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Earlier versions of Pegasus Mail could run under WINE, see Wine Application DB - Viewing App - Pegasus Mail, so I hope this will continue. See also Pegasus Mail on Linux (or an intro to WINE).

I agree with one of the above posters: Wine is great.

The Apps Database shows Top X apps in each category. Gaming area has some surprising results, one of which being World of Warcraft (!) on their *GOLD* list, meaning it's virtually flawless.

Half-Life 2 is on there as well.

There's also other apps like Cedega which have a much larger library of supported games, but I believe you have to pay for it.

In any case, some of the most popular games out can run without a hitch.

The stumbling block is that I use a Canon i9900 printer in large format photorealistic mode, and a Wacom graphics tablet in Paint Shop Pro, for a very small percentage of my work, and there are no Linux equivalents. So I'm stuck with one toe in the Windows world. I can move more than 97% of my work to Linux at any time, but I'll have to go to WinXP to print the 11x17" photos and to do some of the photo touch-ups. I spend perhaps 4 hours a month on these activities-- it really is a small but important part of my work.

While I can't find any good news for the printer, most Wacom tablets are supported in Linux. As for Paint Shop Pro, most versions run in Wine, and I'm sure you've heard of GIMP before.

Wine has come an incredible way since it's conception. I am amazed by how well it runs some games (and other Windows software) these days. I think it's safe to say that by the time the Linux desktop is polished enough for average Joe, wine will have advanced to a point where it runs most Windows games/software very acceptably.

I would like to think that one day wine will actually be better at running Windows software than Windows itself is. This is possible because while Microsoft is intentionaly breaking compatability between releases, wine is being developed to run programs from any Windows version. Often programs actually run faster in wine as well, since the linux kernel generally manages things better.

In the meantime, you might give this a try...

Not quite. You won't get the same sort of CD copy protection compatibility, as they can't legally release the source. Even vanilla Wine has DX9 support now. The CVS version of Cedega would be pretty much useless if it didn't have DirectX support.

If it works in just about any other linux program, it should work in vanilla wine ( http://www.winehq.org/ ). Wine supports both joydev (/dev/jsXX) and linux-input (/dev/input/eventXX) devices. I've done a certain amount of work on the wine joystick subsystem over the last few months and it's working quite well. If you haven't tried recently, try with wine 0.9... you might be surprised. If you still can't get it to work and you'd like me to see if I can fix it, drop by #winehq on freenode or email me (google for my slashdot username and 'wine-patches' to find my email address, it's out there).

It's just platform chauvinism, plain and simple. It stems from a very simplistic world view, a sort of If you aren't 100% against them, you must be against us.

The irony is, it's often those who whine and complain the loudest about Micro$oft that do the least to support actual Open Source development.

Ooops, that was almost well thought out and reasoned... I should have just said: "You're new here, aren't you?"

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?versionId=2786 According to this, its quite usable in Wine.

You do know that MS Money 2004 is rated gold in the Wine app db.

There are also lots of other financial software packages listed with varying states of functionality, if the software you want to use isn't fully supported and you've got a little bit of spaire time you can become an advocate for that application and help get it working by filing bug reports and regression testing.

You do know that MS Money 2004 is rated gold in the Wine app db.

There are also lots of other financial software packages listed with varying states of functionality, if the software you want to use isn't fully supported and you've got a little bit of spaire time you can become an advocate for that application and help get it working by filing bug reports and regression testing.

Anyone seen FC RPMS of Wine 0.9? The binary download page seems to have only the 20050524 release for the RH/Fedora distributions, though SUSE and Mandrake have the 0.9.

> What I'd like to see in Wine is a version that uses GTK for painting,
> so that Wine apps would integrate nicely with GTK apps.

While Wine won't use Gtk for painting any time soon due to technical problems, over the summer a lot of progress as made on supporting theming. So with some more work on theming support plus some glue to slurp the Gtk theme you would essentially achieve the same result.

cygwin on wine on linux is underway. See http://www.winehq.org/?page=fun_projects (about halfway down the page, under "Virtualisation Projects")

• Bug ID 421
• Bug ID 1973

• Bug ID 421
• Bug ID 1973

Ahh, spoken like a true Socialist!

The current boogeyman is "terrorist". Totalitarian socialistic regiments have either fallen (Soviet Union) or are converting themselves to totalitarian market economies (China), while the non-totalitarian mixed-economy commonwealths (most European countries, especially Nordic countries) have become corrupted by globalism for the benefit of large international corporations and to the detriment of their people.

Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, has kept frustrating all US efforts to find him, and is still a viable boogeyman. Please use current boogeyman termonology; otherwise, the younger people here won't get your attempt to make the parent look bad.

This message has been brought to you by Boomonology Inc - let us deliver your boogeyman !

'I say he's made enough money, and I think he should be compel^H^H^H^H^H^H happy to give back to the people who played his games!'

The grandparent didn't say so. The grandparent said that Sid can afford to be tolerant of people who are making a new game based on Civilization as a non-monetary-profit project. These people don't want Sids money, they want nothing from him except to be left alone. So far they have gotten what they want.

However, I do find the very idea that you can get the government to stop someone from reimplementing your idea in the form of a new product deeply disturbing, and completely contrary to the idea of free market. Perhaps Wine should also be shut down, since they are reimplementing the Windows API, even if their product shares no code with Windows ?

It runs perfectly on linux under wine.

I use Password Safe on a USB pen drive. It has a master password that it uses to encrypt all my other passwords in a tidy MFC application. In x86 Linux I access it using Wine, which works fine. For my OS X machine, I use pwsafe, a console app that lets you access Password Safe databases, and dumps the password directly into the X clipboard buffer. (Use the CVS version, the latest regular build can't access the latest Password Safe database format.) I found other unix password safe compatible workalikes to be extremely poor.

This solution works well for me. Just make sure you back up your pen drive.

There has been plenty of legal action taken by authors of code released under the GPL. The problem has been that until recently, no one has ever let it get to court. Its always been settled out of court. That has changed in Europe where German developers have successfully won cases in a court against people that have infringed the GPL. There has also been more popping up around the globe as time goes on. Probably the most obvious and 'in-your-face' case at the moment would be the SCOX vs IBM case.

In regards to SpecOps Labs, it has nothing to do with Linux. Its all about the WINE project. S.O.L tried to release a program called "David" off as their own, but when it was inspected it turned out to be nothing but a really poor obfuscation of Wine. Basically changing the strings in the code, but not much more. And yes, there were steps taking. Technically, S.O.L no longer has permission to access WINE as their license was revoked. Unfortunately I doubt they've actually taken any notice of it given they're in the Phillipines and probably think no "long haired hippy" is going to chase them down and enforce it. Unfortunately for them, they are alleged to have stolen code from CodeWeavers; so in this case there is a significant corporate entity willing to defend their business.

Here is WineHQ's initial annoyance at the issue.
http://www.winehq.org/site?issue=222

And here is where it was last at between WineHQ and S.O.L as far as I am aware.
http://www.winehq.org/?issue=241#SpecOps%20Labs%20 Steps%20Up

There are probably more details about it, but those two issues of the newsletter are definitely the best places to start. After that, search Google and you can see the massive slagfest of a word fight that was going on back in the middle of 2004. It got pretty heated and very ugly there for a while.

There has been plenty of legal action taken by authors of code released under the GPL. The problem has been that until recently, no one has ever let it get to court. Its always been settled out of court. That has changed in Europe where German developers have successfully won cases in a court against people that have infringed the GPL. There has also been more popping up around the globe as time goes on. Probably the most obvious and 'in-your-face' case at the moment would be the SCOX vs IBM case.

In regards to SpecOps Labs, it has nothing to do with Linux. Its all about the WINE project. S.O.L tried to release a program called "David" off as their own, but when it was inspected it turned out to be nothing but a really poor obfuscation of Wine. Basically changing the strings in the code, but not much more. And yes, there were steps taking. Technically, S.O.L no longer has permission to access WINE as their license was revoked. Unfortunately I doubt they've actually taken any notice of it given they're in the Phillipines and probably think no "long haired hippy" is going to chase them down and enforce it. Unfortunately for them, they are alleged to have stolen code from CodeWeavers; so in this case there is a significant corporate entity willing to defend their business.

Here is WineHQ's initial annoyance at the issue.
http://www.winehq.org/site?issue=222

And here is where it was last at between WineHQ and S.O.L as far as I am aware.
http://www.winehq.org/?issue=241#SpecOps%20Labs%20 Steps%20Up

There are probably more details about it, but those two issues of the newsletter are definitely the best places to start. After that, search Google and you can see the massive slagfest of a word fight that was going on back in the middle of 2004. It got pretty heated and very ugly there for a while.

When I tried to switch over to Linux as my primary desktop, I found that there are options out there, but they're just not as polished *looking* as Quicken is for the average finance/budget tracking user like myself. So, let me offer up what I've tried, and you can figure something out for yourself:

• jGnash - A weird name for a finance program, but I used it for a short time and it did an alright job... and that was approximately a year ago. The project looks to be in active development still, so you may want to at least give it a try. It did QIF imports alright as well, and although it's written in Java it seemed to be coded pretty well.
• GnuCash - Well known in the Linux world with a long history. I tried it out but never really got the hang of it due to the somewhat clunky and difficult to understand UI. The engine behind this program seems to work great, but much like Gnome, it takes some getting used to the UI.
• Moneydance - Also has a long history, is coded in Java, and tries to compete with Quicken, but I didn't like the reports in this program. Also seemed a bit sluggish on Windows because it was coded in Java, but that was a pre-2005 release version, so the new one might be better. Unfortunately, from the look of their webpage the reports haven't changed at all, which was my biggest beef with this program.
• Or try Wine because it appears that Quicken and QuickBooks run under it OK. Haven't tried this out personally, and this would mean keeping around your dual-boot setup most likely, but it might solve your dilemma.

P.S. Using Linux as my primary workstation taught me that Linux based desktop software is HIGHLY "tweakable", and as such is also highly prone to disaster. (I'm the type that never reads the manual: disaster then ensues.) If you're going to do your finances on a Linux desktop setup, buy a DVD burner and MAKE SYSTEM BACKUPS nightly!!

WINE

No, seriously, check it out. With Wine Tools to automate the install of basic components (like DCOM98 and Visual C++ redistributable), you can use most of your windows programs on linux. According to Wine Application DB, many version of quicken work just fine under wine.

Heck, I've even gotten a full Visual Studio 6 install going under wine...

If you actually don't like the alternative, and decide to go back to Quicken, then you get to re-enter all the data.

I'd have to run them in parallel for awhile until I was happy with the Linux replacement or decided to keep Quicken. I did this when I test-drove Microsoft Money for a few weeks -- kept updating my Quicken file alongside the Money one. I eventually gave up on Money though -- nicer interface but it wasn't as powerful.

I had thought Wine was pretty far along on supporting Quicken. If you already paid for the Quicken License, are pretty much happy with it, and WINE supports it, why bother switching?

That's an idea. Though that might be hit or miss. I suppose I'd have to try it to see how well it works. I'm not totally tied to Quicken though -- I guess I posed the question because I wanted to see if there was decent financial software out there for Linux and what people thought of it.

My home PC can't switch until Dreamweaver (Wine APP ID 183) and Photoshop (Wine App ID 17) run on Linux.

The upgrade cost to Vista, for most companies, is effectively $0 because it comes with new PCs.

Most of the companies I've worked for don't buy mass software licenses that way, the upgrade cost may be the same as their annual windows license costs + time to upgrade.

My home PC can't switch until Dreamweaver (Wine APP ID 183) and Photoshop (Wine App ID 17) run on Linux.

The upgrade cost to Vista, for most companies, is effectively $0 because it comes with new PCs.

Most of the companies I've worked for don't buy mass software licenses that way, the upgrade cost may be the same as their annual windows license costs + time to upgrade.

Then don't use Ubuntu. Use something powerful like Debian. Sounds like a personal problem to me. If you get screwed with Winblows, you're screwed; there is no other distro.

There's a good emulator called Wine that provides a compatability layer between the Win32 API and the X API. http://winehq.org/ is the site and provides packages for most major distros (including Ubuntu and my favorite, Debian).

Assuming you mean Microsoft Windows, yes, it does.

If you just want to run some programs that are designed for MS Windows, look at Wine. It can be a pain to set up, but it's free and it works.

If you want to run a MS Windows OS, then you need VMware. This lets you run MS Windows in a virtual machine under Linux (or vice-versa). It's nto free, but works well.

lollerskates. read up what strawman means. you're beating up on a claim i never made - hence strawman.

i guess you think wine is theft too?

as for the government "allowing" "legal theft" to occur simply because ibm was a monopoly, rofl. your understanding of computing history is so hopelessly distorted it's useless to continue this discussion, so i will end my participation of it here. continue replying all you like, i'm not going to waste time with this looney thread.

This was noted on there awhile ago. WGA checks for Wine's registry key, and initially, demonstrated the behavior initially noted; that is, claiming non-valid Windows.

A bit after WGA was initially released, however, the WGA authentication dialog started accepting WINE-generated WGA codes with no explanation.

I don't know if WGA still checks for WINE, but if it does, it's something Microsoft can disable on their end quickly and easily, any time they want.

This isn't newsworthy, and it's not even news. The above comments about how WINE is being checked for were noted in the first March issue of WINE's newsletter, and the fact that Microsoft began accepting WINE-generated WGA validations was noted a few issues thereafter, though Google can't seem to find it.

For many years I've been perturbed, having to retain Windows hosts for my gaming needs. Though I would love to use Linux/*BSD fulltime, in the past I haven't been able to just from compatibility.

Now, it appears with Vista's pathetic OpenGL support, we are going to be forced to move.

Fortunately, WINE appears to be doing great things, and World of Warcraft is on the gold list. Hell, even Teamspeak has a linux client too!

The source compatibility mode is not restricted to x86 machines!

You take the source code for the program to be 'ported' and the source to wine (available under the LGPL) and compile them both on your target machine. The result is a binary (with the WINE libraries compiled in) that will run on any (non-x86) architecture running Linux.

That's how it works in theory (your real life experience may differ).

I wonder - if someone manages to get Wine to run under Win64 on x86_64 (probably in 32-bit mode - it hasn't gone 64-bit yet), would it be possible to run 16-bit programs under that?

The fact that most hardware and software is developed for Windows certainly doesn't hurt their market share either.

Of course, once MacOSX moves to x86, it should become possible to run Wine on it. This doesn't work for everything, but it's a start.

As to Fedora packages, there are RH7.3 through FC3 packages here, as well as numerous other binary packages. I won't claim I've used them as I haven't, but they do appear to be there. With regards to Mandrake and Gentoo packages (which I have used), they have nearly all worked quite well (the exception being one which had some issues with regards to wineserver, but I don't think the blame there lies in the packaging). Considering that Wine is still alpha software, I think it works pretty well the majority of the time, that or I've been very lucky. If you're looking for something that isn't quite as alpha, you should probably look at Crossover Office.

If you're looking for more information about this, Wine Weekly News for last week has two writeups on the issue. Basically the last of some very ugly and gritty DCOM work and related items has been finished in Wine. Installers are notorious for using these sorts of features and hence have generally been hit or miss in the past. This is a big step forward for Wine, sometime in the near future the vast majority of installers should work properly (hence the challenge).

There are plenty of people who play new games like World of Warcraft and Half Life 2 under Wine without speed issues, so I'm not sure exactly where your claims are coming from.

The main problem I have with Google Earth is that it only runs on Windows and Google Earth doesn't seem to really work with Wine.. Welll... seeing as I've never gotten it to work, that is the also the only problem I have with it.

I'm sure some people who are masochistic enough will run IE7 in Wine anyways, much like they already can with IE6.

I'm sure some people who are masochistic enough will run IE7 in Wine anyways, much like they already can with IE6.

The two games I return to again and again are Master of Orion II and American McGee's Alice. Even better, both run just fine under Wine on my Linux box.

Yes it works under Wine.

Here is the relevant AppDB entry with instructions and screenshots:
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?versionId=3254

Windows compatibility is a moving target.

Not only that, it's Microsoft's business model! Fortunately, there are those who do their part by carefully aiming and re-aiming, like wine, and the Odin project which provides OS/2 users a similar Win32 layer to run those apps natively.

you are bound to bump into a software patent on something down the road eventually

In the case of OS/2's Windows compatibility, that was provided by using genuine Microsoft Windows code within OS/2, the alimony in the corporate divorce of IBM and Microsoft. The children of that divorce, of course, were OS/2 and Windows NT. A good timeline on all this can be found here.

There's no such thing as an OS clone. ... In the end people just want to run what software they want to and Microsoft is positioned to allow that to happen and I don't see an easy way for someone else to come in and take that away from them.

Yeah sure. So you are saying FreeBSD can't run Linux binaries or Linux can't run any MS Windows (or DOS) programs? From a program's point of view, an OS is just a set of API which help it get its job done. It doesn't really care if it is running MS Windows, Linux, or OS/2. The only problem which has slowed other operating systems from supporting MS Window's API would be that it is constantly changing, so it has grown to this huge beast. It also has so many bugs, nearly every program works around them, so the bugs have to be emulated too, not just the APIs.

Q: Will I be able to run Windows applications on an x86 Mac?

A: Not unless you also run Windows on it.


Uh, there are alternatives.

I kinda think this guy is typing out of his ass.

You're talking about running down to the navarro base and getting around 15000 exp, advanced power armor, and a pulse rifle, super sledgehammer, whatever pleases you, right? Try doing it with a character that can't even speak right. Getting into navarro without murdering chris is a bitch. Excellent reward, and it somehow manages to not totally ruin the difficulty of the game.
I'd play it more, but wine has an annoying glitch in the code that handles the fades. Takes over 30 seconds to fade out the main menu, on a athlon xp 2600, even with the april 05 version pulled with pacman. http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?versionId=319 is the appdb entry for it. If I wasn't doing all this formality crap for my graduation I'd play FO2 until I fall asleep tonight.

I feel like I'm posting this all over the place, and I keep advocating a solution that I've not even trie d myself. I hope to this weekend though:

1. Set up a box running *nix, wine, and the application you want to run.

2. Set up ssh to allow x11 forwarding.

3. Set up shared keys to that you can ssh as yourself to that machine from your workstation without a password.

4. Set up an icon on your desktop for that app that executes: ssh -X user@server "wine app.exe"

Theoretically, you should now be running that windows application locally, and the server is doing the gruntwork. The reason this is important to me is because I support several Mac environments, and a few that wouldn't mind becoming mac environments, but in all cases they are bogged down by "that one app" that is windows-only, and they're using VirtualPC or whatever to overcome the obstacle. If the above works, I'm going to start getting really good at setting it up.

The other thing that I need to get good at is using WineLib and DarWineLib. I'm not a C coder. I keep putting off learning. I know perl, but not C. :(

I need to get up to snuff, and then get cozy with some of these developers that are windows-only and start getting winelib compiles of their applications going. Perhaps get into training developers how to do it themselves. I posted this link about (repetitive, redundant, yeah, maybe) above, but I'm going to do it again.

WineLib Guide

Start setting up linux compile targets, or at least make your sources winelib friendly so that you aren't locking out companies that are looking to move to Linux.

or get the developer to do that for you.

Don't laugh. It is probably not as hard as one would think:

Compile using WineLib.

I'm learning this myself, but the crux of the matter is that although I am learned in perl, I am not in C, so I'm a bit ahead of myself. I really need to go back and learn C, then jump forward to trying to help companies out of precisely these kinds of messes.

I'm gong through this right now trying to convince WatchGuard that they need to do a compile of their Firebox manager for Linux, FreeBSD, and maybe even MacOS X using DarWineLib. They won't hear any of it. :( It really sucks. They have an awesome Linux-based firewall, but it requires windows to configure...wtf?

The Wine project has put together a list of resources to help someone thinking about this figure out a project. You might find the following helpful:

• SummerOfCode wiki page
• Fun Projects page
• Wine's mailing lists and irc information

Not that this really hurts your argument (as setting up wine is not a newb-friendly task), but windows solitaire and oregon trail both run on linux under wine. I play lots of classic games with wine, check it out.