, one way or the other. We're using a build of Wine equivalent to WineHQ of about mid week last week, along with a few patches that haven't been committed yet. I've sent along a few more details to the Wine devel mailing list.
Cheers,
Jeremy

Sweet - thanks for the tip! I found the Wine/Spore report page - looks like there are still a few bugs, but very promising.

http://wiki.winehq.org/Chrome https is not yet supported, but page loading speed isn't bad.

Wine 1.1.4 specifically includes "Several fixes for Google Chrome support". https support is still missing, though.

It's http://www.winehq.org/, not http://www.wine.org/...

Try this link for Wine.

http://www.winehq.org/

It was just a typo, but thanks for correcting anyway.

Incidentally, I've made a standalone installer using the BitRock InstallBuilder.
The resulting package is neat, small (318 MB), includes it's own copy of wine, and even comes with an uninstaller.

If I find a suitable hosting solution I will share the link here.

Cheers, XnPlater

Try this link for Wine.

http://www.winehq.org/

Wino.
Well the very fact that we're talking about Wino means it is observable, even if only by the absence of something else.

Wine.
From winehq, "Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems."
From dictionary.com:
emulator. 1. to try to equal or excel; imitate with effort to equal or surpass
3. Computers. a. to imitate (a particular computer system) by using a software system, often including a microprogram or another computer that enables it to do the same work, run the same programs, etc., as the first.

In conclusion, Wino is observable, and Wine is an emulator.

http://appdb.winehq.org/
Most of the apps listed in the "top 10" lists on that page are games.

I'm sorry, but Wine is developed in a way that *includes* all the quirks/bugs, specifically to run games that use these.

I's even on their features page: http://www.winehq.org/site/wine_features
* "bug-for-bug" compatibility with Windows

From the HOWTO on the 1.0 version from the "C&C: generals" page you linked to:

4. Once the installation is done, find yourself a no-cd crack and replace the original game.dat and generals.exe with the cracked ones.

I don't consider a requirement of installing a no-cd crack as being good enough to say that a game runs in Wine (see this: "... some would advocate the use of illegally modified or "cracked" games, Wine does not support, advocate, or even view this as a solution").

However, it seems reasonable to consider the other games to be working under Wine — I haven't run Oblivion myself, but RA2 and Starcraft run fine (although I do occasionally have issues with RA2 on a slow computer).

From the HOWTO on the 1.0 version from the "C&C: generals" page you linked to:

4. Once the installation is done, find yourself a no-cd crack and replace the original game.dat and generals.exe with the cracked ones.

I don't consider a requirement of installing a no-cd crack as being good enough to say that a game runs in Wine (see this: "... some would advocate the use of illegally modified or "cracked" games, Wine does not support, advocate, or even view this as a solution").

However, it seems reasonable to consider the other games to be working under Wine — I haven't run Oblivion myself, but RA2 and Starcraft run fine (although I do occasionally have issues with RA2 on a slow computer).

speaking of that, video codecs are a WAY bigger problem than flash. Anyone can live without flash. I'd put codecs and games way before flash any way. And if Red Alert 2/Oblivion/Generals/Starcraft can't run on Linux, I'm installing Windows.

I guess it's a good thing they all run in Wine then. I was just playing Starcraft less than an hour ago, actually.

As for video codecs, I've never run into a video I couldn't play before.

speaking of that, video codecs are a WAY bigger problem than flash. Anyone can live without flash. I'd put codecs and games way before flash any way. And if Red Alert 2/Oblivion/Generals/Starcraft can't run on Linux, I'm installing Windows.

I guess it's a good thing they all run in Wine then. I was just playing Starcraft less than an hour ago, actually.

As for video codecs, I've never run into a video I couldn't play before.

speaking of that, video codecs are a WAY bigger problem than flash. Anyone can live without flash. I'd put codecs and games way before flash any way. And if Red Alert 2/Oblivion/Generals/Starcraft can't run on Linux, I'm installing Windows.

I guess it's a good thing they all run in Wine then. I was just playing Starcraft less than an hour ago, actually.

As for video codecs, I've never run into a video I couldn't play before.

speaking of that, video codecs are a WAY bigger problem than flash. Anyone can live without flash. I'd put codecs and games way before flash any way. And if Red Alert 2/Oblivion/Generals/Starcraft can't run on Linux, I'm installing Windows.

I guess it's a good thing they all run in Wine then. I was just playing Starcraft less than an hour ago, actually.

As for video codecs, I've never run into a video I couldn't play before.

Debunking Wine Myths

for those applications that do work and from a purely subjective point of view, performance is good. There is no obvious performance loss

http://www.winehq.org/site/myths#slow

The goal of Wine is a full reimplementation of the Windows API which will make Windows unnecessary.

Empahasis mine.
http://www.winehq.org/site/myths