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does it run on Linux?

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=3839 - So... depends on your distro.

Current the SC2 beta has a Gold rating on the Wine AppDB. It requires a custom compile with a patch, and a little config hacking, to work. I followed these instructions myself borrowing a friend's account, and could play the game. However, compared to my Windows XP install on the same PC, performance is horrid on Linux via Wine.

I'm hoping OpenGL support means better Wine performance. I'm sure with such a large community, Linux gamers will be able to play this game one way or another.

StarCraft/BroodWar are supported through WINE with Blizzard's tolerance on BattleNet.

Really? Because the wineHQ database and my personal experience would disagree...the game plays fine in single-player mode on wine, but battle.net doesn't work. I had better luck installing a windows 98 vm and running it in that. Of course, you have to have a windows 98 license laying around, but once I did that, it worked great for me.

I run WoW in WINE, and with very reasonable results (I get some visual artefacts, but only single frames of some incorrect polygon shapes). If Valve were working on bundling custom WINE launchers for each game... That might work.

The problem with WoW and WINE is you can't load max settings on WoW through WINE or it will crash out when you load into places like Dalaran. This was my biggest issue with trying to use WoW on Linux (had to go back to a dual-boot system for games). As mentioned on the WoW WINE page:

Dalaran and/or other areas cause crashes

This is due to WoW running 32-bit (there is no 64-bit client) and trying to allocate more than roughly 4GB of memory for advanced textures. This is a bug in Wine, since wine, by default, reserves 4096MB (the maximum for 32bit systems) of virtual memory to mimic the win32 memory layout. WoW allocates progressively more memory for textures and this forces the display drivers (which are loaded in the same section of memory) to quit with an GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY error.

Dalaran is a good example of this. Dragonblight and Icecrown may also suffer from this bug.

A possible workaround includes trying is to force Linux to use less memory than what you have, or to make it think it has less memory (eg, limit it to 3GB). The preferred way to do this is to add the mem=3G (for 3GB) or mem=2G (For 2GB) flag to your kernel boot parameters.

How to do this can be found in your particular distro's documentation.

Some people have reported it to work, whilst for others it has not. You may need to sacrifice the advanced textures if you try this.

MWF2

But Windows isn't a "good deal"; it's actually quite expensive and overpriced, given that the same functionality is available even in free operating systems.

How do I get a free OS to run DirectX-apps?

I currently use WINE to play Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 2 (which was released recently on Jan. 26, 2010) and have played several other games successfully. For ME2, I had to patch WINE to fix a stability issue and a mouse issue, but this was no big deal and is unusual; most games WINE can run don't require this. The "Winetricks" script makes it very easy to download (from Microsoft.com) and install the DirectX runtimes with a single command, facilitating the process.

It's quite rare that I encounter a game that simply will not work with WINE, though for some games I have had to take steps that would quickly frustrate someone who is not technically inclined and therefore not interested in how it works. For folks who don't want to deal with the effort, there are commercial versions of WINE that play more games out-of-the-box. Considering its complexity and the magnitude of the project, I am most impressed with what WINE can do.

linux (unbuntu 9.10) won't play a DVD out of the box. don't need to ramble on about why, it doesn't matter. that's the type of thing that absolutely must work out of the box for linux to be viable on the desktop.

also, linux doesn't run IE6, 7, or 8 under wine. the best (most supported) version, according to the wine app DB is IE7 with silver support,
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=4195

from that page, i think this sums it up: "What works: Nothing"

I can almost guarantee that if you submit a bug in the right place in the right format, you'll get a response. That response will almost certainly be a request for a regression test. It doesn't take much skill, so better to have users do it than busy, highly skilled devlopers. When I have done this I have had very good results getting regressions fixed. Sometimes even in the same day.

I agree. I've also found that using a "simple test format" for reporting bugs helps a great deal, both in getting service and also the attitude of the support staff (at least, as far as car be interpreted from text-only email communication).

The simple format I use goes like this:

Repro Steps:

1. First, do ...
2. Then, do ...
3. Next, do ...
4. Finally, do ...

Expected Results:
The dialog should have appeared, with ...

Actual Results:
The dialog was behind the main window ...

In addition, I try to reduce the steps as much as possible, both so I can know exactly what part of the sequence is causing the bug (so I can avoid doing that, for now); and so the developers can better pinpoint the code that's causing it.

Wine developers have a lot of work to do. Getting the version number correct is the least you could do. Submitting the bug to wine's bugzilla and not the AppDB is also very important. The AppDB is for the benefit of end users. Developers don't necessarily read the AppDB, they do keep up with the bugzilla.

I can almost guarantee that if you submit a bug in the right place in the right format, you'll get a response. That response will almost certainly be a request for a regression test. It doesn't take much skill, so better to have users do it than busy, highly skilled devlopers. When I have done this I have had very good results getting regressions fixed. Sometimes even in the same day.

Other people (at least two) have gotten it to work: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=15124&iTestingId=43419

Commander Keen is a DOS game, so it should run fine in DOSBox. Half Life 2 apparently runs perfectly in wine. As games get older, the likelihood of them running in Wine becomes greater (and as far as I can tell, they focus more on popular games, so stuff like WoW and HL2 work faster than less popular games).

Unfortunatly, steam client is broken in Wine now http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=19444 , but it doesn't seem to be webkits fault!

Hopefully it might eventually wind up being working better than the old Steam client ever was now that the IE dependency is thrown out.

Another excellent opportunity to wean someone from ITMS to emusic or the like. Otherwise appdb shows 8.2 as the latest version that works along with the store via wine. Unknown if the store requires a certain version or not though. Also a good opportunity to explain how proprietary lock-in can come back and bite you.

But I definitely agree with your overall statement, if they rely on win only apps, don't push it. I haven't even attempted to transition my parents off vista as they might actually die if they can't use the msn browser/email suite. Once MS kills it for good, I may setup a dual boot and have them try it out, but until then I'll maintain the pc as is.

VAC secured TF2 for Linux is platinum rated on Wine, depending on how buggy the most recent update of TF2 was (it varies widely from week to week)
 
  http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=9901
 
But for the most part it's very playable. Looks like today it's "just" silver. Heck I've gotten it to run briefly on my netbook using Ubuntu 9.10 netbook remix with the unsupported GMA 950 and an atom processor(!). Most of the bugs listed are bugs in the windows version too (like multicore support)

What I mean is: Here are the current Adobe results for Wine AppDb and here the Wine wiki. Wine developers do not specialise on Adobe products and have no access to the source code. It is just a matter of investment to kill the Adobe bugs and get platinum rating for the applications. And then you can really use Linux powered clusters and workstations for rendering. I mean, Windows machines have more limitations for professionals. In the high end production environment you need really fast machines with huge storage capacity. Costs do not really matter. It is difficult to buy a 30 000$ PC but having a high end video processing machine with Adobe tools would be very useful. Whether it is 400 000$ per work station hardware does not really matter when your graphics specialists get more productive. Linux virtually runs on each and every machine out there.

What I mean is: Here are the current Adobe results for Wine AppDb and here the Wine wiki. Wine developers do not specialise on Adobe products and have no access to the source code. It is just a matter of investment to kill the Adobe bugs and get platinum rating for the applications. And then you can really use Linux powered clusters and workstations for rendering. I mean, Windows machines have more limitations for professionals. In the high end production environment you need really fast machines with huge storage capacity. Costs do not really matter. It is difficult to buy a 30 000$ PC but having a high end video processing machine with Adobe tools would be very useful. Whether it is 400 000$ per work station hardware does not really matter when your graphics specialists get more productive. Linux virtually runs on each and every machine out there.

How much would it cost to make Adobe CS fully supported by Wine?

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=18348
Modern Warfare 2 is marked as gold. It both installs and runs for every tester.

What's that Mr. Wine? DX10 is supported? That's nice. See? It has a gold rating

Wine, Cedega or whatever. There, I said it. A significant portion of Windows games work on Wine and Cedega - just look at all the games that run on Wine with minor or no issues. You got WoW, Eve Online, Call of Duty, BioShock, Fallout, The Sims. All the major titles.

it's supposed to stand for "WINdows Emulator"

Whooosh!!

Cygwin does run in Wine, but Wine doesn't actually run under Cygwin as yet, or even compile. Helpers wanted!

Cygwin does run in Wine, but Wine doesn't actually run under Cygwin as yet, or even compile. Helpers wanted!

since when does WINE run under cygwin?

It works both ways, although buggy and not fully functional.
And as reported by parent poster, this two redundant monsters are used as test cases to assist developers in perfecting both software stacks (by investigating said bugs and lack of functionality)

since when does WINE run under cygwin?

It works both ways, although buggy and not fully functional.
And as reported by parent poster, this two redundant monsters are used as test cases to assist developers in perfecting both software stacks (by investigating said bugs and lack of functionality)

Baby steps.
It wasn't so long ago when IE had +90% of the worldwide browser usage share. I would have had nothing against IE, if it weren't for its incompatible implementation of web standards and being Windows-only. I believe it is a crime to limit a web site access to users of a certain browser and a certain OS. Probably this is what Microsoft wanted all along, to make the WWW an extension of Windows. I experienced this first hand when some sites, like my bank, were IE-only. Luckily, for me, Wine helped a lot in breaking that barrier. This is less of an issue now, IE8 is better with standards, and the usage share of alternative browsers grew to a point that they can't be ignored.
Also the EU's latest legislation should help level the playing field. I especially like the interoperability bit, and I hope it extends to ensuring IE complies with standards and doesn't introduce proprietary extensions.

From what I read, the infected packages were on gnome-look.org, not a repository.

Ubuntu 9.10 makes it easier to add repositories, which contain signed packages, which you can trust as much as you trust the owner of the repository. This means that I can go to winehq.org and easily add their repository to my sources. It also means that if someone hacks into their repository server, and uploads a virus-laden package, it won't install on my system, because it wasn't signed by winehq.org.

You must be new here, let me welcome you to "The Internet". I hope you enjoy your visit.

Hosting companies don't give a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys about such matters, so long as the people responsible for the hosting pay good money.

Even the hosting companies that claim to be anti-spam, and who's acceptable use policies state that ANY support of spam, including hosting spamvertized web sites, when confronted with multiple, on-going violations, will ignore all reports, remove all forum posts calling attention to those posts, and continue to cash the checks from the spammers.

SS2 runs fine on current OSes.

Sure!

http://www.opensuse.org/
http://www.ubuntu.org/
http://www.winehq.org/
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxlinux/

Absolutely no WGA getting in your way! ;)

Linux emulation is broken and has been broken for ages.

Works for me.

Live UFS dump is broken.

Works for me.

USB mass storage support is broken.

Wine is not supported;

And this is FreeBSD's fault why?
http://wiki.winehq.org/Wine64

ZFS in double parity mode is broken

Haven't move to zfs yet, but given your pattern I'm guessing you're wrong again.

MTRR for older ATI cards is broken

If you're referring to bug I think you are, it was fixed awhile ago and was non-serious in first place. As with the rest of you're statements it's hard to know what you're talking about without referencing a bug report.

GSpot is a video codec identification tool for windows:
http://www.headbands.com/gspot/

I seem to remember writing up a wine bug about it sometime in the distant past. Ah yes, here it is:

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14868

I'm looking at http://www.winehq.org/history which I assume you're hopefully going to agree, is likely a reliable source.

It's very incomplete. Part of the story is how the WineX developers and such promised that they would contribute work on DX to Wine, which is discussed in detail on the mailing lists. This lead to a huge amount of developer stagnation in the area as everyone was just waiting on the "patches" that would bring all this new functionality.

Years pass and it ends up becoming obvious that the WineX/cedega developers had no intention of keeping their promise despite their continuous reassurances, thus causing a huge amount of stagnation in development in Wine's development in the Direct X area, during this time a lot of the developers felt that this was a catalyst that should push the licensing changes to prevent something like this (and other events noted in Wine's history) from ever happening again, where it took them more years to get where they are today which, in many ways, is still lacking compared to Cedega who had a large head start due to deceiving the WineHQ people who are still playing catch up.

A lot of these events are not documented on the website and other places except in discussions on the WineHQ mailing lists as it doesn't help very much with a 'professional' image of Wine by ranting on about all the booboos Wine had.

Had Wine been licensed the way it is today, quite a few negative incidents could have been avoided and Wine would have been better off today.

I've tried searching for mailing list entries, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of stuff out there, at least that Google is showing up.

It's all there, I just don't want to spend a few hours looking through the archives, but I'm sure there are those on Slashdot that do 'obsess' enough over this to do so.

Nope. Try a more reliable source like the Wine mailing lists.

I'm not sure why I'm bothering to do this, because I know you're going to continue to think the same thing regardless, but...

I'm looking at http://www.winehq.org/history which I assume you're hopefully going to agree, is likely a reliable source. ;) I've tried searching for mailing list entries, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of stuff out there, at least that Google is showing up.

Anyway, there seem to be a couple of points.

a) RMS helpfully pointed out that, at the time anyway, the BSD license was considered incompatible with the GPL.
b) There was, as I already surmised in the GP, fear of Wine being "hijacked," by a commercial entity, apparently Corel.

c) There was apparently a majority vote to switch to the LGPL. I don't place a lot of confidence in such democratic measures where Stallman is concerned; a majority vote to move a project to an FSF license isn't going to necessarily mean much, if the people voting aren't capable of objectivity where said licenses are concerned. It reminds me of the amount of pressure that Alan Cox was trying to initially put on Linus, to move the kernel to version 3 of the GPL.

If you want to give yourself some credibility, in response to this, I'd suggest actually trying to legitimately refute what I've already written in the GP, rather than simply coming back again with another variation of the "citation needed," troll; which I suspect in this case translates to you actually not having a more legitimate comeback.

An alternative is to setup Windows in a VirtualBox VM that has 3D acceleration enabled, install WineD3D in it, and then install and run your game.

The results vary depending on the game and on your system, but it's worth a try. Some games definitely work better this way than through Wine, and you don't have to reboot.

Check the Wine AppDB: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=6824

Run MSO, PlanetSide, WoW, Crysis, GTA X, Global Agenda, Steam and the games i download for it?

Stop whining and start WINEing.

Sure, the best place to start when you are looking for advice on how to get a particular Windows application to work in Wine is here . Just run a search for your games in the application database and see what comes up.

I've never personally ran either of the two games you mentioned, however, I do have a couple of general pointers.
The very first thing I do when wanting to try a new game is I just put the CD in the drive on my Ubuntu box and see if it will work. Ubuntu 9.10 which is going to drop here in a couple of days offers much tighter integration between apps installed in Wine and the regular desktop. The correct icons are used instead of generic Wine icons, menu entries are better integrated, and the stock software add/remove functionality now supports Wine apps right along side the native Linux ones.

Now, after you have installed Wine and put the CD in the drive and the autorun dialog comes up and you've installed the game, if you click on it in your menu and it doesn't work the most likely problem is there is a particular dll file it's looking for that isn't there. Open up your terminal and navigate to the game's executable in your /home/username/.wine/drive_c/Program files/ directory and try to run it with $ wine app_name.exe. Pay attention to the output and scan through the gobbledygood and look for what it says the problem is. If it is indeed a dll, just do a google search with "missing.dll download" and usually, a site will come up that has it for download. Copy it to the same directory the game's executable is and it should work at that point as that is in the search path for dll's when wine tries to load something. If it still doesn't work, that's when I hit the application database. Sometimes there are simple tweaks and sometimes there are more complex ones. Fallout 3 comes to mind here. That should get you started on that.

A couple of general Linux pointers:
First, don't be afraid to break your install. Linux is very robust but it will do anything you tell it to do with a salute and a smile. So, if you unwittingly tell it to break itself, it will. And as a curious technically adept user, you will do this probably more than once. No problem, just expect that at first, that will happen. Trying to fix it will be a good learning experience and even if you don't succeed and have to reinstall, you will still have learned a great deal. I generally recommend any new Linux user that really wants to learn Linux and not just use it to "get work done" start off in a virtual machine. VirtualBox is really good as it's free and it allows 3D capabilities in Linux guests unlike vmware so you get the full effect with compiz, etc. Run it and read all the Linux books you can find and experiment with it. It's a very rewarding experience and this is how I learned to use Linux. The funny thing is, after a year or so, you will look back on some of the mistakes you made at first, at the time seeing them as insurmountable errors requiring yet another reinstall but after the year, are the easiest thing in the world to fix. My first reinstall came after messing up the nvidia driver. Now, I can install and configure it in my sleep.

So, don't let anything discourage you. There will be times when you're like, "Screw this, I'm going back to Windows." Just know that when that happens, it means you are normal and just need to persevere a little longer.

I hope this helps and if I sound condescending at all, I don't mean it that way. If you have any questions, just reply.

I've tinkered with Wine since about 1997, and the frustration involved in getting anything to actually work properly has never been justified by results.

My experience with WINE has been similar, until recently. We bought a couple of Wacom graphics tablets for home, and they work very nicely with Ubuntu. Just for fun, I tried to install the painting program that was bundled with them - Art Rage. It installed perfectly, and runs perfectly under WINE, after installing gdiplus http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=1901. Art Rage is actually a nice program, which attempts to emulate the behavior of real paints, brushes, spatulas, etc. (its features can't be replicated in Photoshop or GIMP).

Linux, although far from perfect, has been mature enough for the desktop for years, while every time I use Windows I find myself grinding my teeth.

We've been Linux-only at home for about 4 years, so I usually only grind my teeth at work. The company is overly dependent on Microsoft stuff, the quirky as well as the worthy.

Great Diablo 2. Let me know when I can buy something off the shelf today, not out of the bargain bin.

World of Warcraft. Supreme Commander. Half Life 2. Call of Duty 2. Warhammer Online. Eve Online. Fallout 3. Command and Conquer 3. The Sims 3. Counter Strike Source.

And that's just from the front page. Are those more in your price range?

Unfortunately, I find a lot of the open source offerings for Linux lacking compared to what it is available for Microsoft.

Indeed. If only there were some way of running all that software designed for the Microsoft platform on a Linux platform...

Just because your OS kernel is Open Source(tm) doesn't mean all of your applications need to be.

Gold and Platinum ratings. http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=2910

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?versionId=469

Looks like WarlordIV works (at least in windowed mode) in wine.

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=4395
Also the last review was written with a older version ... It may now completely work.

One massive advantage of Linux is that old hardware (that support exists for - which is most..) keep getting support. (it is very rare to drop a driver in the kernel just because it is old hardware.)

You could also try the appsdb list of Wine. ~ http://appdb.winehq.org/ If you browse the list you can find freeware windows games that runs quite well. (the last one I tried and had fun was Battleships Forever)

Wine translates the fixed function and shaders to OpenGL/GLSL/ARB shaders as necessary. Most newer games work somewhat out of the box, several run perfectly out of the box, some without requiring the closed source version of "DirectX 9 extension DLLs" ala d3dx_39.dll, which wine is also implementing.

Basically, if it runs straight DirectX 9, or most things before d3dx9_35.dll, it runs okay on wine.
But implying that Starcraft is the average age of things that 'work okay on wine' certainly isn't the case. You can happily run World of Warcraft, Half Life 2, Oblivion, and many other games on it.
Check the Platinum and Gold lists for some goodies: http://appdb.winehq.org/

I can happily load most any retail game released as brand new -today-, and at least get to title screen, or know exactly why it failed. Many work correctly in-game to a significant degree.

Or try the steam download of Bioshock which has a silver rating with the newer version of Wine, 1.1.28. I believe you can download a steam version even if you purchased the game retail. http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=17740

(2)if they haven't heard of it, "will it do everything that Windows will?" I explain that it will

So, when they ask something like "Will it play Bioshock?", do you say

a) "It will"

-or-

b) "It will, but not with high texture details or proper mouse control, and don't change the resolution or that will crash the game. Oh yeah, the game will page fault quite often, so save regularly, but other than that, it will work just great!"

What a great friend.

On a side note (sorry for offtopic), I wonder how many people will be blocked from going to that page since it says "make bombs"? :P

ALLAAAAH

*cough*