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"Lindows" Coming Soon?
nstbbuff sent in a link to a story running at ZD about Lindows,
a recently funded startup founded by MP3.com's old CEO that plans to sell a WINE oriented Linux dist for $99. As usual I'm skeptical about these sorts of things, but provided code is released back, I'm down with it. Meanwhile Transgaming is doing their thing, but with game-specific stuff. Their flagship release is The Sims, but theoretically many DirectX games should run under Windows. I'm still skeptical -- I mean, how many closed WINE forks does the world need?
I mean, how many closed WINE forks does the world need?
... as soon as they have enough subscribers, they'll release it all under the Wine license. Okay, I must note here that I don't know the specifics about that one, but it's more Free than the currently used Alladin license.
The transgaming patches are NOT closed source, they are just not Free Software. You can download them (see the winex project on sourceforge) or get them from CVS, you just can't use them for anything commercial. And
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If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
Vmware enables you to use windows inside linux and then run your windows apps inside windows. So you still need an installed and working windows. It is just a way to avoid dual booting. The drawbacks are that you still need windows and that it requires a lot of ram and processing power.
On the other hand, wine works without the windows OS and runs the software alone. That is a much more difficult task than the first solution because wine has to "understand" all kinds of software calls to the OS. That is why the bigger and more complex apps do not run with wine.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
Well, Linux is not exactly cutting-edge technology. It was designed with well-known and well-established OS principles in mind. In "OS years" it's significantly older than 10 years. More like 20-25 years, in parts of the paging and VM code.
Of course, the distribution model and licensing can be considered cutting-edge.
-- clvrmnky
So they claim, but my direct X apps run fine in it, although it can't take advantage of my 3D card.
I can play playstation (epsxe, CVGS) and N64 (apollo, 1964, pj64) along with quake and baldurs gate and so on.
Wine Is Not an Emulator. It does not emulate Windows, it is an alternate implementation of the Win32 API. The DirectX portion of Wine simply translates the Direct3D interface to Mesa library calls.
So it does exactly what you describe; it runs Windows games natively on Linux.
What's the fun of running Windows apps in Linux? Higher stability? a
Maybe a few people will want to make their own damn choices and not necessarily want to be forced to automatically sign on Internet secure sites using Microsoft passport, and browse the Microsoft Network, and put their money in the Microsoft bank, and buy the latest Microsoft choice of music and movies from the Microsoft DVD store, drink "Bill's Choice" softdrink, wear Microsoft cloths, buy a car from the Microsoft New Cars site (after Ford is brought under their control, uh, a strategic partnership formed with Ford) and buy their mortgate from the Microsoft Savings & Loan and ship packages with Microsoft Parcel Service and get their Microsoft friendly news from the Microsoft National Broadcasting Company (MSNBC) over the Microsoft Cable Service, etc.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You also might want to consider upgrading to eComStation. It's an updated version of OS/2 Warp 4, with lots of big and little improvements.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
There are a few base classes of emulators:
1) "Classic emulators": These emulators provide a dedicated memoryspace for the target platform, provide CPU emulation, and provide some means to interact the "virtual computer" with the host operating system. (Think SoftPC, KEGS or SNES9x)
2) "Translators": These emulators, upon loading, convert the target platform's code to code compatible with the host platform (Like MIPS->X86). Libraries of the target are either mapped to native libraries or new libraries are written. Dedicated memory is likely to be required if the target application does not have a memory manager. Think UltraHLE here.
3) "Virtualized Systems": Provide seperate interfaces to the hardware of the host system to different operating systems thereon. May include combining ethernet packets, sharing access to IDE controllers, providing a means to change access to the video hardware etc. Think Plex86 or "Classic Environment" (OS X).
4) "API Emulators": Host and target are the same platform, but different operating systems. Rather than provide a direct means to share hardware as in virtualized systems, the libraries used by the target operating system are mapped to libraries on the host, or new libraries are written to provide easy compatibility. This is what Wine is.