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Actually, they aren't required by Wine's license. And the CVS hasn't gone anywhere, it just doesnt have the copy protection stuff needed to play these commercial games. For reasons explained here

In a k-12 school, we run many 3rd party apps that don't run on Linux

Have you looked at WINE and/or Crossover Office?

A lot of 3rd party apps work with it quite well, including Photoshop, FlashMX, QuickTime, etc. Microsoft packages like Office also work fine.

When Crossover Office and/or Wine supports it, I guess they will LOVE to leave this particular "feature" unported. :)

First we complain MS products are built on a proprietary API, and we WINE.

Now they sell a product built on a published API, we whine.

Reluctant Doc files?
Use either
Crossover office to run Microsoft Office on linux
or
OpenOffice 1.1, now much faster, with improved Doc support. It seems to handle everything I chuck at it!

Games?
Use wine(x)! Severeal Game companies are contributing to it already to make it work with their games!

There is NO reason to use Windows these days, and Microsoft knows this, thats why its FUDDING linux to death!

• A "land bridge" is a bridge made of land between two large land masses. It is another way to say "isthmus", using familiar English words.
• I'm guessing "shrimp" meant the crustacean before it meant "small."
• You can download OSS windows.

I'm still waiting, though, because after 'xfs' rendered all the fonts required for ShowLetter.exe, 'top' shows that the process 'wine' just took up 100% cpu time for the last couple hours or so.

It is not safe to run these worms / viruses on wine.

http://www.winehq.org/hypermail/wine-devel/2003/08 /0488.html:

We've been through this discussion before too. Wine is not a VM, and the isolation between Win32 and Unix code is the result of application's ignorance, rather than a deliberate design decision. As such, it is highly NOT recommended for cases where hostile code of unknown qualities is tested.

For all you know, sobig may be checking whether it is runnning on wine, and then issuing the correct interrupts (static linking dlopen) and infecting your Unix system.

That old mail is refering to sobig, but you can replace "sobig" on text with "swen".

Why do you need more than 4Gb of memory, today?

It's been done

Getting increasingly common, and doesn't really push the price up that much

unix

Free

Also been done

Also Free

All you need is a burner. The rest is free. Apple are just using mass-market drives anyway.

So, let's see what that sort of hardware normally retails for...

Five minutes with google located this review, of a similar PC available for $3300... in 2001. So Apple are selling kit at the prices the rest of the world were using two years ago.

Applying Moore's law (combined with the knowledge that in the hardware industry, prices stay fairly constant while performance increases), we can conclude that this is a little over twice a suitable price for equivalent value. Somebody with more time than me is invited to track down a current workstation price.

And that jives with my experience of Apple, too. Equivalent (often identical, once you remove the ugly translucent plastic cover) hardware to what everybody else is selling, at approximately twice the price.

...who just assemble components and sell them as expensive boxes. How does that benefit us, exactly? It's not like they invented most of the hardware in those things. A significant chunk of it came from IBM, and most of the rest is just normal retail hardware (hard drives, dvd drives, network chips, usb controllers, graphics chips...).

Yes, but do they run (on) Linux? (sorry, couldn't resist).

If you include Wine in the mix, then the answer is a resounding...sometimes.

Your story that Wine changed from LGPL to GPL is bogus. Wine is under the LGPL license today (see here). And the LGPL license is all that is needed to prevent people from "taking without giving back".

Putting Wine under the GPL would make it seriously less useful because one of the main purposes of Wine is to let people move commercial Windows applications to Linux, and that may involve linking with it.

an x86 emulator like Boch

and a Win32 API like Wine

or Codeweavers?
It could beat VirtualPC:

faster (no Windows code to emulate)

and cheaper (no Windows license required)

It's fine that you don't drink bear (I don't either).

But seeing that Samba is about Windows compatibility, do you drink WINE?

*duck*

Sure, Wine using its own reimplemented DLLs probably doesn't run as many apps as Wine using Microsoft's DLLs, but as long as the app you want to use works "properly", then Wine works "properly" for you. Which app do you use regularly that works with Microsoft's DLLs but not with the free ones?

That said, if DisneyCo is using the work of the commons, why can't it give back to the commons?

Lets forget about the jokes. And instead lets try to imagine, what Microsoft Linux would really be like, if it was ever released.

I'm pretty sure it would include patches to the kernel, and they might even play by the rules and release the source for those. But there might very well be some closed source kernel modules as well. In addition you will not be allowed to copy those kernel modules. We can start guessing about what modules there will be. But I'm pretty sure one of them would be an ntfs driver.

Microsoft could get their usual GUI to run on top of Linux. Since others have done most of it, Microsoft could do it as well. The exact details about how Microsoft would do it are not easy to guess. They could use parts of Wine, but maybe, Microsoft want to do it another way. If they are going to use Wine, they could either use the latest version, or the last non GPL version.

But Microsoft could take a completely different route and not use any Wine code at all, instead they could use as much of the existing Windows code as possible. I wonder if this would be best done in a library or a kernel module. Probably they would like a real binfmt_exe.o kernel module with its own personality. It is probably going to map some large DLLs into the process address space, and maybe even some shared memory.

I believe programs written for Windows when running on this Microsoft Linux will have access to some NTFS features, that are not easilly accesible by normal Linux programs. It could be done either by the closed source library knowing about some secret ioctl implemented by msntfs.o, or by cooperation between msntfs.o and binfmt_exe.o. Possibly a combination; an ioctl, which is not only secret, but also only allowed to programs running with the exe personality.

I wonder what graphics drivers are going to look like. I guess they will probably ship with closed source kernel modules implementing drivers for various graphics chips. But of course they are probably going to be incompatible with XFree86. And might even prevent the ones needed for XFree86 from being loaded at the same time.

I use Wine to run Kazza Lite and WinMX, you should do this. WinMX can be a bitch to configure but if you have a Windows 98 box then just copy the correct dlls from the Windows system directory to your Wine system directory.

You can find more info and tutorials in WineHQ.

The device includes secret digital keys -- large binary numbers -- that cannot easily be altered.

Easily? They would probably say that Windoze is an OS that could not easily be replicated as well.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I know quite a few people who will poor their lives into doing something that someone else says "cannot be done easily." (...and will almost definitely succeed)
(begin M$-Rant)
Also, I believe Microsoft falls under Murphy's Law, "If there is any way to do it wrong, he [Bill] will find it."
(end M$-Rant)

You mean like this?

I play the guitar in a band named "Mantra" (heavy stuff), listen to music all day long (lots of stuff, not necessarily heavy), ride my MTB (my latest addiction, and non-geeky one -- wow! ;).
I used to photograph a few years back and intend to go back to that sometime soon.

Apart from that (and some ocasional book assimilation) it's all computer-related. Even my guitar playing is kind of computer related as I use my PC as a pitch shifter (as I'm too lazy to tune up to different keys) and store all my notes and tablatures in digital format (Guitar Pro rocks. And works with Wine, too!).

So even though I don't get bored when that humming box is humming no more, my life is pretty tied up with it :)

// fixxxer

You should read that as: M$ is going to reduce the number of documented APIs from 76k to 8k, meanwhile adding more undocumented 'features' to old routines, which are misteriously used by M$ software.

WineLH anyone?

What's different now?

Can I install Linux and be productive in less than 5 hours? Can I insert a CD and have the install routine work?

Are there any games yet?

Can I develop Windows applications from within Linux now? Or at least run VS or VS.NET?

There is something that I cannot understand.
Doesn't Crossover Office use Wine?

Yes.

Isn't Wine GPL?

No. It's LGPL.

Then, how come Wine still struggles to run the same apps?

It does? Takes some work to get them installed, but it works pretty much the same as Crossover after that.

I should be able to download their source code, shouldn't I?

You can. At least the changes to wine. Here.

Can I do this? I'd like to use their improvements made to Wine, as stated in the GPL and run it for free.
After all, they have used a huge amount of code developed by people who wanted to make their code free.

Am I missing anything?

Yes. A clue. There are proprietary bits in Crossover. Ie, thier simple installer/configuration tool. It makes installation a snap and integration with your desktop just as easy.

It's a very useful product. If you need it, pay for it. There really is nothing wrong with paying for good software. I promise. The world will not hate you for it. Sure, some over zealous geeks might poke fun at you.

This is the reason F/OSS will never dominate MS. Too many think EVERYTHING must be free. As in free ride.

Don't be such a lazy jerk, read the FAQ:

What is Wine and what is it supposed to do?

Wine is a program which allows the operation of DOS and MS Windows programs (Windows 3.x and Win32 executables) on UNIX. It consists of a program loader, which loads and executes a Windows binary, and a library that implements Windows API calls using their UNIX or X11 equivalents. The library may also be used for porting Win32 code into native UNIX executables, often without many changes in the source. Wine is free software, and its license (contained in the file LICENSE in each distribution) is LGPL style.

No, Wine I Not an Emulator

Or wine,
or anything that can use microsoft codecs.

Last Xmas I spent a couple of weeks at my mum's, where all my old desktops are, now converted to Linux app & web servers. I couldn't get to terms with the fact that my former gaming machine, a dual P3-800 with a 22" monitor, was just sitting there being wasted. My only Windows (XP) machine left is my laptop, which is hardly good enough to run Chuckie Egg, never mind CS.
After a quick search on google and a couple of days fiddling around with Wine I got Counter-Strike working on the app server. What joy! Frame-rate not the best around (30-60fps) but still playable.
Not all games will run, and I hear EverQuest is the reason why many people need to keep at least one Windows machine lying around, but support for new games and applications is making the list of supported apps grow all the time.
Certainly worth a try...

Heck, if Mike's diary entry is still the state of affairs, there are more people with commit access to the Hercules CVS repository than there are XFree86, a project that's probably two orders of magnitude bigger!

Some other projects only have one person in charge of commits, but of course anybody can submit changes. Wine is one of those: only one person has write access to the CVS repository (Alexandre Julliard), but anybody can submit changes to the wine-patches mailing list.

so what if I'm not running windows?

You can run the viewers on Linux with Wine.

This is a really stupid idea.

1) Linux already has standardized game API's. They include OpenGL and SDL.

2) DirectX interfaces change so often that they give Win32 game developers fits. Trying to clone this sort of environment and stay current is simply not viable.

Wine is a very bad platform for compiling because everytime a file is opened in the current wine architecture there are at least two context switches and the CPU caches also get flushed. This is because of Wine's client/server approach. I love client/server architectures, but having synchronous requests and or task switches in performance critical paths are a no-go.

When compiling big projects there are many thousands of files to open. Especially those header files add up quickly. Even when the latency penalty is only a couple of hundred usecs this is very noticable. When also the CPU cache got flushed things get very bad. In my experiments only about 15% of the CPU time were available for the real compile work, the rest were soft page faults and task switches.

There was work to fix this situation but this
was shot down before it got very far.

Yes it has. Lots of times.

Look, what you really want is a PowerBook. You know it, everyone here knows it. You just won't admit it.

What the hell is this, Freud? He has presumably evaluated the options, and decided he wanted a PC laptop without paying for Windows. Those were the requirements. Why are people having such a hard time dealing with this? You can tell there aren't many salespeople on this site, second guessing the customer is a quick way to lose sales.

So let's compare features. The Apple certainly has no potential whatsoever of running Microsoft Windows except through some complete emulation/virtualization software. Score one for Apple.

WTF? A lack of an option is a feature? Only a true Apple shill would claim that.

The Apple comes with an actual GUI far superior to Microsoft Windows (not even a contest) and much more polished than your typical UNIX GUI.

Evidence please. Quite a few Mac users aren't so impressed.

Want more? Well, your Mac is actually capable of running Microsoft Office should you later find yourself in a bind and be REQUIRED to deal with it to put food on the table.

Except that it's not Office. If you already own a copy (quite likely), you might as well just use it, and get perfect compatability. On the other hand, he already said quite clearly he didn't need any Windows software, which presumably includes Office. Piracy can be done on any OS btw, at least on Linux you don't actually need to.

That means that you can create "lickable" GUIs using the X Window System.

This has got to be a troll. It lets you do what you have been able to do on every other OS for years, namely display X apps. It doesn't alter their appearance.

And on top of all of that...... *snip*

Why should he care about any of that? Oh, and that's a nice hidden font preview you've got there.

And you're not supporting a company that supports Microsoft. In fact, you are supporting a company that actually competes with Microsoft (on some small level).

This is definately a troll. Apple "competing" with Microsoft is an interesting parlour game, but no more. You were advertising the virtues of IE and Office earlier.

What is it around here? Do people get commission on every Mac sold or something?

Key features of the Network Audio System include:

• Device-independent audio over the network
• Lots of audio file and data formats
• Can store sounds in server for rapid replay
• Extensive mixing, separating, and manipulation of audio data
• Simultaneous use of audio devices by multiple applications
• Use by a growing number of ISVs
• Small size
• Free! No obnoxious licensing terms

• Festival - The Festival Speech Synthesis System.
• mpg123 - a command line MP3 player
• GAIM - a free AOL IM client
• OpenOffice (StarOffice) - the (now opensourced) StarOffice Suite has built-in NAS support for the Solaris and Linux Platforms.
• The Qt Library - from Trolltech supports NAS natively. You will need to pass the '-system-nas-sound' to './configure' before building.
• libSDL - SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer library, now has native NAS support thanks to Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8}
• XAnim - the X Animation viewer
• XBoing - a blockout type X game
• XPilot - a multiplayer client/server space warfare game
• Xemacs - the best cross-plaform, cross-language IDE
• Alsaplayer - A NAS Output plugin written by Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8} is now supplied with the Alsaplayer distribution.
• X MultiMedia System (XMMS). A NAS Output plugin written by Willem Monsuwe is available at ftp://ftp.stack.nl/pub/users/willem/
• Wine. A NAS plugin written by Nicolas Escuder is now available with the WINE distrubution.

Now one can run native Xapps, windows AND OSX apps on a unix box..

NetBSD, OpenBSD, Unixware, and SCO OpenServer 5 worked at one time, but Wine now requires kernel-level threads which are not currently available (or understood by the Wine team) in those platforms.

I also purchased the game to show support for their linux efforts. Around September I gave up hope of seeing the Linux client anytime soon.

However, the game runs perfectly under wine (The sound during the intro movies is messed up. Just skip them). Just use the wine settings from the comments posted here Wine App DB

I have the full effects enabled and run at 1024x768 on my Ti4400/PIII 500Mhz with perfect performance. It is sluggish in Win98 at 800x600 w/ effects turned off on my friend's GeForce2/466Mhz. Quite a complement to the Linux, X, NVidia, and wine folks.

This product is used to serve up (via X) MS Office apps to multiple clients, as has been possible for years using a Windows Server and running MS Office over the network, a standard procedure in many companies. This makes it easy to upgrade, apply service packs, etc, as all you have to do is update 1 copy on the server, rather than all users copies on their workstations.

This product executes the Office app under wine on x86 Linux, and sends it to any given X server. Presumably, you could run a Win32 PC X server and run MS Office from an x86 Linux server to a Windows desktop, although, this would obviously be somewhat counterproductive.

Since wine only runs on Linux (and FreeBSD, to some extent) on x86 processors, as mentioned in FAQ #3 on the wine development site, this means that users of Solaris, LinuxPPC, sparc Linux, and other commercial UNIX users were left out in the cold as far as being able to run MS Office. Now, however, you simply need to set up a server with this product, install MS Office, and then setup accounts, etc. Users can simply run the program, and Word, et. al. will appear as a regular window on their X desktop.

PS. The level of what works/what doesn't varies a little among the Office family; Word & Excel are best, PPT/Access don't run as well, the last I checked. IE & Outlook are supposed to be great. (at least as great as said products can be :))

I have a 3 year old who knows his way around a computer better than the sales people at my company. ;)

Anyway, I have a dual boot machine, RedHat 7.2 (KDE 3) & XP. As unreliable as some games are under XP, they are far worse using WINE. Some are not even playable (Disney games). Check out Wine Application Database for more information on compatibility. Also, the system requirements are greater running an app under Wine.

Surfing the web was no big deal. Mozilla & Flash work great.

An issue I had was in the login sequence; he could click on his username and log in (no password assigned) on the XP box, while in Linux he had to have me or his mom type in his username to log-in. That's fine for parental control and a computer in another room far off, but our computer is in our living room where we'll always see him, and it's convenient for him to log in whenever he want's to use it.

yes and no, wine provides low-level binary compatibility, not hardware emulation, so its only for OSes running on x86 chips.

winelib, however, is aiming for cross-platform compatability, so its possible you can compile windows software and link it with winelib for use on osx.

A single guide for each and every program would be impossible to keep updated. Like most people, I have never heard of most Windows programs including the one that you mentioned above.

The next best thing is the Wine Application Database. The appdb lists specific programs and you can add yours to it so others know how well or poorly the programs you are interested in work.

Tip: If you search for the message that appears when the program fails to run, you might get directions on how to install another program that is similar and does work with Wine. (Then again, you might not...can't say!)

The Wine FAQ has been updated reciently, and the Wine Knowledgebase is still helpful.

Note: The Wine-FAQ link listed above may move.

To make this clear, here are links for running MS Word, MS Excel, and MS IE under Wine without paying any money to Codeweavers or any other company. You do pay with your time, though.

When I first started to use open source software (back in '93), I always wondered how easy it would be to release compromised sources, whether intentionally or not.

Once I got into it, hey, I trusted these guys. They were the good guys. We were the good guys. The community was built on trust, and it worked.

We used to scoff when we heard about the torjans in the latest version of Microsoft Word. That would never happen to us... unless they sorted that WINE [wine.org] project out. ;-)

Now we face the same issues. As source distributions (I'm not discounting binary distributions - if you trust RedHat, that's your call) increase in popularity, this will become more of a problem.

We need to tighten up the procedures that we use. We need to ensure that the software we put out is the software that the users download and use. We need to ensure that nobody can comprimise our systems in this way.

• There's a little more behind this than meets the eye. Both Xandros and CodeWeavers have a significant share owned by a holding company, Linux Global Partners . Other companies in their portfolio include Ximian, Gobe, Metro Link, and GNU Cash. All of the companies are fully independent, but as Linux Global Partner's web site states,

• Our operating strategy is to integrate our partner companies into a collaborative network that leverages our collective knowledge and resources. With the goal of holding our partner company interests for the long-term, we use our collective resources to actively develop the business strategies, operations and management teams of our partner companies.

Maybe I'm being paraniod here, but it looks like Linux Global Partners is buying up lots of Linux technology. And given that Xandros doesn't follow the "free as in beer" model, I've got to wonder how this bodes for the future of Linux. I mean, the projects are still under GPL, but that doesn't mean it will be released for free. Clearly they are in this to turn a profit.

I guess the free ride has to end at some point.

Perhaps there's a list somewhere of what windows apps it runs, if any?

here [winhq.org] might be a good place to look.

Incidentally, why do people think it's cool to comment that others are morons with no life? Do you honestly think people care or actually don't realize that by posting that, you yourself admit that in reality, you're really a moron with no life?

All Nintendo has to do is say that it was intended as such.

The fact that Nintendo made most of the NES cartridge specs PUBLIC in Nintendo Power magazine during the third year of publication kind of blows "anybody who reverse engineers our NES cart edge bus is breaking trade secret law" out of the water.

As an added bonus, the catridge format had the advantage of being a fairly effective form of copy protection, especially in a non-emulated context.

Are you saying emulation is illegal? Try telling that to the developers of Wine and Bochs. If, on the other hand, you merely claim that Game Paks were physically hard to copy, then look at all the pirate multicarts you can pick up in HK.

Sure it was bypassable, but the mechanisms for bypassing cartridge-based protection tended to be fairly elaborate.

I understand that Nintendo 64 Game Paks and later Super NES Game Paks (the one with the SA-1 coprocessor) had a small amount of protection against homebuilt dumping machines, but there is NO protection on Famicom, Game Boy, or Game Boy Advance Game Paks: just write the address, read the data. Write the address, read the data. From there, you can construct a complete backup copy of the binary.

In contrast, the Dreamcast protection was almost non-existent (with an unmodified Dreamcast being able to boot cracked, burned games)

That's about how much protection there is on GB and GBA, and homebrew developers like it.

That could *easily* work for most Linux users if they changed the apple logo on the mug to Tux. Go ahead, spread more anti Apple/Microsoft FUD. Linux still sucks.

Linux FUD exposed:
1. Windows has to access the DLLs in order to communicate with the hardware, so 3D apps on Linux are faster, since it's accessed directly from the kernel.

Fact: Linux may be quicker when it come to accessing the hardware, but you're forgetting the most unstable part of the Linux OS: XFree86. XFree86 was designed as a network transparent windowing system (whatever that fucking means), so it has the added overhead of opening network ports to ... guess what? Talk to itself!

2. WINE is a Windows emulator

Fact: It says right on the WINE site that it is not an emulator. In fact, I'm not sure what it is, since most people aren't even able to run Notepad with it. An alcoholic beverage maybe?

3. Linux is free

Fact: The biggest lie of all, since Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing.

--CheezyDee

• If Microsoft release Office for Linux, they might be able to keep that market even in case of a Linux takeover. OTOH by doing so they will make Linux stronger with the risk of loosing the OS market.
• If Microsoft does not release Office for Linux, Windows will still be the platform on which Microsoft Office runs most reliable. This means that Office users have to use Windows, OTOH Linux users cannot use Office.

Why not donate to Wine?IBM must have some usefull DLLs that miss from Wine, right? Also, IMHO OS2's value was not so much in it's front end - which was rather similar to MS Windows'.

Its superiority over Windows is ratherr in its general design and back end: Compared to Win95, Warp is a real OS, rather than a graphical DOS shell.

here

Transgaming offers binary packages (RPM, deb and tgz) to subscribers only. These packages have the copy-protection, an updated InstallShield core, and a few other things that they licensed themselves. For non subscribers, they have their public Sourceforge CVS tree. No source package, no binary package, only raw CVS source.

I don't think they'll stop the (subscriber's) debian package: there's no reason to do so.

If you'd like to compare, the LGPL'd Wine (the official branch) offers CVS source tree and about a release a month, packaged as a tgz (source only). Some other individuals (see WineHQ for a small list) package it and distribute binaries.

I've read a lot of comments along the lines of: "Show off X display forwarding and whizzo website updating."
Personally, I'm inclined to say "stay off that for a while".

Start with the basics (ls, cp, mv, grep, find, ps etc) and get them used to using the console (i.e., no X whatsoever: not even an xterm). As others have said: teach them that you don't need a point-and-click interface to do the standard stuff: file management, installation, configuration etc. Obviously editor skills (emacs, vi/vim, ) are going to be essential.

Only after a while should the X factor be introduced. Even then, try to keep a perspective on its uses:
It's all well-and-good showing them how what great things you can do with this wonderful OS, but means nothing if they end up believing that everything's as "flash" (read: GUI orientated) as Windows and are left flandering when given a console.

Now for my no-so-objective suggestions:

1. Teach them the proper use of the power button (I.e., get used to it collecting dust rather than finger prints.) Repeat 3 times: "Power cycling does not solve my browsing problems".
2. Hit home the idea of file protection and user privledges - "No. root isn't the only login."
3. "IE doesn't come installed by default and don't wine [sic] about it."

Worse, they're implying that AOL is for non-geeks only.

I browsed Google for solutions for folk who want to use AOL. While I did find a listing for AOL Tunneling Client for UNIX on linux.org, the web page that it links to seems to have disappeared. Perhaps the WINE project offers another ray of hope.

It seems like the best solution would be for AOL to switch from its proprietary internal protocols to TCP/IP and family. With packet filtering, they should be able to maintain just as much control over the user environment as they do now, while making it easier to support "non-standard" clients.

And while they're at it, I'd like them to switch to IPv6. Plus I want world peace and a pony.

Seriously, there are a thousand good reasons to switch to TCP/IP. What advantages do they gain by sticking with what they have?