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I already have that.. it's called VMWare Fusion on a Macbook Pro. =^)

That's a little different, but if somebody were to make a package to let you run Linux binaries on OS X (including hacking the execsw[] table in xnu/bsd/kern/kern_exec.c to have an image activator for ELF binaries) and combine it with Wine for OS X, that's another alternative along the lines of Wine+Darling-on-Linux. (Extra credit for hacking execsw[] to handle PE binaries as well. :-))

I don't know how much Windows NT source would be needed to complete the circle and add the ability to run OS X and Linux binaries on Windows.

...what we need is a "Win9X Box" that will simulate say a 733MHz P3 with 384Mb of RAM and a Geforce 4 that will fake all the quirks that devs would use back then.

For 3D-accelerated games from that era, I've had good luck with dgVoodoo. Unaccelerated DirectDraw stuff often flat refuses to run on newer versions of Windows, but I've gotten some things to work with The DirectDraw Hack and similar programs, depending on the game.

But, that's not really what you're asking for. QEMU might be a good starting point; getting it to emulate a P3 and a Geforce 4 may be a lot of work (I haven't perused the source), but probably not impossible; I mean, it's designed to emulate selected CPUs and video cards already.

WINE is getting good, too -- I want to try this when it's working.

...what we need is a "Win9X Box" that will simulate say a 733MHz P3 with 384Mb of RAM and a Geforce 4 that will fake all the quirks that devs would use back then.

For 3D-accelerated games from that era, I've had good luck with dgVoodoo. Unaccelerated DirectDraw stuff often flat refuses to run on newer versions of Windows, but I've gotten some things to work with The DirectDraw Hack and similar programs, depending on the game.

But, that's not really what you're asking for. QEMU might be a good starting point; getting it to emulate a P3 and a Geforce 4 may be a lot of work (I haven't perused the source), but probably not impossible; I mean, it's designed to emulate selected CPUs and video cards already.

WINE is getting good, too -- I want to try this when it's working.

Maybe as progress continues with Wine on ARM you won't have to worry about that.

A good justification for supporting 32-bit builds is supporting all those people still running 32-bit Windows. Call it lowest common denominator. You wouldn't understand backwards compatibility because Linux is shit in that arena, even Debian with it's "longer" release cycle. XP lasted so long, I'm sure that also delayed 64-bit adoption.

It's not a big deal in many cases whether an app is 32 or 64 bit. Firefox maybe it is because it's poorly architected and could do with a bigger memory space. In many cases there is no benefit from a native 64-bit app.

I'm afraid you can't really criticise anyway when when I can't run Lightroom on Linux, yet it runs for fine for me as a native 64-bit app on both Windows and OS X.
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=5839

On the contrary, Starcraft 2 runs almost perfectly in Wine. It has a Platinum/Gold rating in AppDB

According to my google-fu, both Fallout 2 and Neverwinter Nights run pretty well...

According to my google-fu, both Fallout 2 and Neverwinter Nights run pretty well...

Unaware of any BSOD reports running 32bit apps in Wine ( http://www.winehq.org/ )

Wine has a Direct X implementation. Wouldn't it be hilarious if they Wine on Windows working well enough to make older versions of Windows able to run modern Windows applications?

I'm using steam with wine http://www.winehq.org/ ... No stupid MS OS here, no sir.

There are both Linux and Mac versions of Crossover, which runs thousands of applications, including games, MS Office, and many other things. Here's the compatibility list. Check the WineHQ AppDB too if you don't see it listed. Codeweavers contributes heavily to Wine, too, and the projects are closely related. They're not just a paid fork of Wine like Cedega was.

Wine (and Crossover) have really progressed far since they started. I play games as well as run more serious applications, and I haven't booted up my Windows partition in months. I haven't had the need. This giveaway comes with a year of support, too, which is very nice.

I love Linux. All my servers run it, I'm connected to a SSH session as I write this, and have an Android phone by my side. BUT Linux is still a long ways off from being ready for a gaming. There are 2 issues I see. 1) The sound subsystem is in a sorry state 2) The X WIndows Manager needs to be thrown out

It's true that OpenGL support is not bad, but the sound situation is still a disaster. There are currently 2 low level audio stacks that apps use OSS and ALSA's.
http://insanecoding.blogspot.hk/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-linux-not-so-sorry.html
TL:DR OSSv4 offers great sound and low latency, everything else sucks. But the kernel developers have refused to add the free GPL'd OSSv4 updates into the kernel, so we are all stuck with OSSv3 legacy and ALSA's crap that's only good for watching videos and listening to music. Real time apps like music production or music games are impossible to do on Linux with the current situation.
The added PulseAdio layer only makes the latency situation worse. Check out the issue the WINE developers had with it.
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2012-June/095954.html

The X Windows Manager issue just came up last week. How do they expect us to take Linux seriously when you can crash/freeze your desktop, just by launching a game that tries to run Fullscreen? This issue has plagued me for years, and there was even a Slashdot article on it just last week.
http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/10/25/2339223/a-proposal-to-fix-the-full-screen-x11-window-mess

Now for the positive. Maybe wayland will solve the X Windows issue and maybe if Linux does start to talk off, the kernel developers will get their head out of there ass and merge OSSv4 back into the mainline. A Linux gamer can dream.....

What do you mean you "couldn't get wow to run on wine"?
WOW has a platinum rating on wine's appdb.

For those of you who don't know, platinum means that absolutely no tweaking is required at all.

If they want to game on wine though, make sure you get an nvidia card. It's the only way to go. Sure ATI/Intel are more open, bla bla, but if gaming's what you want, then it's your only choice.

It advertises that it runs Android applications?? That seems a little disingenuous as well

http://www.winehq.org/about/

Wine says it runs Windows Applications. It should be OK for Microsoft to pressure companies to not ship Wine to avoid compatibility issues.

Nah, wine is already tainted...

I'm trying to switch over to linux, but only if I can run lotro. I'm hoping eventually swtor will play in wine...but right now I'll be happy just playing lotro.

I was under the impression that "Lord of the Rings Online" worked well in Wine 1.4, is it not the case?
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=4891
What GPU do you use? and what distro are you running?

The answer to that is yes, perfectly on wine 1.5.9 at least on Debian.

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=14392

Platinum rating for me, fresh wineprefix and no tinkering.

Enjoy.

What, there is a steam client for Linux? I was just trying to install it on wine, and it keeps crashing ( http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=19444 ). What a coincidence that this /. post comes 1 hour later....

Well yes, if you're dependent on a particular proprietary software that runs only on your platform, then I suppose you're stuck with it.

But there's a good chance you can run it under Linux using wine, which is included with all of the major distributions. The sewing machine app might still be a problem, though, if it needs proprietary drivers.

Just awesome. As the Humbe Linux Bundle have shown there is big potential in the Linux desktop market for games. Many games are already working just fine in Wine. As you can see in the WineHQ[1] there are 3333 Platinum, 2878 Gold and 2468 Silver rated applications and games (Platinum and Gold means they are working out-of-the-box with Wine).

But I do hope you are going to contribute to the Wine project. What would be just beyond awesome if your client would be open source. There is no reason to not make your client open source anyway, since it will work only with your service. But to have your client open source would bring you many advantages.

Like free bug fixing from the open source community; Free translations to different languages, like Chinese, Thai, German, Spanish. Free porting to different Linux distributions like Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian. You would have so many more potential customers if Linux users could just go to their package manager and install your client from the official repositories.

Thank you for the port and for the courage to take the opportunity.

[1] http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&sTitle=Browse%20Applications&sOrderBy=appName&bAscending=true

Also, have they tested FreeBSD and Wine? Because there's someone on WineDB claiming to have been banned for playing Diablo III on FreeBSD, and I have an odd feeling that wasn't on their testing list somehow.

I've been playing for about a month under Wine without my account being banned. That said, one has to wonder just how "extensively" their tests were done on Linux. Try running it on any 64-bit kernel, and you can't even get past authenticating unless you're using either a patched version of Wine, or the "setarch i386 -3" workaround. The Warden routine gets stuck in an infinite loop without the patch. More details on this Wine ticket: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30849

Despite their community manager's assertion, there most certainly are gaps in their testing.

Hmm, there was an issue with the 1.0.2 patch. They started doing Warden scans and in Wine the reported Ram is exactly what the system has. Kicked Diablo into an infinite loop if you have a 64bit OS. See bug . I can't help but think that some of the "work arounds" may have triggered a false positive. Then again since I had this issue maybe I should log-in and see if I'm banned, but their probably doing maintenance right now since it's Tuesday.

And they probably (correctly) identify Wine as being not genuine Windows. It's an emulation.

You should be receiving a barrage of W.I.N.E. Is Not an Emulator hate mail any moment. It doesn't invalidate your point but I thought you should be forewarned.

wine works fine with most games. I've played several high-demanding 2012 games with no issues, including Mass Effect 3, the day it was release. Haven't booted windows in years and that hasn't kept me from gaming. I can even play some really old games I hear don't work in new windows versions (like Max Payne).

If Microsoft pushes the OEMs too far, we may see large donations to the WINE project. http://www.winehq.org/

Diablo III seems to play fine under Wine: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=25588

And I heard that netflix works on Android. Presumably you could install Android x86 in a VM.

Yes it does work and has gold rating:

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=1325

Well to use THEIR APIs yes, but to write your own APIs that do the same thing, NO. (And that is what this issue is all about).

You only need the headers (so that you can make your APIs call-compatible).

And you can get the headers from a lot of places, such as the WINE project.
Microsoft does not make it drop dead simple to find them with out trying to get you to sign a license (even if free), but they are available
for people to replicate most/some windows functionality via other platforms.

Further, I only need the APIs and the Documentation from Microsoft to write in any programming language, by simply translating
the headers to what ever computer language I want to use. I then sell/give my programs to others and they run them on
any windows machine without paying another nickle to Microsoft. I licensed the documentation, (because it was convenient, although
I could have gotten it all on the web), and they licensed the binary APIs when they purchased Windows, or Linux, or what ever.

The form and structure of API arguments is not copywrite-able.
   

Wine? Which web browser's JavaScript engine changes its array indexing behavior in this way when run under a free reimplementation of the Windows API?

Limbo on Linux is a wine bottle that runs with very poor performance. Trying to improve performance via the latest version of wine exposes a recent bug (shader model 3.0). Psychonauts on Linux is a real icculus port, but is just a wine bottle on Mac.

Don't consider wine compatibility as the type of support for Mac/Linux that I expected from the Humble Indie Bundle.

Don't get Ubuntu. The Metro-clone...err...Unity interface will make you want to shoot yourself.

Xubuntu has my vote for a development environment. Getting MySQL workbench working is a bit fun, but with a bit of work you can even get Skyrim running.

I haven't heard of CleanMyPC, but I've heard of MyCleanPC. If you back up your files, wipe everything off your PC, and install MyCleanPC, your PC will be clean. Then you can install thousands of free applications and reinstall many applications that are already your favorites. The last time I cleaned a relative's PC that had about three fake antiviruses on it and embedded deeply, I did just that: wiped it, installed MyCleanPC, and moved a couple things around to make it look like it used to, except cleaner. It ended up even cleaner than it was when Dell sold it to her.

Clean, precise, pangolin-powered. MyCleanPC.

Not sure if it's still the case, but I used to play WoW on Ubuntu (which Mint is based on) using Wine /PlayonLinux and the Open GL renderer (launch time option -opengl) in a 2600x1024 window (spanned in the middle of three monitors) with full settings (as much as it let you enable w/ the Open GL renderer) and got great framerates. Tested in regular gameplay, PvP, and raids.

Though this was using a GT8600 and later a GTX 260. YMMV, etc.

I also know that Rift is pixel perfect now (as of a few Wine versions) though you do have a noticeable performance hit when you enable certain visual features.

Not sure if it's still the case, but I used to play WoW on Ubuntu (which Mint is based on) using Wine /PlayonLinux and the Open GL renderer (launch time option -opengl) in a 2600x1024 window (spanned in the middle of three monitors) with full settings (as much as it let you enable w/ the Open GL renderer) and got great framerates. Tested in regular gameplay, PvP, and raids.

Though this was using a GT8600 and later a GTX 260. YMMV, etc.

I also know that Rift is pixel perfect now (as of a few Wine versions) though you do have a noticeable performance hit when you enable certain visual features.

A lot of people aren't willing to pay for a $144 library on which iTunes depends: "The iTunes store does not work".

I've found some interesting pages on malware in wine: 2005 and 2007 (second is the one linked to in the wine FAQ).

Virtual Machines are still not an answer, not yet anyway. Until there's a Voodoo 2 gpu emulator in the virtual machine that handles directx 1-7, opengl 1.2 and Glide. Old applications simply will not all run. Win9x doesn't work properly in virtual machines even now 15 years on. You still can't play Warhammer Dark Omen with all it's options just like a bare metal Pentium 2 running windows 98 with a Voodoo card can. This is a hurdle that honestly should have been fixed years ago. Wine has the same problem. There are many old applications it doesn't support because they never finished Directx 1-7 support. http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectX-ToDo. Until they get graphics cards properly working in virtual machines it's not ready to be used. Gallium3D is going to make linux able to run Directx 10/11 applications work in virtual machines by directly forwarding commands from the virtual machine to the graphics card, but there are at this stage AFAIK no plans to support older titles. The closest thing I've seen around is Dosbox has some voodoo 2 patches but they're very unsupported, you can't just apt-get install dosbox-voodoo and get a working install at this stage. Also running windows 9x while patchable, is unsupported by Dosbox at this stage. It would be nice if virtualbox would pick up some of this work to fix gpu support. But I suspect noone is interested in making old software work :(

Take a look at some of the games that work on Linux thanks to Wine.

About the only reason I would want to run WINE is to run [shutter] Internet Explorer so I can access some damn [private/business] web sites that STILL don't support anything else.

And yet WINE *STILL* cannot run Internet Explorer 7+ worth a damn (last ratings from 1.4.X)! Wouldn't one think that would be high on the list?

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=25 (IE9 = garbage, IE 8 = bronze, IE 7 = bronze/garbage)

Since it is not tested by anyone under 1.4 yet, I guess I should try hacking on it forever and see if it will work yet. But not holding my breath :(

Don't get me wrong- I think the WINE project is wonderful, and they have a lot of really good support for a lot of applications; just not the one I need.

Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3 - http://www.winehq.org/download/debian

Still, thank you all for the fantastic project called Wine!

With Windows XP going away, in a few years you might be looking for an old box to run your favorite program. In another few years you might be completely out of luck. Even further out, what if Microsoft went bankrupt (or bought by Apple, Google, RedHat, whoever) and their OS division is shelved?

Projects like ReactOS, Wine, DOSBox, etc. allow you to have another possible path in that uncertain future. Your program might not work out-of-the-box, but you have the source to tinker with and try to get it to work.

That is probably the same reason for running Wine on Windows, which is probably better than running an old program within a virtual machine.

Soon enough, you will probably run all of your programs in a browser anyway. But I digress :)

With Windows XP going away, in a few years you might be looking for an old box to run your favorite program. In another few years you might be completely out of luck. Even further out, what if Microsoft went bankrupt (or bought by Apple, Google, RedHat, whoever) and their OS division is shelved?

Projects like ReactOS, Wine, DOSBox, etc. allow you to have another possible path in that uncertain future. Your program might not work out-of-the-box, but you have the source to tinker with and try to get it to work.

That is probably the same reason for running Wine on Windows, which is probably better than running an old program within a virtual machine.

Soon enough, you will probably run all of your programs in a browser anyway. But I digress :)

Of course you can. You haven't copied anything, you've independently created a lookalike. It's you who've hired the programmers, so the product of their labour is yours.

But, the artistic work of the original programmers is theirs. The fact that paid someone else for their labor doesn't automatically mean I legally own all IP that they infringe.

In fact, this is similar to what the Wine project is doing, although they're trying to create a software layer which is functionally equivalent to Windows, and are less concerned about the graphical look.

Exactly. Now you see the distinction, I'd hope. WINE avoids the trademark and copyright issues by not using those graphics. If the defendant in this case had avoided the specific artwork, and instead merely took another functionally equivalent picture, he would have been fine, too.

It was only well known to his customers because he used the first one without paying license fees. Say I download a copy of Windows 7 from some torrent site, and the BSA comes after me to pay for a license. If I hired a team of programmers to reverse engineer Windows 7 and write something that looks the same, so that I don't have to pay for that license to Microsoft, I can't very well claim that I'm justified in copying because I was so used to using Windows 7.

Of course you can. You haven't copied anything, you've independently created a lookalike. It's you who've hired the programmers, so the product of their labour is yours.

In fact, this is similar to what the Wine project is doing, although they're trying to create a software layer which is functionally equivalent to Windows, and are less concerned about the graphical look.

Wine on non-x86 can't run x86 Windows applications. Qemu in theory could... very slowly, but then again that can run on Windows too.

There is ongoing work to change that: http://wiki.winehq.org/ARM
That way, all of WINE's Windows API code, including GDI, DirectX, etc... would run with native speed on ARM.
Only the target executable itself, excluding DLLs that are covered by WINE, would be emulated with QEMU.

I'm not sure of the version you are using but some seem to work under WINE http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=86

I use the latest version, whatever that may be. I need to sort out mapping data that comes in from customers all over the world. And some of it is pretty crappy.

Fortunately I don't need to do this often, a few times a year. It isn't worth the effort to spend more time than I already do fussing about with WINE.

But thanks for the suggestion.

I'm not sure of the version you are using but some seem to work under WINE http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=86

But, you're right that MythTV does not natively support Netflix. Maybe it could be accessed via MythBrowser? Or is a real Win/Mac (on a PC) client necessary?

Netflix depends on Silverlight. Silverlight is not supported (or usable) on Linux. Doesn't even work under Wine. A good alternative to Netflix is Hulu. It uses Flash for video.