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Debian And WineX
fdsa writes "After a heated debate, and under some pressure by TransGaming, an 'intent to package' WineX from sourceforge CVS for (non-free) Debian has been withdrawn. The message provides a good summary of the recent Wine chaos, and notes how WineX is effectively under a different license than stated. Here's a mail from their CEO Gavriel State on the issue."
Amusingly, Gentoo Linux users can install WineX with a single command. It is packaged (I assume) from the Sourceforge CVS, and given that Gentoo compiles everything from scratch, conveniently sidesteps the whole distributing binaries thing.
By the way, for fellow Gentoo users, a 2002/05/11 ebuild is currently available by "# emerge winex". Check the package list for the most recent date.
If you read the entire Open Source initiative statement, you'll understand that Open Source is just a fancy name for proprietary licenses. Yea, there are some guidlines that must be met but they are a mile wide, so when someone says they are "Open Source", you really have to read their license, because it could be just about anything.
GPL all the way, baby. You know what you're getting every time.
Transgaming was promising to give back their sourcecode ton Wine. They've since changed their policy on that and any mention of merging with the wine tree after meeting their targets has been silently dropped from their website.
I personaly have a winex subscription and run debian. They have debian packages and I don't mind having to download and install them manualy. Helping to pay for development and being able to use my votes to make an impact into what they are wokring on next is good. I enjoy playing JKII under linux and am going to install SOF II shortly. If they could just get dungeon siege working i won't have to boot to windows until the next good game is released and only until Transgaming fixes winex to support it.
Cool. You do that. Everyone else will continue to play Counter Strike using WINE like they did well before Transgaming.
Granted, their method of releasing code isn't perfect, they also don't have the comercial customer support base that codeweavers has. And yes, they do support .deb, .rpm, & .tgz binary releases now (as of 2.01).
What gentoo gives you is the CVS of winex.
This doesn not include the SafeDisc stuff that transgaming packages up.
Most copy-protected CDROM games will not work with the CVS.
But since linux users never pay for anything anyway I guess you can just use hacked versions of games from p2p networks.
I'm currently running Debian, but I'm planning to switch to gentoo in the near future. As to the capabilities of Portage... From their website:
"Portage is a true ports system in the tradition of BSD ports, but is Python-based and sports a number of advanced features including dependencies, fine-grained package management, "fake" (OpenBSD-style) installs, path sandboxing, safe unmerging, system profiles, virtual packages, config file management, and more...
Tell Portage what ebuild you'd like to install, and Portage will auto-download, unpack, patch, configure, compile and install the package. Thanks to Portage auto-dependency resolution, you can install KDE 3.0 or GNOME 1.4 by typing in a single command, and the resultant installed binaries will be optimized and customized to your exact specifications."
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I'm a former Mandrake user, (mandrake uses apt-get and urpmi, two tools which are nearly identical in functionality). Today I'm a Gentoo user.
Gentoo is by no means stable - you have to maintain the stability yourself. In fact, gentoo is more of a bleeding edge kind of system. They usually have the latest version of whatever someone has written a script for that can be automatically installed (including custom system options, most notablly the
-O3 and -fastmath optimizations on C and C++ code). New stuff is available every couple of hours to be recompiled for your system specifically.
The biggest problem with Gentoo right now is reverse dependancy checking - when you uninstall a package, the portage tool (similar to apt-get) doesn't check to see what packages will be broken by this change (forward dependency checking works great). And of course, not all of the code actually works right away. However, its been my experience that the user community is much, much better to work with than any other distro. In previous distributions, if something broke, I'd often have to scour the internet to learn how to fix it. With gentoo, problems are often solved with just a visit to their website.
One more thing - if you really like some package, you can just install it by hand. But its not much more work to make a package (unlike a rpm, for example). In fact, its not much work to edit packages if there are problems. Therefore, its quite possible for users to be developers in this distro. In fact, it seems to be the norm.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!