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It seems like WINE has been around forever. And here there is this minor update, yippee! What annoys me is this lack of 64 bit support. Late last year I finally switched completely (for the most part) to Linux due to Window's lack of 64bit support. Mind you, I was shocked and stunned (or is it the other way around) that I was getting better hardware support under Linux then Windows. But what has been disappointing is a need for some applications that do not exist under Linux, and where no comparable alternatives exist (Photoshop, Microsoft Visio, etc. - and no, Gimp is not comparable. Its not even comparable to Paint Shop Pro). For my college classes, I sometimes need to access systems that are in effect DRMed and only work under IE (that whole invasive ActiveX, junk up your system crud). Their solution to accessing this under Linux is to use WINE. Which, seems to be only 32 bit. I could have swore I read something awhile back suggesting they were going to be doing a 64 bit version this year. I take it this hasn't happened yet. In light of this slashdot article post, I've once again looked into WINE. I have recently discovered WineOn64Bit article on the WINE Wiki. Will shoot for giving that a try in the next few days. Has anyone else done this successfully? Any caveats not mentioned in that article? Or does anyone know anything about some native 64 bit WINE?

chaosite wrote:
> Yes, it has gotten way better.
> It has support for Direct3D, tons of winapi functions, etc... It's pretty awesome at this stage, really.

Oblivion, perhaps the most widely acclaimed game from last year, runs pretty well on Wine 0.9.38. Someone made changes to the DirectX thread-related code that causes Oblivion under Wine to crash for every version since. The lesson here is that the newest version of Wine is not necessarily the best one to use for any given application.

We don't need Cedega anymore. I'm actually running some games under Wine and they perform as expected under Windows. Yes, even those fast 3D FPS.
Of course not all games are supported, but the list is growing; take a look at the App DB list.
Some of them install just fine, some others need a bunch of dlls copied here and there, but usually you have a working game in a matter of minutes.

And it's not just about games: Wine is getting mature to a point it can actually replace Windows even in a development environment. Need to test web pages with IE and have no disk space to waste for a Windows partition? Here's IE for Linux .
I've also succesfully installed and used different versions of Delphi (the best Windows RAD out there, don't even try to argue that:^) provided one doesn't try to use ActiveX components, something most non mcsd drones will see as an improvement rather than a setback.

Sorta reminds me of the old days when I used OS/2 as a multitasker for DOS programs. I needed a reliable way to test some client/server Clipper db apps I was writing and OS/2 was the only way to rapidly build and test on a single machine what had to work on several PCs in a netbios network.
Another funny thing is that the small fonts I used in those apps to gain maximum screen space worked perfectly under both native DOS and OS/2 VDMs (DOS boxes) but always crashed Windows 95 terminals.

To me it's history repeating again: looks like Windows is doomed to be beaten by something else even in its own field.

To be fair, Wine does suffer quite a lot from regressions. Don't take my word for it - look up a few of your favourite games on the AppDB and notice how the playability level varies from one release to the next.

That's not so likely to be a problem with the major apps. World of Warcraft and MS Office are likely to be rested between releases, so they tend to be fairly stable. On the other hand, it's pretty much a crap-shoot whether Deus Ex (my favourite use for Wine) will work with any particular release.

Don't get me wrong; I think Wine is a fantastic project, and the number of apps they can handle has risen steadily over the time I've been using it. But being realistic, the do have a problem with regressions. Once it gets out of beta, that will hopefully change.

Wine releases every 14 days, see http://winehq.org/ Are we now going to see these kinds of news on /. every time there's a trivial update? I can think of a couple of apps and releases that are a little more important...

WoW already runs on linux with the help of WINE, or its commercial equivalent Cedega - and after the kerfuffle towards the end of last year where a large number of false positives were returned by blizzard's anti-cheating code against individuals running WoW under Cedega, and the subsequent conversations between the Cedega and Blizzard guys, its fairly safe to say blizz are aware of this fact.

In general WINE and Cedega are becoming fairly well known within the game coding hemisphere - and the chance of native linux ports of games being released is decreasing. Why bother writing another client when you can be assured your windows client will work under linux if you are careful about how you write it?

Am I the only person who believes that WINE has their priorities screwed up??? You can't run any recent version of M$-Office (probably the 2nd-most-used application on the planet, behind IE) on Linux, but hey--you'll be able to run DX10 games on XP--or maybe even W2K! WTF?

I can see corporate desktop Linux taking off if MS-Office could run flawlessly using WINE... Yet, to this day, there are no "platinum" ratings for any version of MS-Office on WINE's AppHQ... (Office 2003 comes close with one "silver" rating).

According to Wine's application compatibility database, it works if you use this command:
TEMPDIR=$(mktemp) && cabextract -d $TEMPDIR wdviewer.exe && wine msiexec /i $TEMPDIR/WORDVIEW.MSI; rm -rf $TEMPDIR

(from the bottom of the page at http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=537 6 )

You do know that Wine is often faster than native Windows, don't you? http://wiki.winehq.org/BenchMark-0.9.5

Some people have been able to run Remedy via WINE under Linux.

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=232 1

Photoshop 6 works fine for me in plain old wine. The App DB says up to 7 works. CS and CS2 appear to have problems still....

While it might be infeasable to count the number of people using linux, it would be nice to be able to point some game development companies at a nice, large digit and say could we get some openGL games, please?

While I'd love to see more native linux clients out there, right now I'd be thrilled to just see more games using openGL because they seem to work so much better with WINE.

damages can be defined in many many terms

it's a scandal that this has happened at all.

Not that I really think it will make much of a difference on its own, but here's the email that I sent to info@parallels.com when I first read about this earlier today:

According to the information on the Wine wiki page

http://wiki.winehq.org/Parallels

there is a potential license violation of Wine intellectual
property in your Parallels Desktop for Mac product. Is this
true? If so, I will be forced to switch to VMware Fusion as I
refuse to support a company involved in the piracy of open
source software.

Please respond so that I can decide whether it will be necessary
for me to abandon your line of software.

Hopefully, if enough people complain to Parallels – and once they start to realize that they will lose customers over behavior like this – they will decide to do the right thing.

The WINE Project has been running for a decade and a half now, and is not too much closer to full Windows support than it was when it started.

Run windows apps on Linux

I meant that it shouldn't be possible to hack MS's DX10 to run on XP, but it's probably possible to write a port from the ground up. OTOH, if there are no XP DX10 drivers, there won't be much point.

Wine's DirectX implementation contains enough features that we can begin working on DirectX10. Part of the recent rewrite of DirectX moved 3D rendering code into a common library shared by all versions of Direct3D.

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=668 1, sorry

Peachtree (2006) will work on Wine, but needs some tweaking: http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=603 7

I miss Trillian
Why not try it with the latest wine? The last tested version was .9.30, the latest version is .9.38. See if it works for you.

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=399 4


BBH

Actually that isn't strictly true although using WINE on other arches isn't really worth the trouble. If you like, you can google up using x86 wine through QEMU on PPC. It's fairly slick in that you don't have to fire up an entire other os in a window but it's still hackish. It is also (theoretically) possible to recompile Windows apps to an alternate arch target with Winelib. It is my understanding though that that latter use case isn't very common and isn't well tested by the Wine team. That is a pity because it cuts into what is the best use of wine: quickly adapting a Windows app to a Linux environment. Wine is no great shakes as an general solution to running $RANDOM Windows app although it can do well as a way to quickly bring a targeted app to Linux.

http://www.winehq.org/site/docs/winelib-guide/wine lib-introduction

Shennanigans, call-eth I.

Can this "user friendly" ebook PDF reader be installed on my Linux-powered laptop? Nope. Screw it then, I'll keep buying my tagged-but-DRM-free eBooks from Manning.

Ubuntu (and any non-Windows OS) can't run Windows-only games.

It's not the fault of Linux or Ubuntu, and MS may be an evil monopoly, but most people don't care - it's just a practicality issue.

(and even then, they'd still need a warning).

Ubuntu (and any non-Windows OS) can't run Windows-only games.

It's not the fault of Linux or Ubuntu, and MS may be an evil monopoly, but most people don't care - it's just a practicality issue.

(and even then, they'd still need a warning).

Ubuntu (and any non-Windows OS) can't run Windows-only games.

It's not the fault of Linux or Ubuntu, and MS may be an evil monopoly, but most people don't care - it's just a practicality issue.

(and even then, they'd still need a warning).

Wine isn't an emulator exactly, I don't see speed differences between Wine and Windows.
Is Wine an emulator?

It looks like Dreamweaver 8 runs perfectly well under Wine.
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=348 2

You might also want to try Quanta as an alternative to Dreamweaver:
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/index.php

-- Mahatma Gandhi

Seriously, Microsoft is getting ready to pull off their kid gloves, now. They are really, truly, in a rather scary position.

1) Their flagship product, Microsoft Windows, is selling very softly. Word on the street is "don't buy until Service Pack 1, at least". (Told to me by our local computer store, I might add) Dell has reverted to Windows XP. Lots of public institutions are making very public noises about switching to alternatives, such as Ubuntu. What's worse is that some are actually doing it, and it's working. Apple OSX is ballooning. People are sick of viruses and dumb security alerts. The cost of supporting Windows clients has been rising almost exponentially as the number of band-aids required to keep a Windows system running has exploded. Anti-virus, Anti-spyware, Firewall, Malicious Software Removal kit, r00tkit detectors, frequent software updates, it's just getting to be too much for any reasonable non-technie to manage.

2) Their next big product, Microsoft Office, is similarly under heavy assault. The Massachussetts ODF debacle brought to the forefront the basis of Microsoft's lock-in, and jurisdictions are switching rapidly to ODF, PDF, and other open formats. Just today, we saw Norway joining the fray.

3) Their big ace in the hole is the Windows API. But they're losing that on several fronts:

3A) The Windows API is the cause of many security problems, since it's a buggy, insecure, festering pile.

3B) Even so, it's being emulated, warts and all with increasing effectiveness with the WINE codebase.

3C) Lastly, it's just not as relevant anymore. New apps today are commonly web-based, partly to avoid the problems inherent in client-side software.

Case in point: I had a school contact me JUST TODAY and ask if our product (normally Windows/Mac) would work with WINE. (No need for WINE - it's GTK-based)

4) They've almost completely failed to diversify their product line despite trying for over 10 years to do so. They have other, profitable products, but the amount earned by MSN and Xbox is a pittance compared to what Windows and Office earn for them.

So why wouldn't they fight back with whatever they have? They're SCARED SILLY. They have BILLIONS of dollars in their war chest, and their revenue stream might be flat, but there's still an INSANE amount of cash available. They won't take this lying down, folks.

Get ready for the fight of your lives - this will make SCO look like yesterday's donuts.

And perhaps we could also add a link to http://appdb.winehq.org/. Here we see, that there certainly is a good deal of effort put into running Windows games on Linux.

From the Picasa FAQ:

A: If Picasa for Linux is successful, then other Google applications (and future versions of Picasa) may also be ported using Wine. (Google Earth won't be one of them, though; it will be a native Linux application.) For more info on Wine, please visit http://winehq.org./

So the absolute worst case scenario here is that installing software in Ubuntu is as easy as installing software on Windows, but chances are it will be much much easier. Basically everything about your post was FUD, and not even intentional FUD, but ignorant FUD. From someone who claims to be a Linux developer (and a Wine developer too?), I can't fathom how you could not know this.

This isn't a case of not knowing, it's a case of having experienced stuff you apparently haven't.

Let me fill you in. What happens if you are not included in a distribution (or just as badly, included but packaged wrong or out of date)? As there's a lot of confusion around what this means, it means you aren't apt-gettable by end users. Not in the repositories.

Well, firstly you have to provide your own packages. That's OK if it's only one distro, but it quickly becomes annoying if it's several. And actually it's one package for each version of each distro. A package for Feisty isn't good enough. You need the last couple of versions as well, because not everybody upgrades at the same time. To do that you need a separate install of each version, and you need to build the package on each install, using multi-boots, or VMware, or chroots, or just relying on volunteers to fill in the gaps for you. So if there are 3 distros you want to support, each with 3 versions in the wild, that's 9 packages you need (therefore 9 independent OS installs). You can try and cheat by reusing older packages on newer distros but sometimes that breaks.

Then you have to tell your users how to install it. Look at the complexity of the page you linked to. This is a light year away from "just download and install it yourself". You have to copy and paste meaningless commands to add "keys" to your "apt list", whatever that is. You have to know which version of Ubuntu you have, although they all look pretty similar (yeah this stuff sounds real basic but people get stuck on simpler things). If you accidentally use the wrong one, you'll get a technical error message that isn't clearly related to your mistake. Or you'll get no error at all and it'll just crash or misbehave in some obscure way.

Inevitably, some people will get this wrong, resulting in additional support load for you.

If you don't have root (family machine?) then you're stuck, of course.

This is the best case scenario. Wine is a big project, and Ubuntu is a big distro, so it works out OK here. Users don't have to wait long after they upgrade before they regain access to their programs. If you use Fedora the situation is worse. If it's a smaller project, again, don't rely on getting a 3rd party repository (actually Wine is pretty rare in doing this).

See, this is what I have problems with. It's the general design of the software distribution scheme that's bogus. It can never work reliably. It's like Microsoft announcing that Vista will only install software you got from Microsoft Download Center ... nobody would accept that: it doesn't scale, MS aren't trusted to be impartial, etc. It wouldn't work for Microsoft, so why would it work for anybody else

No, from http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb you just go to http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/archive/index.html and click on the .deb file. Easier than installing windows apps.

Will they block this website too?

http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb

Um, WTF? If Windows doesn't include software I want, I download it and install in. For linux, it's probably in the distro's repository, so downloading and installing it is even easier. If it's not, then I'm back to where I am on Windows, download it and install it.

Now I doubt Ubuntu will setup a different repository for Dell installs, so Wine will likely be only an apt-get away. The announcement is just saying that Wine will not be in the default installation, for the logical reasons given.

But lets say you're right, and Ubuntu doesn't offer it for Dell installs, you just download it and install it yourself, it'll even handle downloading and installing any dependencies for you.

So the absolute worst case scenario here is that installing software in Ubuntu is as easy as installing software on Windows, but chances are it will be much much easier. Basically everything about your post was FUD, and not even intentional FUD, but ignorant FUD. From someone who claims to be a Linux developer (and a Wine developer too?), I can't fathom how you could not know this.

Have you used Wine recently?

To run modern games it generally requires a bit of tweaking, but there are a huge amount of things out that run without any configuration at all.

Take a look at the Platinum rated titles on the Wine AppDB - these run flawlessly with Wine without tweaking:

http://appdb.winehq.org/

I'm a huge wine fan. I spend several hours a day
doing Wine QA/triage, have some code in Wine myself,
and have helped release a commercial app using Wine. And although
I initially cringed when I saw that announcement,
I do think Mark's right, at least for now.
Wine can't run most Adobe apps without
fiddling (see http://wiki.winehq.org/AdobeApps ),
nor can it run the latest iTunes. Yet.
When it can, it'll be time for Mark to reevaluate.
Hopefully that'll be before the next release of Ubuntu...

I also noticed that the patent-writer listed gcc as a compiler that could (with suitable modifications) produce code that would be a use of the patent. Talk about adding insult to injury!

I should probably go look in the Wine debugging macros and see if any of them could be considered prior art for this...

Soldat 1.3.1 (the last version) worked perfectly under win 0.9.35 http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=964
According to the Authors message, with a bit of tweaking 1.4 will work as well.

http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2007-Ap ril/056237.html

"From a quick look at the strings in the lib, they use opengl, but import only very, very basic
functions ... just a hello world d3d10 implementation which doesn't do much more than return D3D_OK on CreateDeviceAndSwapchain"

Why reinvent the wheel, when you could just add the DX10 functionality to Wine?

looks like that's a project in this year's Summer of Code for Wine: http://wiki.winehq.org/SummerOfCode (scroll to the bottom)

You should be fair; it barely works.

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=744 0

Under wine, the game has no multiplayer and for some that could be considered completely unplayable, since I don't think many people buy RTS games for the singleplayer.

Everything was enabled with no changes to the setup I already had except the special mouse cursors which required a quick patching to the source code and recompiling of Wine (really isn't as bad as it may sound) using a pre-existing Windows installation. I experience maybe a 10% FPS drop which is generally to be expected with Wine. The Wine Application DB has detailed instructions on how to get any game that will work to work in Wine.

Wine handles Wow just as good as Cedega. If you're paying for Cedega just for WoW, stop... there's no benefit. If you use it for other games as well, then it's probably worth it. Just MHO.

Check here:
http://www.wowwiki.com/Linux/Wine
and here:
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=648 2