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Fun With Wine

taviso writes "Ever wondered what would happen if you could compile and run cygwin under wine ? What about compiling wine under cygwin ? well these guys have, and are planning to nest the two environments as many times as possible to see if wine can take the strain, and not without good reason: 'Having such virtualization environments run within each other is an important milestone in the lives of these projects, it is a remarkable technical feat that requires a great deal of maturity'. "

263 comments

  1. What's this? by QuietRiot · · Score: 4, Funny

    What's this, cygwine?

    1. Re:What's this? by stefanlasiewski · · Score: 3, Funny

      Fine Wine and Cygars?

      --
      "Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
    2. Re:What's this? by jez9999 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I've been wondering for a while now; isn't WINE kind of illegal? Why hasn't Microsoft cracked down on it yet? This is no attempt at a troll, BTW, just genuine curiosity.

      I mean, WINE is attempting to perfectly imitate the Windows API. This seems to me like a breach of copyright. Microsoft create an API and its functionality is copied identically by another application? It actually seems like MS have a genuine case, for once, at legal action. Looks like WINE is doing to Microsoft what Microsoft have done to a lot of competitiors - steal their intellectual property.

    3. Re:What's this? by OneEyedApe · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I have not looked into this, but I would suspect that they are employing a method similar to that of the Samba team. In otherwords, you treat the program (or libraries) in question as black boxes. Put X in, get Y out, then write a function F such that F(X) = Y. The idea is to mimic the functionality, without looking at the actual code.

      --
      Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all....
      --Thomas J. Kopp
    4. Re:What's this? by jez9999 · · Score: 1

      But the actual code of WINE is irrelevant. It is going to be different from Microsoft's code anyway. What IS relevant is the interface into the 'black box' - it's IDENTICAL (or designed to be) to the WinAPI, and that is where the copyright violation seems to occur.

    5. Re:What's this? by stefanlasiewski · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I believe that you are allowed to emulate an interface, as long as you can prove that the code underneith is unique.

      This is why IBM produced Intel-like chips for such a long time.

      And today, you can run a Windows or Linux system on top of either Intel or AMD chips. You don't need to install a whole other OS. Why? Because the AMD chip emulates the Intel interface.

      --
      "Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
    6. Re:What's this? by jez9999 · · Score: 1

      Then how come Apple sued Microsoft for stealing MacOS's interface, with Windows? Wasn't Windows a kind of emulation of MacOS with a few minor changes?

    7. Re:What's this? by ChiPHeaD23 · · Score: 2

      Apple lost.

    8. Re:What's this? by stefanlasiewski · · Score: 3, Informative

      You can sue all you want, but it doesn't mean that are right or that you will win.

      Apple sued, but they lost., because Apple was not the inventor or the GUI interface. They borrowed the GUI idea from the Smalltalk project which was created by Xerox and PARC.

      --
      "Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
    9. Re:What's this? by zmooc · · Score: 2

      They're copying it and the only problems they may face are equal to when they'd be copying cola from CocaCola; as long as they don't call it CocaCola and don't use patented things in it, they're fine. So they may run into problems with software patents, product names etc. but not for just implementing a windows api.

      --
      0x or or snor perron?!
    10. Re:What's this? by ggambett · · Score: 1

      Actually, it's GNU/Cygwine :)

    11. Re:What's this? by arkanes · · Score: 2

      Look and feel is a trademark issue, and doesn't apply to interfaces. The copyright belongs on the code itself, again, not in the interfaces. Patents are about the only thing that can catch them, and MS has hisorically shied away from using patents to slap people down. Nothing illegal about reverse engineering. As long as they don't look at the MS code, they're in the clear.

  2. Wonderful. by aussersterne · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So I can nest to infinite levels cygwin and the free version of Wine, giving me access to the Linux commands I already have in Linux, only now I have them available to me n+1 times at progressively "deeper" levels. I can dig arbitrarily deep in nested environments and run 'ls'. Huzzah!

    But I still cannot run MS Office or Internet Explorer or most games in Wine. D'oh!

    --
    STOP . AMERICA . NOW
    1. Re:Wonderful. by xanadu-xtroot.com · · Score: 5, Informative

      But I still cannot run MS Office or Internet Explorer

      What are you talking about? Of course you can

      --
      I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
      I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
    2. Re:Wonderful. by brunes69 · · Score: 5, Informative

      MS Office and IE both run fine in Wine. IE of course only runs if you have an existing Windows install. And all the games I care about (like Warcraft III and Max Payne :P) work fine in WineX

    3. Re:Wonderful. by aussersterne · · Score: 2

      Notice that I mentioned "the free version of Wine."

      Yes, I can pay for an aftermarket Wine to run Office, but I can also run MS Office and Internet Explorer in Win4Lin, as well as Photoshop (which codeweavers can't help me with), so even paying $$, Wine comes out loser.

      --
      STOP . AMERICA . NOW
    4. Re:Wonderful. by garcia · · Score: 2

      I am not at all interested in paying for the crossover plugin.

      The point for me of getting away from Windows is the pay factor. If I've already paid for Office, why would I want to spend ANOTHER $55 to get it to work under Linux?

      I might as well keep Windows and just run it there for the same price as I paid for it.

    5. Re:Wonderful. by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 2
      MS Office and IE both run fine in Wine. IE of course only runs if you have an existing Windows install.

      Untrue also :) Jeez, looks like half of slashdot hasn't actually used Wine. I have IE6 running at work just fine, although I do have a dual boot system CrossOver isn't using anything from my XP installation. You just need to get the installer and install it as normal. Doesn't work perfectly, but it's good enough for web development which is all I need it for.

    6. Re:Wonderful. by aussersterne · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I don't know which version of wine you use. But I have downloaded every Wine release, compiled, installed, and run it. I want Wine to work. I read the Wine Weekly News. It would be nice to be able to abandon Win4Lin's "windows in a window" environment in favor of individual application windows.

      But I can still not get the Office installer or the Inernet Explorer installer or the Photoshop installer to run.

      I've even tried several times using Wine with the filesystem created by Win4Lin, which had an "already existing Windows install" containing Office and IE and PS. No dice.

      Here and there (mostly on /.) I hear of people who are able to use Wine to run every last Windows application under the sun. "Wine works great, and it works great now!" they say. But I can't get most any application installers to work with Wine, even with the latest releases. And no Web sites out there exist that give any hints, beyond DLL games that also don't produce desired results.

      If you have nice, step-by-step instructions for getting Office 2000 and Internet Explorer 6 and Photoshop 6 to install and run in Wine, please post them here! The Linux community will be very grateful, as this would allow a large number of people to migrate to Linux by using Wine to run their important applications.

      Yes, you can buy Crossover Office for some increased (yet still limited) application support. And you can buy into the Transgaming situation for some increased (yet still limited) gaming support. And you could even buy WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux for a while, which used wine for some increased (yet still limited) application support. But that's a lot of $$, a lot of different installations of wine on a single system, and still no Photoshop 6!

      --
      STOP . AMERICA . NOW
    7. Re:Wonderful. by boy_of_the_hash · · Score: 4, Funny

      Look on the bright side.

      At last a perverse heterogeneous enviroment exists that allows developers to draw on the combined flaws and incompatabilities of linux, windows, cygwin and wine. Which (aside from the uber-cool element), is a boon for masochistic developers everywhere. Perhaps this will spur a new breed of coders that are the cyber-culture equivilent of flagellation cults.

      Then again, I probably should go a little easier on the wine.

    8. Re:Wonderful. by Spoing · · Score: 5, Informative
      Yes, with the GPLed version of Wine available at the main Wine site. Codeweavers puts polish on the GPLed version by adding an installer including tweaks. The effort they put into it is worth it.

      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.

      --
      A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
    9. Re:Wonderful. by paai · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      I agree. Wine Does Not Work (most of the time).
      In itself that is no disaster, but it becomes a
      disaster when other people think "Oh, I can
      do any Windows stuff with Wine".

      I think that this way Wine had done more
      harm than good to the cause of Open Source...

      Paai

    10. Re:Wonderful. by Monkelectric · · Score: 3, Funny
      I am not at all interested in paying for the crossover plugin.

      I to am frustrated at the difficlty of finding linux waerz :D

      --

      Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley

    11. Re:Wonderful. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    12. Re:Wonderful. by Vilim · · Score: 1

      ?? i have office 2000 running fine on wine. I used the tutorial found here [http://frankscorner.org/wine/modules.php?op=modlo ad&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid= 30&page=1]. It works fine for men, although it does crash sometimes while exiting (preforming your exit much faster :p)

      --
      History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
    13. Re:Wonderful. by aussersterne · · Score: 1

      Did you read that link? I've been there in the past. None of the applications you linked to run properly (i.e. at 5 level), while they all run properly in Win4Lin.

      --
      STOP . AMERICA . NOW
    14. Re:Wonderful. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And you can buy into the Transgaming situation for some increased (yet still limited) gaming support.

      You aren't required to pay for WineX unless you want their precompiled binaries. The CVS tree is open to the public.

      FWIW, any recent Wine/WineX will run every Win32 application I'm forced to run (which is arguably few ;).

      CodeWeavers gives back all of their code so it shouldn't be long before the main tree has all the functionality you need. :)

    15. Re:Wonderful. by brunes69 · · Score: 2

      When I try this it tells me that internet explorer cannot be installed on this version of windows

    16. Re:Wonderful. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >>But I still cannot run MS Office or Internet >>Explorer or most games in Wine. D'oh!

      Why would you want to do that?????

    17. Re:Wonderful. by isorox · · Score: 2

      I to am frustrated at the difficlty of finding linux waerz :D

      Word is the hacker/terrorist site www.freshmeat.net has lots of software to download. Do there before the feds do!

    18. Re:Wonderful. by rsilva · · Score: 1

      After reading your post I decided to install wine once more and see if it works. Then I did:

      # apt-get install wine wine-utils libwine-print winesetuptk

      Waited a little...

      Then I called winesetup and accepted all the defaults. Finally I called IE with

      $ wine /mnt/dosc/Arquivos de Programas/Inernet Explorer/iexplore.exe

      Now I am answering you from IE working under wine... Not that hard! IE works reasonably well, the only problems I have seen in the last ten minutes are a weird pink background for the icons and some glitches in slashdot rendering (the rounded corners are only partialy visable). Another problem that my Brazilian (ABNT2) keyboard is not working perfectly, for example I can't get the backslash.

      Give it a try, wine may surprise you. It surprised me.

      Two important details. I am running Degian testing (Sarge). The wine version is 0.0.20020904-1. Moreover, I had a windows installation, so I am running the programas from there. I didn't try to install any application.

    19. Re:Wonderful. by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 3, Informative

      Hmm, odd. Make sure Wine is set to be emulating Windows 98 not 95

    20. Re:Wonderful. by cgleba · · Score: 2

      BTW I've found that the latest CVS from the wine project (make sure to use --enable-opengl) tends to be more stable, faster and runs more programs then WineX CVS. The only exception to this is any game that *only* uses DirectX. In that case WineX wins by a large margin.

      As for the previous complaints about Office2000, IE6 not working, I have yet to have any luck with either of those (I don't have a need for either; it is just amusing to play with wine). . .*but* Office97 and IE 5.5 work superbly and I don't see a massive feature difference (other then pretty stuff) to warrant the need for O2k. . .but then, too, I don't use office (AbiWord rocks!).

    21. Re:Wonderful. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      alt.binaries.warez.linux ;)

      The newsgroup 'alt.binaries.warez.linux' does not seem to exist on the newsgroup server netnews.attbi.com. ;)

    22. Re:Wonderful. by +A.OS.L.S_Bozo+ · · Score: 2, Informative
      Yes, you can buy Crossover Office for some increased (yet still limited) application support.
      ...and still no Photoshop 6!
      Like this? or this?
      As you can see from those screenshots, I've had success getting PS 6.0 to work from within Codeweaver's "Crossover Office". It starts & runs without issue. I also tried a few different filters, and they worked.

      However, every time I attempted to modify the default user colors, it crashed without hesitation.
      YMMV.
      --
      +Chiron+
    23. Re:Wonderful. by jez9999 · · Score: 1

      Someone sends you an Office 2000 compatible .doc file. Now re-answer the question.

    24. Re:Wonderful. by OneEyedApe · · Score: 0

      While this might make for an interesting exercise, I have but one question. Why would you want to run Micrsoft Word, Excel, and Internet Explorer under Linux? From my experience, OpenOffice.org and Mozilla are far better products, and they run natively.

      --
      Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all....
      --Thomas J. Kopp
    25. Re:Wonderful. by tijnbraun · · Score: 1

      I have win4lin ... quite expensive actually (you need a bootable win98 cd to get it to work + buy win 4lin)... but when I start win it always eats a lot of my memory and cpu.. here is a example of top (win + iexplore):
      PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
      2649 onno 19 0 24560 46M 24364 R 27.0 41.9 0:21 dosexec

      normally the cpu usage goes down if you leave it to itself...

      But although I think that win4lin is nice... it still is uses a lot of memory to emulate (or whatever its doing) the windows kernel + application, instead of only running the application you interested in... Wine on the other hand (if it uses less than the windows kernel) could sometimes be more appropriate

    26. Re:Wonderful. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your sig is heartwarming, thanks.

    27. Re:Wonderful. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      jeeeeeeezzzus second link NOT work-safe

      but it definitely works at home ;)

    28. Re:Wonderful. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're right. It won't work if your a woman, but it does work fine for men.

    29. Re:Wonderful. by mikvo · · Score: 1

      We recently received an Office 2K document that, try as we might, crashed Word every time we tried to print (from various versions of Windows, and various versions of Office). It was a 60-something page document with lots of large tables, and a bunch of other strange, but not-too-complex stuff.

      So, being the adventursome soul that I am, I fired up my OpenOffice, pointed it at that document, and PRESTO! No problemo.

      So maybe OpenOffice still starts a little slow, and is a little sluggish at times, but it does a pretty good job as far as I'm concerned.

  3. What the hell does this mean? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I can't make heads or tails out of the disclaimer on the webpage. WTF, is Cygwin available or not? These folks need to work on their english skills...

    The latest net releases of the Cygwin DLL are numbered 1.1.x or 1.3.x. 1.n.x versions of the Cygwin DLL are newer than previous beta Bxx (i.e. B19, B20, B20.1) versions. The last commercial release was v1.0 which was only released on CD-ROM and is no longer available. Red Hat has no current plans to release a new commercial CD. The Red Hat GNUpro release version is currently 1.2.x and is available only with Red Hat support contracts.

    The last Bxx release was in December 1998. The Bxx releases are no longer available. In fact, older versions of the DLL or utilities are not usually available on this web site. Any cygwin program built from December 1998 onward should work correctly with newer DLL

    1. Re:What the hell does this mean? by Raiford · · Score: 2
      It's availible and I am using it right now. I am running Xfree86 on top of CYGWIN on an XP box. I am using mozilla via a PII box running linux with a remote Xsession setup on the XP machine using CYGWIN/XFree86.

      --
      "player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
  4. Cute title but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Imagine parents checking the browser history and discovering their 14-years-old read a page called "Fun With Wine".

    1. Re:Cute title but... by Lazarus2k2001 · · Score: 0, Troll

      Was that suppose to be funny??

      --
      "Holy instant noodle"
    2. Re:Cute title but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Frankly any parent with the technical werewithal to check browser histories of their children probably already reads slashdot.

    3. Re:Cute title but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Speaking as a former 14 year old who had his browser history checked, I'd say thats the least of his concerns ;).

    4. Re:Cute title but... by isorox · · Score: 3, Funny

      Imagine parents checking the browser history and discovering their 14-years-old read a page called "Fun With Wine".

      Knowing parents they'll stop the kids using the computer. Knowing kid's, (s)he'll whine.

      *groan*

    5. Re:Cute title but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Imagine parents checking the browser history and discovering their 14-years-old read a page called "Fun With Wine".
      I would of course promptly switch them to beer.

    6. Re:Cute title but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If the 14 year old is reading slashdot.org, he/she knows how to delete the history.

    7. Re:Cute title but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Everyone knows 14y olds are full of whoremoans

  5. Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough... by JessLeah · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wine has come light-years since I first used it, years and years ago... yet every time I try to use it to run some arbitrary WinThing, inevitably I can't figure out how to make it work, or I try feeding it every DLL/etc. it needs, and then it segfaults. Or just doesn't work.

    I read these stories of people doing absolutely astonishing things using WINE, but what the rest of us (who only have a need to touch WINE when there is something that they Must Have that isn't available for Linux-- in my case, it was the FightAIDS@Home distributed-computing client) really need is a good, central repository of "How to get Program X to work under WINE" mini-tutorials.

    Anyone here work on WineHQ and can comment on this?

  6. Well, I am already sure about one thing ... by RinkSpringer · · Score: 1

    ... most developers already had fun with wine :-)

  7. Wow! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Some nerds certainly know how to have a good time! Is this going to be on the next volume of "When Geeks Go Wild" ?

  8. No... by mumblestheclown · · Score: 3, Insightful

    'Having such virtualization environments run within each other is an important milestone in the lives of these projects, it is a remarkable technical feat that requires a great deal of maturity'.

    No, it's a party trick. Milestones include running actual applications that matter and getting large numnbers of users to use the emulators as a bridge from one OS to anther.

    FWIF, Since 1995-1996 or so I've had linux people telling me about how wine is close to obsoleting my windows systems. Hence, my skepticism. These emulators always seem to be amazing technical accomplishments, yes, but like Soviet televisions made of vaccuum tubes for sale at Best Buy, not ready for prime time by anybody but tinkerers. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that they are chasing a moving target..

    1. Re:No... by glwtta · · Score: 2, Redundant
      These emulators always seem to be amazing technical accomplishments

      Just to start the pedantry rolling - WINE isn't an emulator, it's an API implementation.

      --
      sic transit gloria mundi
    2. Re:No... by Ed+Avis · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you have a Windows box, this is an important step forward in the quest to Run Everything Under Cygwin. You can try out your existing apps to see if they work under Wine. If eventually you manage to get all your applications working on top of Cygwin (including some or fewer through Wine), then you can yank away the bottom two layers and switch to a Unixlike OS.

      --
      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    3. Re:No... by dinivin · · Score: 2

      An emulator is something that duplicates the environment that an application runs in.

      That's from the Wine FAQ. It goes on to say that Wine doesn't attempt to duplicate the environment.

      However, the simple fact of the matter is that I have a shit load of wine libraries on my computer designed specifically to emulate their windows counterparts. As such, WINE most certainly is an emulator.

      Dinivin

    4. Re:No... by John+Ineson · · Score: 2, Informative
      The problem is exacerbated by the fact that they are chasing a moving target..
      Nope.

      "By the way, a lot of people think that the Windows API is too much of a moving target for WINE to catch up. As a Windows developer, let me say, this is rubbish. Almost every Windows app out there is tested on Win 95 to make sure it runs decently on the entire 32 bit Windows product line. If WINE could ever catch up to Win 95, they would be almost completely done. The target hasn't moved anywhere since August, 1995." -- Joel Spolsky

    5. Re:No... by bigdavex · · Score: 2, Funny

      No, it's a party trick.

      All of slashdot wants to know -- Are there girls at these parties?

      --
      -Dave
    6. Re:No... by Per+Wigren · · Score: 2

      FWIF, Since 1995-1996 or so I've had linux people telling me about how wine is close to obsoleting my windows systems. Hence, my skepticism.

      The problem is that Windows is a moving target. I'm sure you can run the apps from 1995-1996 pretty perfectly, but the problem is to always support the latest and greatest stuff from MS.

      --
      My other account has a 3-digit UID.
    7. Re:No... by z4ce · · Score: 2

      How did this get Score: 3 and no moderation type, i.e. no Insightful, Interesting, Underrated... it's just "Score: 3" slashcode bug here?

    8. Re:No... by Xenographic · · Score: 1

      but like Soviet televisions made of vaccuum tubes for sale at Best Buy, not ready for prime time by anybody but tinkerers
      ---->

      Uhmm, pretty much all TVs use vacuum tubes, still. At least, all of them with a CRT (cathode ray tube, AKA the 'picture tube') ...

    9. Re:No... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Underrated and overrated don't change the type, just the score. Someone gave it +1 Underrated.

    10. Re:No... by isorox · · Score: 2

      Soviet televisions made of vaccuum tubes

      My word! Do they have screens too?

    11. Re:No... by Luke-Jr · · Score: 1

      Most people want Wine for games though. DirectX sure has moved since '95

      --
      Luke-Jr
    12. Re:No... by Darren+Winsper · · Score: 2

      I think he's wrong. There's plenty of Windows software that doesn't work on Windows 95 these days, especially if it doesn't have things like IE5 on it.

    13. Re:No... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thats why the name means Wine Is Not an Emulator?

      Fuckhead

    14. Re:No... by glwtta · · Score: 2
      specifically to emulate their windows counterparts

      The word you are looking for is "duplicate" not "emulate", both in everyday English and in computer terms. The latter is more specific in that "emulation" usually applies to hardware (GNU/Linux and Windows run on the same platforms in this case, there is nothing to emulate)

      Anyway, it seems this is already "redundant", I am not sure what you are trying to prove. Is the WINE team mistaking in that they are not building an emulator? Do you, in fact, know better?

      --
      sic transit gloria mundi
    15. Re:No... by zerblat · · Score: 1
      Click on the message number, ie #4691405, in the message title.

      You'll see this: Moderation Totals: Redundant=1, Underrated=1, Total=2. (Since the parent was posted someone moderated it as Reduntant).

      --
      Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
    16. Re:No... by damiam · · Score: 1

      Underrated and Overrated moderations never show, they just increase the score.

      --
      It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
    17. Re:No... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Moderations of underrated and overrated don't register a reason like the others. You can always click on the message link to view the moderations done to the comment.

    18. Re:No... by dinivin · · Score: 2

      Do you, in fact, know better?

      Anyone with a decent understand of English knows better. Just because I may claim to be the reincarnation of Ben Franklin, that doesn't make it true. Just because they claim not to be an emulator, that doesn't that true either.

      Dinivin

    19. Re:No... by dinivin · · Score: 2


      Hey asswipe, I know what the name means.

      Dinivin

  9. doubts about future of wine by vivek7006 · · Score: 0, Troll

    I have serious doubts about the future of wine. The wine project may have achieved many milestones, but Microsoft can snap it any time. All they need to do, is to change thier APIs and making them incompatible. And if it makes bussiness sense, believe me, they will.

    1. Re:doubts about future of wine by bellings · · Score: 5, Informative

      Microsoft can snap it any time. All they need to do, is to change thier APIs and making them incompatible.

      Uhh... perhaps you've been living under a rock for the last two years? They did change all of their APIs to make WINE obsolete. Here are the new ones: http://www.microsoft.com/net/

      --
      Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
    2. Re:doubts about future of wine by CeZa · · Score: 1, Insightful

      The wine project may have achieved many milestones, but Microsoft can snap it any time. All they need to do, is to change thier APIs and making them incompatible. True, but they would also "snap" the compatiblity for every previous Windows application. I would love for them to do this, however, as it would mean every Windows customer changing from the proprietary environment.

    3. Re:doubts about future of wine by Cid+Highwind · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I have serious doubts about the future of wine. The wine project may have achieved many milestones, but Microsoft can snap it any time. All they need to do, is to change thier APIs and making them incompatible. And if it makes bussiness sense, believe me, they will.

      They already have in a way. Wine is still working on the Win9x API, so software that needs the newer Win2k or XP interfaces won't run. This may not be a big deal yet, but MS already announced (sorry, I don't have the link handy) that Office 11 will *not* run on Win9x, it will be 2k or XP only.

      Wine as a platform for running old apps will live on, but wine as a viable alternative to buying windows is stuffed, IMHO.

      --
      0 1 - just my two bits
    4. Re:doubts about future of wine by RevAaron · · Score: 2

      But luckily, we have Mono and dotGNU and the benefit of a more-open spec with .NET.

      --

      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
    5. Re:doubts about future of wine by Angry+White+Guy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      MS has more than just announced that Office 11 won't run under 9x, they've pretty much stated that, due to security concerns, most new software will not operate under 9x. They are attempting to force a change, and hopefully it will increase stability (and revenues, but that's beside the point, right?) as games and applications are written solely for the nt-core os'es.

      --
      You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
    6. Re:doubts about future of wine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      0 1 - just my two bits

      1 1 - there's my two bits.

      Now, only two more people can contribute their unique two bits! Ha!

      Not much point in posting anything to Slashdot after that. May as well shut the site down.

      Bummer! I've reduced Slashdot's life cycle by 25%! What have I done?

    7. Re:doubts about future of wine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Suck on this: 1 1 0
      -- os@udel dot edu

    8. Re:doubts about future of wine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Damn you! I though I was the only one who had figured out the secret of generating higher numbers than 1 1!

    9. Re:doubts about future of wine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I seriously doubt the games and applications will be written "solely for the NT-core OS'es". My guess is that they'll continue to be written for Win32 as they have been since forever, and the only thing preventing them from working on Win9x will be a simple version check and a pop-up stating they won't work.

      Wine can simply pretend to be a more recent version of Windows, and the apps will keep working. No new win32 function calls will need to be reverse-engineered.

    10. Re:doubts about future of wine by Luke-Jr · · Score: 1

      that's 3 bits u idiot XD

      --
      Luke-Jr
    11. Re:doubts about future of wine by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 2

      That's not true at all, Wine has loads of NT calls, in fact if you look you'll see ntkernel.dll right there in the Wine installation. Wine automatically provides the right calls to the application based on what they need.

  10. great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    we'll use wine under cygwin under WinXP to make people switch to Linux

  11. Is this really all that important? by Spazholio · · Score: 2

    This seems more like a "proof of concept" situation than something that's really important. I understand that it shows a relatively clean program, but when would something like this be necessary or applicable in the real world (ie - repetitively nesting cygwin and wine)?

    1. Re:Is this really all that important? by frostgiant · · Score: 3, Insightful

      >but when would something like this be necessary
      >or applicable in the real world (ie >repetitively nesting cygwin and wine)?.

      If you have to ask, you are missing the point.

    2. Re:Is this really all that important? by Spazholio · · Score: 2

      >If you have to ask, you are missing the point.

      I asked, so therefore I AM missing the point. The reason I asked was to be enlightened. Does this have a real-world application? Or is it just a simple, "Hey, look what we can do!" sort of thing? If it's the latter, I get it. If the former, then I don't.

    3. Re:Is this really all that important? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How the hell is this "insightful?"

    4. Re:Is this really all that important? by OneEyedApe · · Score: 1

      In so far as I can tell, this was an attempt to demonstrate that Cygwin and Wine can emulate or otherwise recreate their respective environments well enough to run each other, thereby demonstrating their power and quality. But it should also be noted that some people just like stupid computer tricks.

      --
      Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all....
      --Thomas J. Kopp
  12. Er... correct me if I'm wrong, but... by 26199 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    ...from the page:

    Compile & run Cygwin under Wine in Linux

    This provides an a good test case for Wine. It is tough, but we do have the Cygwin source code, and we have a good chance to understand why it does not work.

    So they have a good chance of understanding why it doesn't work?

    Forgive me if I don't find that *overly* impressive :-)

    1. Re:Er... correct me if I'm wrong, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      depends what isn't workin: wine or cygwin?

    2. Re:Er... correct me if I'm wrong, but... by nervous_twitch · · Score: 1

      Nesting is very important in debugging programs like this. If they're each supposed to be emulating a certain environment, they can find flaws in the emulation and correct them. Same goes for compilers.. once it can compile itself correctly it's considered fairly stable.

      --
      Trees everywhere, and not a forest in sight.
  13. Maturity by Klerck · · Score: 1

    "...feat that requires a great deal of maturity."

    Obviously not referring to the maturity level of the people doing this!

  14. Wow by Apreche · · Score: 3, Interesting

    these guys have some skills. I know it's probably just because I don't know how, but I can't even get X to work with cygwin, or anyting other than solitaire to work in wine.
    This reminds me of the time when I sshed to one machine, then telneted back to the machine I was on, and kept on telneting and sshing to as many machines as I could to see what would happen. Th results weren't as exciting but it was still fun.

    --
    The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
    1. Re:Wow by idontgno · · Score: 1
      This reminds me of the time when I sshed to one machine, then telneted back to the machine I was on, and kept on telneting and sshing to as many machines as I could to see what would happen. Th results weren't as exciting but it was still fun.

      It make logging back out fun, though.
      "exit". "Dammit, another session!"
      "exit". "Dammit, another session!"
      "exit". "Dammit, another session!"
      ad nausaeum

      And it makes the network secret police very very curious. But I've said too much....

      --
      Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
    2. Re:Wow by RevAaron · · Score: 2

      Heh. You have a strange idea of a fun Friday night. :)

      --

      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
    3. Re:Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You know if you're in any sort of windowing environment you can just close the terminal window and forget about it.

    4. Re:Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fear the power of SIGHUP.

    5. Re:Wow by hughk · · Score: 2

      I guess that wasn't recent. I have had X working under Cygwin from even before they had the installer integrated. Nowadays, it is easier. With wine, it is just a matter of fiddling, or spending money on WineX or something.

      --
      See my journal, I write things there
    6. Re:Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just hold down Ctrl-D :-)

  15. Does not work like that by The+Raven · · Score: 5, Informative

    To break Wine, they need to break backwards compatibility. Their existing MASSIVE market of users and companies that use old programs on new Windows will prevent them from ever doing this like you say.

    --
    "I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
    1. Re:Does not work like that by ion++ · · Score: 2

      Does it ?? Really ??
      I seem to remember that the latest Office, version 11 ? will only run at XP and win2000. And since office 11 contains a brand new fileformat, that office xp and older offices cant read, they have defacto forced you to upgrade by breaking backwards compability.

      Yes i'm aware that default wine doesnt run office.

    2. Re:Does not work like that by Mac+Degger · · Score: 2

      Carefull...they pretty much did that with windows 3.11-->win95. Plus their last statement about security (we'll break your programs to fix our problem) gives 'em carte blanche.

      --
      -- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
    3. Re:Does not work like that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sorry to burst your bubble, but if you had actually used Office 11 Beta 1, you would know that the file formats are compatible to Office 97 and onwards. The whole package is, despite being beta, much faster and much more polished than OpenOffice will ever be - not to mention packed with useful (yes, really!) new features.

    4. Re:Does not work like that by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 2

      To break Wine, they need to break backwards compatibility. Their existing MASSIVE market of users and companies that use old programs on new Windows will prevent them from ever doing this like you say.

      Right. Breaking backwards compatibility is a bad thing. They couldn't, for example, just wake up one day and decide that the new version of MS Office will run on Windows XP and Windows 2000SP3, but not on earlier Windows 2000 releases, nor on Windows XP or Windows 95/98/ME. API backwards compatibility is there for a reason, right?

      --
      Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
    5. Re:Does not work like that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      much faster and much more polished than OpenOffice will ever be

      And by 'predicting the future', you've shot the hell out of anything remotely approaching credibility. Oh dear!

    6. Re:Does not work like that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Umm, didn't I read on slashdot the other day that MS announced their intention to break backwards compatibility for the sake of security?

      I wonder if it was anything to do with the security of selling new versions of windows...

      It would be quite a nifty spin on the same old tactic they've been using forever: breaking a competitors code with an upgrade.

  16. Try this by mfos.org · · Score: 3, Funny
    1. Re:Try this by Dwedit · · Score: 1

      Then run this all under Virtual PC!

  17. Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough by monthos · · Score: 1

    Becouse of gaming companies slow to relase linux versions of even servers for there games, i have to run them in wine untill a linux server becomes available. works well, and on a 1ghz athlon system running three gaming servers on it, the load average isnt even as high as you would expect.

  18. Is cygwin an emulator? by Samir+Gupta · · Score: 1

    I thought that cygwin was just an implementation of the UNIX command line tools for Win32, not a full emulator or virtual machine (like VMWare, for instance.) How would they 'run' WINE under Cygwin?

    --
    -- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
    1. Re:Is cygwin an emulator? by spinkham · · Score: 3, Informative

      from cygwin.com:
      Cygwin is a UNIX environment, developed by Red Hat, for Windows. It consists of two parts:
      # A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a UNIX emulation layer providing substantial UNIX API functionality.
      # A collection of tools, ported from UNIX, which provide UNIX/Linux look and feel.

      Basically it lets you compile unix programs on windows and run them with the cygwin .dll.

      --
      Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
    2. Re:Is cygwin an emulator? by Raiford · · Score: 2
      Cygwin is an actual emulation layer. It resides as a DLL on your Windows box that provides a unix-like environment with more functionality than just a set of unix-like tools. You can actually run unix-like daemons (inetd, ssd, etc) and set up an Apache server. I use cygwin to run Xfree86 on a windows box that is networked to a linux machine I have. I use the Xserver under cygwin to work with the Xapps on the linux machine while I am working under XP.

      --
      "player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
    3. Re:Is cygwin an emulator? by Meowing · · Score: 2

      It's not a full-fledged emulator in the sense that there's a VM, but there is a mostly complete Unix API and the filesystem gets mapped. One side effect of not being an emulator, is that Cygwin does allow you to use the native Windows APIs. Checking for API leakage could be interesting -- is a program using the native function, or an emulated version?

  19. Nesting you say? by BigWhale · · Score: 1

    Ok, let's see... We are running Linux... Start vmware and run windows in it... and then install cygwin there... and then run wine in it... and again and in wine run Atari/Amiga emulator and then C64 emulator in it and in it we could probably squeeze in VC-20 emulator... ... ...
    Ok... that's bizzare.. ;>

    --
    The Sig, the sig
  20. let me get this right.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    1)install wine and cygwin
    2) ???
    3) Fun!!

  21. Re:Firt Post by BigWhale · · Score: 0, Troll

    Did anyone else detected a sudden drop of IQ?

    --
    The Sig, the sig
  22. Compilers do this all the time by Geekboy(Wizard) · · Score: 1

    Compilers are considered to be somewhat mature, when they can compile themselfs. Kudos to Wine and Cygwin for managing this.

    1. Re:Compilers do this all the time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I was thinking the same thing until I realized that when (for example) GCC matured to the point that it could compile its own source, the source already exploited a lot of features of the language - it has to support parsing input files, optimizations, and properly exporting executables.

      Running an emulator inside another does show a bit of capability of each, but not to the same degree - all that's needed is enough maturity in each to support the other's initialization code. If they're able to run MS Office in Wine in Cygwin or Mozilla in Cygwin in Wine then it'd be a much more applaudable accomplishment.

  23. Re:Firt Post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I see an absence of IQ

  24. try winesetup by leehwtsohg · · Score: 5, Informative

    I had the same problem, sometime I would manage to get something running, mostly not.
    Now the standard (unstable) debian install comes with winesetup, which sets up a nice working wine installation (works a bit better of you have windows installed)
    Try to install winesetup (a contribution from codeweavers)...

  25. Turtles, all the way down... by Jack+William+Bell · · Score: 3, Funny

    So, is my attempt to use my /. journal as a weblog kinda the same thing? I wonder if someone could use the comment section in one of my entries as a mini-/. ? Then someone could use the comments to that for a weblog and...

    I gotta stop now. My head hurts.

    Jack William Bell

    --
    - -
    Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
  26. Emulation Rush by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 2

    So...can I use my Mac to run VirtualPC, run Linux on it, and use WINE and Cygwin to run and develop Windows apps?

    --
    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
    1. Re:Emulation Rush by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, you wouldnt need Cygwin to develop win32 apps...

  27. Great! by flikx · · Score: 5, Funny
    A new level for my evil pile!

    Windows -> VMWare -> Linux -> Wine -> Cygwin -> Wine.

    And finally, a stable, enterprise-ready solution for running my Windows applications.

    --
    One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
  28. Believe it or not... by shaitand · · Score: 2, Funny

    I've done this and tests like it under various emulations of systems, yes mostly because I was bored and it is definately useless. What ever happened to geeks who tried to do difficult things... just to see if they could and to hell with practical purpose?

    1. Re:Believe it or not... by Mac+Degger · · Score: 3, Interesting

      As Max Planck once said: basic research is when I don't know what I'm doing.

      --
      -- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
    2. Re:Believe it or not... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Half of them died of fucking boredom, the other half became extinct because of a failure to secure a mating partner.

    3. Re:Believe it or not... by shaitand · · Score: 1

      *sighs* nobody keeps up anymore, those are the MARRIED geeks, like me.

  29. wrong by tanveer1979 · · Score: 2

    managers have fun with wine, we developers have to make do with beer ;-)

    --
    My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
    FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
    1. Re:wrong by nitehorse · · Score: 2

      make: *** No rule to make target `do'. Stop.

  30. Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough by Gandalfar · · Score: 1, Informative

    Ok, here you go: http://appdb.winehq.com/ just what you want

  31. Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 3, Informative
    Anyone here work on WineHQ and can comment on this?

    Actually the WineHQ site is being redesigned at the moment (I'm not a major contributor but am on the lists).

    The best tip for using wine is simply - buy it. WineHQ wine hasn't had much effort put into end user usability, it's much like the raw Linux kernel, it needs wrapping up with lots of utilities and quite a few "hack patches" for it to do everything the users demand. I have 2 installations of Wine on my machine, CrossOver and Wine CVS. Guess which works better.

    Often, a few little things can make a program work better if it doesn't work properly with a standard CodeWeavers install. For instance: WinZip works fine until you open a zip with a message in it. Why? Because it's missing a RichEdit control (wine has no replacement for it yet). You could fiddle with config files and make it use a native riched40.dll, but an easier way is to google for it, find allerasoft.com and download it from there. Run the RichEdit update .exe in Wine, and now you have the control and WinZip works perfectly.

    The Apps DB is the best place to look for tips like this, each app that is known about in the database has a score and a comments section for users to swap tips.

  32. I only have this to say: by Henry+V+.009 · · Score: 2

    World's best honeypot!

  33. Why run the whole thing under x86? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Virtual PC emulates a PC perfectly, so that you can run windows 2000 or a linux distro on it just as though it were a PC.

    I say, run The Sims under WINE under CYGWIN under WINE under {Linux Distro} under Virtual PC under Mac Os 9 environment under Mac OS X.

    And not pay Microsoft a penny.

    1. Re:Why run the whole thing under x86? by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 2

      Er, because 1) it's slow as hell, and 2) you have to pay for Windows?

    2. Re:Why run the whole thing under x86? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It was a joke you shitbrain.

    3. Re:Why run the whole thing under x86? by rgmoore · · Score: 1

      No, you don't have to pay for Windows. There are (or at least were) versions of VirtualPC that came with a Linux distribution (I think they chose RedHat) instead of Windows. They charged substantially less for it because you didn't have to spring for a Windows license. I'm not sure if that version is available anymore, but if you already have a copy you can use it as suggested to run Windows programs on your Mac without paying Microsoft anything.

      --

      There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

  34. Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough by luisdom · · Score: 1

    http://appdb.winehq.org/
    Useful, indeed.

    But what I miss is a simple configuration/installation program. I have executed trillian under wine and (as you can see in appdb) it works almost 100%, but getting it to work wasn't simple, nor short.
    Great great project, though.

  35. XBOXBochsLinuxWineWin98Virtual PC... by Doomrat · · Score: 5, Funny

    How about installing Linux on an XBox, running Bochs on it, installing Linux onto the Bochs machine, running Virtual PC under Wine, installing Windows 98 on Virtual PC, running WinUae on it, installing Linux onto the emulated Amiga, running Bochs on the emulated Amiga...

    OR you could go out and have sex with a woman, one with breasts and everything.

    1. Re:XBOXBochsLinuxWineWin98Virtual PC... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Well, it's a tough choice.

    2. Re:XBOXBochsLinuxWineWin98Virtual PC... by Nurgled · · Score: 1

      On a serious note, is there actually a version of UAE capable of running Linux now? Last I saw, no available UAE had MMU emulation, but UAE keeps moving around and I'm having trouble tracking it these days.

    3. Re:XBOXBochsLinuxWineWin98Virtual PC... by Doomrat · · Score: 1

      I've heard of an emulated Amiga running Linux under SOME version of UAE. I think it may have been WinUAE.

    4. Re:XBOXBochsLinuxWineWin98Virtual PC... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OR you could go out and have sex with a woman, one with breasts and everything.

      Oh, please. like there is such a thing.

  36. wine on osx by squarefish · · Score: 2

    I know this may be a bit offtopic, however I've been trying to find out if wine is usable under osx. Has anyone done this or know of any sites covering this? I've tried google without any luck. Thanks

    --
    Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
    1. Re:wine on osx by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 2

      Wine is not usable on a Mac, and probably won't be for a very very long time. I believe that it was a lot of work just to get Winelib working on Linux PPC (ie so you can recompile windows apps if you have the source on linux/ppc), mainly because Wine does funky stuff with assembler, various low level things and so on. If you're on a Mac, you'll have to use Virtual PC to run Windows apps, and buy a copy of Windows.

    2. Re:wine on osx by taviso · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      ex$$
    3. Re:wine on osx by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      you can buy windows?

    4. Re:wine on osx by iabervon · · Score: 2

      Wine on OS X will run all your G3 Windows programs. Unfortunately, none have been developed, so it's not well tested. Wine is no emulator; it's a program which provides the services to other programs that Windows does. The programs have to run on your actual hardware.

      Actually, Wine would probably work well on an x86 version of OS X...

  37. Re:What a waste of time by Goalie_Ca · · Score: 1

    If your talking about palladium there's nothing they can really do about it unless intel and amd have a sudden change of heart and get rid of that trash so that no signed software can still run.

    --

    ----
    Go canucks, habs, and sens!
  38. One day... by fade · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This kind of virtualisation stress test is interesting, but largely academic. I'm still waiting for the day when it is less hassle to load the (very few) windows applications I need under wine than it is to reboot my workstation to deal with those tasks under windows. Screwing around with wine to get it to load even small windows applications is one of the most frustrating things I can think of in association with *nix systems. I hear good things about the transgaming stuff, but it obviously hasn't made it back into the main branch of the wine tree. The promise of wine has been hanging out there for a lot of years now; I'm just wondering if perhaps they're trying to build a glass house on quicksand.

  39. Heh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Although I know he's referring to software maturity, its still funny to hear "Lets see how many x we can y" and "maturity" in the same breath (or sentence, as the case may be)

  40. Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough by koko775 · · Score: 1

    everybuddy is a good linux alternative to trillian -- does basically the same thing.

  41. I also had to do one of those, sorry! by Britz · · Score: 1

    Imagine running Cygwin in Wine in Linux on big iron (remember, 40.000 of those on one machine) and then do a couple of VMwares in each. Then You can run a beowulf cluster...

  42. sarcasm ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    this in truth is an important milestone in the lives of these projects, it is a remarkable technical feat that requires a great deal of maturity.

    or not .. :)

    Don't worry! Everythiung is getting nicely out of control....

  43. Why? by defile · · Score: 2

    If you can nest the environments ten times, what is to be gained (scientifically) by doing it one thousand times?

    1. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Except for capacity testing, anything beyond 2 times is wasted... Having a compatibility library run inside an emulation layer does mean that the whole of what's emulated is being made compatible, and the whole of what's compatible is being emulated... for feature-completeness

    2. Re:Why? by kscguru · · Score: 3, Informative
      • Optimization - a 10% slowdown will be magnified exponentially, and thus will be easier to find (and replicate)
      • Reliability - remember how everyone (er... competent admins) load-tests servers so that they could handle a Slashdot-effect load? Theoretically, someone could have an interest in running many, many concurrent applications under Wine - what better way to flush out the bugs in the system than to give it an extreme load?
      • Extensibility - a well-designed system will degrade gracefully under extreme loads. If it doesn't (i.e. it degrades exponentially), then the code probably needs to be reworked to be more efficient.

      But things like this typically follow a scale:
      1) does it work period? (i.e. can cygwin run under wine - 1 nesting)
      2) does it work in the small-number case (i.e. 2-5 nestings, or thereabout)
      3) does it work in the extreme case? (i.e. 10^(2-5) nestings) - which means that most inefficiency bugs are flushed out and the design scales well

      Just about every system can fit into one of these categories - but only the most robust fit into #3. Example: Linux threading. Right now it passes 1 (you can multithread), passes 2 (having a number of threads/process under ~100 doesn't really change performance), but fails 3 (the 2.5 kernel developers are working on that one right now - but ~10,000 kernel threads will bring the system to its knees).

      --

      A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire

    3. Re:Why? by defile · · Score: 2

      Very good points. Thank you!

  44. Emulator in emulator in emul... by weird+mehgny · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...finally something (other than Doom 3) that gives us a use for the 3 GHz P4.

  45. Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough by Spoing · · Score: 2
    I read these stories of people doing absolutely astonishing things using WINE, but what the rest of us (who only have a need to touch WINE when there is something that they Must Have that isn't available for Linux-- in my case, it was the FightAIDS@Home distributed-computing client) really need is a good, central repository of "How to get Program X to work under WINE" mini-tutorials.

    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.

    --
    A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
  46. New Game by picone · · Score: 1

    Ouh!! Cygwin running under wine running under cygwin running under wine running under... I think we can create a game here. It woulb be called: "Finding where are you sitting?"

  47. MODUP: Guide to running Photoshop, IE, Kazaa... by MarkWPiper · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.frankscorner.org/wine/ is an incredible resource. Check it for info on how to run all of those hard-to-make-work programs. He even shows how to get WineX working for free :-)

  48. Ha, ha! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Imagine a beowulf cluster of these babies!

  49. Milestone target: Running .NET over Wine by Glorat · · Score: 2

    It's not as bad as you make out. The .NET CLR runs on top of the Win32 API and is not a replacement. Therefore, in theory, a fully working WINE will allow .NET to run straight on top of WINE. In fact, there are attempts in the Mono project to use WINE to enable WinForms on Linux. If .NET can run on WINE, that would be a major achievement and it certainly isn't impossible

    1. Re:Milestone target: Running .NET over Wine by smallpaul · · Score: 2

      The .NET CLR runs on top of the Win32 API and is not a replacement. Therefore, in theory, a fully working WINE will allow .NET to run straight on top of WINE.

      Do you think that the .NET license will allow that? If not, then you have to duplicate all of .NET in order to support .NET applications. In other words there is a whole new API that over time will make WINE obsolete. On the other hand, the Windows API was invented years before the WINE project started whereas Mono is only months behind .NET. So it is at least conceivable that there will be a complete open source .NET clone before there are even many popular programs that depend upon .NET.

  50. Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough by acm · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I read these stories of people doing absolutely astonishing things using WINE, but what the rest of us (who only have a need to touch WINE when there is something that they Must Have that isn't available for Linux-- in my case, it was the FightAIDS@Home distributed-computing client) really need is a good, central repository of "How to get Program X to work under WINE" mini-tutorials.

    I was interested in your FightAIDS@Home cause, and looked up their website, but was really turned off by this excerpt of their webpage:

    Entropia, a for-profit corporation, believes in "profit with a purpose". Like oxygen, profit is necessary to survive and grow, but it is not the reason for existence. Occasionally, Entropia's software will run commercial tasks on your computer, which in turn allows us to support this and other non-profit causes, like FightAIDSatHome. Entropia will continue to invest significantly in human and technological resources to drive the science of distributed computing toward ever-greater knowledge, understanding, and exploration of science, technology, and the arts.

    What exactly is included in "commercial tasks." It seems to me that if I'm donating *my* spare computer cycles, and *my* electricity, you shouldn't take advantage of that by profiting from it. Oh well...

  51. Wine q&a by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 5, Informative
    I see a lot of posts saying how Wine never works for them etc, how Wine will never catch up with Microsoft and so on. I'd like to dispel a few myths I see.

    The first one is that Wine is hard to make work. Well, it's like Linux you know, if you go get a release from WineHQ it's like getting Debian or Gentoo, great for power users but it requires quite a lot of effort to make it work well. It's all there though, you can sit down and beat WineHQ releases into running Office or IE. It just takes effort and skill.

    For the rest of us, companies like CodeWeavers are for Wine what RedHat is for Linux. They add bits, integrate it nicely, give you support. As a concrete example of what they add, they have a nice app (officesetup) which presents you with a list of apps that are installed a la "Add/Remove programs". If you use this program to install an app as opposed to running the setup.exe directly, icons will be added to your menus and desktop, and file associations will be automatically setup for you. Wine doesn't have this (yet).

    Another thing is that WineHQ has no code for automatically performing a "reboot". Stuff like IE needs some actions to be performed when you reboot the machine (the RunOnce sections). WineHQ releases don't have any code for this, so you'd have to manually read the registry entries and files and do it yourself, hence the fact that most people fail.

    WineHQ will get this code. One of the targets for Wine 1.0 is that it's easy to use. For now though, you need to buy CrossOver Office for the best overall Wine experience. It's unfortunate that you have to buy a separate product for games, but that's one of the perils of BSD licensing, it allows forks like that (fyi wine is now lgpl).

    Another myth is that wine can never catch up with Microsoft. That actually isn't true, if anything we're moving as fast as, if not faster than Microsoft right now. There are a few large projects left and then Wine basically has a mostly complete implementation of the Windows APIs. Such projects include a richedit control (effectively a mini word processor), RPC (being worked on now), DirectX (an lgpl implementation, parts are available but d3d is only like 10% done), a WinHelp app and so on. After that, it's pure bugfixing all the way.

    So what are Microsoft doing? Well they're working on .NET of course, the Windows APIs are horrible and .NET is a way of making them easier to use. But we have that covered as well with Mono, in fact for System.Windows.Forms Mono is using the Wine controls library. Mono is moving at an astonishing pace, it has lots of volunteers working on it. But it needs more developers as always (wine that is), and one problem is that getting Wine working well enough to hack on it is hard. Catch 22 in a way. Don't be put off though. Wine is cool, and remarkably advanced.

  52. Dude by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    when you buy Virtual PC, you are paying for an MS windows license, so you are still supporting the beast

    1. Re:Dude by Luke-Jr · · Score: 1

      No. He was going to run Linux in the Virtual PC...

      --
      Luke-Jr
  53. let's reverse this by nslu · · Score: 0

    and compile wine under cygwin

  54. Sch! God damn it! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Here and there (mostly on /.) I hear of people who are able to use Wine to run every last Windows application under the sun. "Wine works great, and it works great now!" they say.

    You *know* you are not supposed to say that. It is like saying Mozilla or Java is slow, or that Mac is expensive. You'll be an outcast, a paria.

    So shut up now, before the *nix extermination crew comes to get you... and eat your skin.

    1. Re:Sch! God damn it! by Luke-Jr · · Score: 1

      Java is supposed to be slow. It's an interpretor.
      And Mozilla isn't slow. Try running Mozilla compiled with Visual C++ (in Windows or Wine) and it will be fine. The speed problem here is the C++ compiler from GCC.

      --
      Luke-Jr
    2. Re:Sch! God damn it! by jonadab · · Score: 3, Informative

      > And Mozilla isn't slow.

      Mozilla isn't slow, but it has a higher memory footprint than some
      other browsers (Opera, for example) and a higher _apparent_ memory
      footprint than IE, from the user's perspective (because the parts
      of IE that are loaded at bootup time won't be considered as parts
      of IE by most users). This means that on systems with marginal
      amounts of RAM, Mozilla is more likely to push you over the edge of
      your memory into swap, which of course is _noticeably_ slower. This
      is the phenomenon most often meant when people say Mozilla is slow.

      In my case, I've got 512MB of RAM, and after the OS (Linux) and GUI
      (XFree/Gnome) take their hits the five apps I use most (Emacs, Gnus,
      Mozilla, Gimp, and gnome-terminal) are welcome to most of the rest.
      Once a day or so when I fire up something else large (OpenOffice,
      for example) too, I dip into swap space, but most of the time that's
      not a problem. But I'm a power user, and I specifically maxed out
      the RAM on my system so that I could have [counts] fourteen windows
      open at once (at the moment, 3 Emacsen, the 4 basic Gimp windows
      (no actual images just now), one Mozilla (9 tabs), and 6 instances
      of gnome-terminal (in 4 different terminal classes) for various
      things (one for a MySQL client, two looking at directories where
      I'm doing two different projects, one tailing a log (related to one
      of the projects), and two sshed into another system). That's not
      normal user stuff; most people _don't_ go out and spend extra money
      on extra RAM, because they _don't_ need to have 14 windows open at
      once. So for them, if the computer is anything like as old as mine
      (January 1998 originally, though I haven't had 512MB of RAM that
      long), Mozilla is indeed going to be "slow".

      This is however not a _performance_ issue (from the programmer's
      standpoint), but a footprint issue, and it will be fading in
      importance, as new computers are coming with more hefty amounts of
      RAM these days. (128MB is _way_ more than Mozilla needs, and
      that's the least a normal system comes with these days.) Yes,
      apps will continue to grab more of that, but since most users
      only really run one app at a time... so app developers don't
      have to _stop_ the growth in the amount of RAM they use, as long
      as the keep it substantially _slower_ than the growth in the amount
      of RAM that new computers have. By Netscape 8 timeframe nobody's
      going to _care_ that it uses 48MB of RAM or more. The people who
      _do_ run multiple apps at once (such as myself) can pick up a
      little extra RAM; it's cheap these days. By the time Netscape 9
      comes out, it can probably get away with using 64MB or more, since
      three-year-old off-the-shelf systems (being sold today) will have
      128 to work with en total, and new systems will be selling with
      more like 512 or more. (Of course that number is guesstimated.)

      Code optimization from the compiler doesn't really matter; it's
      keeping it from swapping that will save your day in terms of
      apparent performance. The difference between well-optimized code
      and poorly-optimized code, in terms of CPU time, is subliminal;
      most people need benchmarks to even determine whether there _is_
      a difference. But if you run out of physical RAM and start using
      swap space, the user can measure the delay with something no more
      precise than an analog watch.

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
    3. Re:Sch! God damn it! by Linux+Freak · · Score: 2

      Why so many terminals? I use dozens of terminals at once myself, but only 3 are on my CRT at any time. (Hint: "screen")

      The best thing about "screen" is, I can detach my sessions and reconnect to them exactly where I left off, from any other terminal in the world (any class of device, too).

    4. Re:Sch! God damn it! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mozilla isn't slow

      Try running Mozilla on an older or a cacheless workstation like a Sun Sparc 10 vs. the last release of Netscape or the latest release of Opera.

      Holy jesus, there's a big difference. In Opera, things move more or less swimmingly along. In Netscape, things are a little slower, but still okay. Mozilla takes a year to start. Then, once it's started, click in the URL bar and start typing. A day or two later, the first letter you typed will show up. Then the second. Then the third. After an excruciating wait, the entire address will finally appear in the URL bar and your Enter keystroke will take effect. After another eternal wait, the page itself is finally rendered.

      You decide you want to print the page. You click 'File' in anticipation of choosing 'Print...' from the menu. After clicking 'File', nothing happens. You wait. You wait some more. And you continue to wait. Finally, after an eternity, the menu is slowly drawn. Then you click 'Print...' and you begin to wait... and wait...

      Forget it, you say, click over to your xterm, type 'killall mozilla-bin' and a second later you start Opera again and off you go.

    5. Re:Sch! God damn it! by jonadab · · Score: 1

      I've heard about screen, but I haven't messed with it much.

      The advantage of my approach can be summed up in two words: terminal
      classes. For example, the terminals that are sshed into pedestrian
      (my IP-Masq gateway) appear in my task list with the title "Pedestrian"
      and an icon of a terminal wearing blue shoes, and their colours are
      set to white on soft light blue. The terminal that I use for the
      MySQL client appears as "MySQL" in the list, with an icon of a
      dolphin, and the colours are set to white on dark blue. The one that
      is tailing a logfile appears as "logtail" with an icon of a terminal
      with a (wooden) log in front of it, and the colours are yellow on
      burgundy. The specific details are not important, but the point is
      I can tell them apart at a glance and easily grab the one I want.
      It's no harder to switch to MySQL than it is to switch to Gnus.

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
  55. Re:Wonderful (I was skeptical at first...) by zanerock · · Score: 1

    As I read the first sentence of the main post, I thought, "well... that's dumb." But then, I realized that it wasn't. Like it says a bit later on, being able to do things like this is indicative of maturity and robustness. It's not that useful (yet) in-and-of-itself, but it's an indicating that things are starting to solidify.

    Doing weird, technical things like this that are far beyond a projects original scope indicates that the project itself has matured, and is growing past it's original scope. The neat thing, is that it's doing so almost as a side effect.

    Besides, I think truly useful things will come of this before too long. Virtual machines within a machine is useful for lots of things. Application firewalling, stress testing, deployment testing on various platforms, etc.

  56. That gives me an idea... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Would it be of any significant speed benefit to build an engine to recompile software to run in linux native code, rather than "wineulating" (for lack of a better word, since wine is not an emulator) windows native code in real-time?

    1. Re:That gives me an idea... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      From what I understand C/C++ already does that with the macro preprocessor e.g. #ifdef whatever. Also the way most source code is distributed means that there is normally a ./configure script which sets everything up. So to answer your question it isn't too hard (in theory) to recompile (port) code to run under a linux api and such "engines" to do so already exist. It is just that currently these are unsurpported because it is more work for the programmer and, since most of this code is commercial in nature, for little justification.

      The problem is that you would have to have access to the code in order to do that (and all the assoicated licensing restrictions). With the current political situation in place - being a closed mononopoly. It is unlikly that you are going to get Microsoft to open up their Api. As a result it is left up to efforts like Wine to attempt to reverse engineer all the system *.dlls and translate those functions to the linux Api.

      In a perfect world we would (a) all be using a cross platform api like qt, (b) the anti-trust case would have forced Microsoft to have opened up their Api rather then just asking them to please, please play nice for once (like they ain't going to try to encrypt all 'puters to only run their stuff) or (c) someone would have worked out a way of making money out of open source making closed binaries redundant.

      Like the man said "you can't always get what you want, you get what you can"

    2. Re:That gives me an idea... by bluGill · · Score: 2

      No, wine is NOT an emulator. Wine is an implimentation of all the windows libraries, plus an extention to linux that allows windows programs to run. In effect a windows program running under Wine is just as native to linux as a Gnome program. Both use external libraries to make themselves work. (Note, the only flaw in this argument is linux doesn't know how to directly execute windows programs, but that is trivial to solve if anyone wants to do it) There is no theroretical difference between a windows program calling Wine libraries, and a Gnome program calling GTK libraries. (Theory often differes from reality though)

      An emulator is different. Bochs, virtualPC, and similear prodcuts are emulators, and benifit from compiling to native code. Windows programs are already native X86 programs, and that is where the benifit of compiling comes from.

    3. Re:That gives me an idea... by Spoing · · Score: 1
      Good points -- that I also happen to agree with. :)

      Have you ever seen the movie Spinal Tap? Rember the scene where the band member insists that "This one goes to 11"? If not, rent it.

      --
      A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
    4. Re:That gives me an idea... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, windows "native code" and linux "native code" are exactly the same, x86 assembly (assuming you are running linux on a PC, of course). Windows and linux applications differ mainly in the libraries they call. "recompiling" is meaningless in this context.

  57. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  58. Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough by yokem_55 · · Score: 1

    Well everybuddy, gaim, etc are great if all you are doing is chatting. But if you want to transfer files, forget about using anything native to linux. Why this feature is left out of virtually every linux im client I've come across is beyond me.

    --
    ...and IN SOVIET RUSSIA, beowulf clusters imagine 1, 2, 3 profit!!!! jokes made out of YOU!!!
  59. how about running MySQL under Cygwin? by drugdealer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd really like to see this.

    1. Re:how about running MySQL under Cygwin? by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 2

      It's not exactly what you asked for, but PostgreSQL has been installable from the default Cygwin setup tool for quite some time. You have to install cygipc though.

  60. Well, I hear... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    that they have a pirate version of the kernel over at kernel.org ;) At least, the MPAA seems to think it's a pirate something-or-other...

  61. impedance mismatch? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


    due to the inherent impedance mismatch between the two

    Huh? Sounds like someone has taken one too many op amp courses. When the world gives you hammmers, everything starts to look like a nail.

    -a
    Someday I'll locate my /. password so I can log in.

  62. It's better by ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... a factor of 100!

  63. Re:MODUP: Guide to running Photoshop, IE, Kazaa... by sbaker · · Score: 2

    His instructions seem to require you to check out WineX from CVS - but
    his instructions suggest there is anonymous checkout available without
    a password.

    When I tried it just now, it definitely needed a password.

    --
    www.sjbaker.org
  64. Wrong Product by The+Raven · · Score: 2

    They can make THEIR product use the NEW features on their NEW OS.

    But that has nothing to do with REMOVING the OLD features from their NEW OS.

    Two completely separate situations that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

    --
    "I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
  65. Fun with Wine? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Well, one time at band camp...

  66. How about linux from scratch by myowntrueself · · Score: 2

    in cygwin under wine?? :)

    --
    In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
  67. Re:MODUP: Guide to running Photoshop, IE, Kazaa... by Luke-Jr · · Score: 1

    I thought the grandparent post was joking when he said it showed how to get WineX for free because it's so simple... Then I see the parent post and see that not everyone has used CVS before... Either the password is blank (just hit enter when asked) or the password is anoncvs I'm quite sure it says that on the transgaming site too...

    --
    Luke-Jr
  68. Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough by cgleba · · Score: 2

    > Wine has come light-years since I first used it

    LOL. . .I still remember the days when the only program that worked reliably under Wine was notepad and I had fun running exceed on a windows machine, smb mounting its filesystem and then xhosting notepad back on to itself :).

    Wine is not perfect, but it has come a light-years and frankly amazes me how much it can do!

  69. Re:Wonderful (I was skeptical at first...) by Luke-Jr · · Score: 1

    Wine isn't a virtual machine or an emulator of any kind. It is merely a Win32 API implementation. The code from the programs run natively.

    --
    Luke-Jr
  70. Re:MODUP: Guide to running Photoshop, IE, Kazaa... by cos(0) · · Score: 1

    Anonymous checkout is available in regard that you don't have to have YOUR OWN account to use their CVS. However, even an anonymous account requires a password. In Wine's case, their anonymous (read-only) account is usename "cvs" and password "cvs".

  71. Re:COME ON.... by Luke-Jr · · Score: 1

    What would you want to run either MSIE or Netscape? *cough*Mozilla*cough*

    --
    Luke-Jr
  72. gui wimp MS lackeys! by klez23 · · Score: 1

    I can dig arbitrarily deep in nested environments and run 'ls'.

    I can achieve the same effect with just ONE shell command:

    $ ssh localhost

    I can even forward local ports to themselves & set any zlib compression level i like. & all communication between my nested levels is encrypted with my choice of protocols. Try that with cygwine! Plus my system remains completely free of proprietary MS library names!

    peter

  73. Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough by Luke-Jr · · Score: 1

    Maybe because IM is text, not files. On the other hand, I like IM file transfers and am hoping Kopete supports it when it is released with KDE 3.2...

    --
    Luke-Jr
  74. Cygwin Vs. VMware by BrookHarty · · Score: 2

    I have cygwin installed on my AMD box, its nice, but its not what I would call speedy. Vmware running mandrake (with vmware tools, so I can cut and paste) runs at a very acceptable speed. Not saying cygwin doesnt have its uses, working on any text log files is easier with text-utils than plain windows install anyday. (sort/cut/grep/wc/ or perl)

    On the topic of WINE thou, the only reason I use wine is for CounterStrike, and All-seeing-eye on linux.

    1. Re:Cygwin Vs. VMware by colfer · · Score: 1

      Perl for Win32 is free from ActiveState.

  75. Re:Wine sucks. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    DynaTroll, there are message(s) for you:
    • Fuck Off
    • Die
    Thank you for using (AC)Messenger Service. Motto: From Troll to Troll
  76. this reminds me... by vonsneerderhooten · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    My sister was recently diagnosed with Multiple personalities.

    She called me the other day and my caller ID Exploded.

    -D

  77. Re:Wonderful (I was skeptical at first...) by zanerock · · Score: 1

    Oh, I'm well aware of how wine functions. I developed high-end commercial software for about two years that incorporated various emulation techniques for a number of purposes.

    I found, when thinking about capabilities, that worry too much about the distinctions of how you run code for one platform on another wasn't very helpful. No matter how you do it, through various kinds of emulation, library replacement, different kinds of encapsulation, or whatever, it really doesn't matter in the thoeritical realm. They are all equivalent as they can all do exactly the same thing and have exactly the same functionality.

    Now, there are many many practical reasons why different techniques are superior, but I was only speaking of possible applications of functionality, not implementation of those features, so, it as far as my comments go, it doesn't *matter* whether Wine replaces Window's libraries, or is a virtual machine, etc. The former is usually faster, but march harder to get right while the latter is, technically, fairly simple to do, while it is often very slow to run.

    Though not always. It's a fascinating and often misunderstood field.

  78. Slashdot Loser Alert by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can't people do something more productive for a change? As for cygwin, it's positively poky. I takes longer to scroll one screen length with any cygwin port than XP takes to boot up.

  79. What are you talking about? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If you have nice, step-by-step instructions for getting Office 2000 and Internet Explorer 6 and Photoshop 6 to install and run in Wine, please post them here! The Linux community will be very grateful . . .

    More like the Windows community will be very grateful. The Linux community runs native applications.

  80. Re:MODUP: Guide to running Photoshop, IE, Kazaa... by Hilleh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm sorry if I am taken as trolling here, but the last part of your comment irritated me immeasurably. Yes, I believe that free beer things are good. Very good. Back when I used Windows, I pirated things that I was never going to use just to have them. I'll admit I was horrible. However, projects like WineX and Codeweaver need your support. Buy subscriptions and let these people know how much you appreciate their hard work. It's only going to go so far if you just take advantage of it without helping them fund some of the development.

  81. Maturity?!? by carambola5 · · Score: 2
    ...requires a great deal of maturity

    I don't know about you guys, but purposefully playing with something until it breaks is not usually considered "mature" in my book.
    --
    IWARS.
    People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
    1. Re:Maturity?!? by OneEyedApe · · Score: 1

      Actually, it unfortunately seems to be only the mature coders who stress test their work, and attempt to do a thorough job of debugging.

      --
      Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all....
      --Thomas J. Kopp
  82. Re:Wonderful (I was skeptical at first...) by jez9999 · · Score: 1

    But.... isn't that... kind of... emulation?

    Emulation = the imitation of something

    WINE = the imitation of the WinAPI

  83. Re:DON'T BE A FUCKING PUSSY by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    • There Goes Your Karma.
  84. LINE project - run Linux apps under Cygwin/Windows by truth_revealed · · Score: 5, Informative

    The LINE Project also falls into this ubercool camp. (Is Sourceforge down? Here's the cached version). It allows you to run staticly (statically?) linked Linux applications under Windows/Cygwin - including advanced X11 applications. I've tried it and it actually works surprisingly well. The problem is that LINE emulator is not actively maintained any longer and it broke with the recent Cygwin DLL and/or the upgrade to the recent GCC 3.2.x compiler for Cygwin. When I get a chance I'm going to take a look at it to see if there's an easy fix. If anyone here has a clue as to what the problem might be, please reply to this post. thanks.

  85. Your not alone by bogie · · Score: 2

    I'm the same way as you. Wine works half-assed no matter what I do. It has always played Solitare, but that's about it. Even when I got Office 2k installed, half the time it would crash as soon as you tried to open a menu. It was never usable.

    I also tried the codweavers plugin demo(for WMP, Quicktime etc.) That didn't go well at all on a stock Redhat 7.3 install. Quicktime kinda worked once in a while, but nothing else would install. They would download via the shell script and then nothing.

    Bottom line is Wine is a crutch and a bad one at that. I'm hardly inexperienced with linux and if I think Wis a pain, I can hardly imagine what less experienced users must go through trying to get it to work.

    BTW even when following the tips on Franks wine world the apps dont' work. I don't know what mojo he uses, but when I've followed the tips I haven't gotten fully usuable apps.

    --
    If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
    1. Re:Your not alone by Trolling4Dollars · · Score: 1

      My experiences have been fairly positive. I've been able to run the following with Wine from CVS (most recently with the October build). I run a completely Windows-free Wine: -The Blade Runner (Only works well in "desktop") -Riven (works pretty well, the occasional stutter and you can't access the save menu. Doh! Might work better in "desktop" mode, haven't tried it though.) -Myst (Works fine, even with sound now! Occasional color palette problems.) -Unreal Tournament (I used this before I got it working natively. Worked just fine though. Software rendering only) -Lighthouse (One of my favorite myst-like games. Worked perfectly. Absolutely no problems. Most impressive!) -Windows Media Player 6 (Great for me until I found MPlayer. Still allows me to view WM* content off the net though. Very nice. Even works full screen!) -The Playa (Again, used it before I found MPlayer. Needed it to view DiVX files. Worked pretty well. Had some problems with certain files. -WinAmp (Perfect operation. I was even able to use the WinAmp plugins! I tried the plugin for XMMS that uses Wine to run the WinAmp plugins but it didn't work very well. Better to use native WinAmp for plugins.) -Any Macormedia projector/Director file. (I've put in enhanced content music CDs and have been able to watch the music videos included with no problems. The Kylie Minogue - "Can't Get You Out of My Head" and Plaid - "P-Brane" discs worked just fine for me.) -Quicktime 4 (Worked fairly poorly, but I could watch some net streams with it.) -Installers of just about any type work flawlessly. Unfortunately this can mislead you into thinking an app will work. -Sierra Creepnight Pinball (My wife loves this game. It works well without sound. This is a shame since the sound is what she loves. But it works.) -VNC (Both the viewer AND the server work. it was kind of weird, but the Windows vncserver actually remotely displayed the Linux desktop! Very strange and unexpected.) -PuTTY (Secure shell worked, but telnet didn't. This is a shame since it would be nice to have a gui based secure shell/telnet app in Linux that saved connection parameters in a menu system like PuTTY does.) -Acid DJ 2.0 (I was very surprised at this, but it actually ran well. The only problem was some GUI quirkiness which was a little annoying. It also died on me at one point.) -Trillian (A multiprotocol instant messenger app. I used it for MSN connectivity. It ran pretty well, but you couldn't move the main window without a lockup. If you run it in a "desktop" then you can move the main window. I used it for MSN chat with friends. aMSN has resolved that for me now.) -Cool Edit Pro (Loaded up and actually ran my multitrack audio projects! Didn't try much else since I still have to rely on a lot of other Windows software for my pro-audio work.) The things that didn't work for me: -Internet Explorer 4, 5 and 6 -MSN Messenger 4 (Needs IE. Eventually I found aMSN which is native Tcl\Tk. It's about 80% like the real thing and allows me to communicate with my buds, so this is less of an issue now.) -MS Office 97 (It installed, and I could run some of the Apps: Word, Excel but they would crash as soon as I tried to do anyting useful. Outlook would appear quickly and disappear. Of course, Evolution has solved that for me as well as OpenOffice.org) -PowerDVD (The installer actually failed because it couldn't install a specific file for some reason. Even though it was there, the installer complained that it wasn't Getting ANY DVD player to work would be a coup since it would work around the DeCSS problems. I personally use MPlayer and vlc for DVD playback, but I'd love a guilt free DVD player for Linux.) -Buried in Time 3 (Old Win3.1/Win95 game from Presto Software. Installer worked, but the game crapped out.) -Myst III: Exile (Some kind of copy protection problem. I would imagine it might work in Transgaming's version of Wine.) -SuperMap USA (A cheap $5 US atlas on CD-ROM. It installed, but wouldn't run. Again... a shame since it would have been great to have on raod trips. I've actually considered trying to write an app that can use the data off the CD for native Linux use.) -WinZip (This actually kind of ran, but it had a lot of problems because of it's desktop integration in Windows. The button graphics were missing too, so it was hard to use.) -Adobe Acrobat Reader 5 (Just wouldn't install or work) -Adobe Book Reader (Same as above) -Baldur's Gate (No worky) -Starcraft (No Worky) -Diablo and Diablo 2 (Installed, but menu was inaccessible. Didn't seem to work at all, even if I tried to guess where the menu buttons were.) -WRQ Reflection 2 (This is the prefered telnet client at work for connecting to our VMS systems. It died during the install.) I've tried others for the past half a year or so, but I can't remember everything. As you can see it's been a mixed experience with more successes than failures. I think Wine has progressed a LOT in the past year. When I first tried it in 1997, it was pretty paltry... I could only run Notepad and Calculator. But since it runs quite a few games and apps that I still use from time to time, it's allowed me to leave Windows off of every system at home except my audio workstation. I look forward to what Wine will have in another year or so... Please contribute to Codeweavers or Transgaming since they are bringing further flexibility and versatility to Linux. That can only be a good thing...

  86. Alcoholic processing by LostCluster · · Score: 2, Funny

    If you put cygwin under wine under cygwin under wine too many times, and it starts to process incohently, would that effect be caused by the fact that the computer is drunk?

    1. Re:Alcoholic processing by TheBoostedBrain · · Score: 1

      I believe it processes that way because we are emultating the buggy windows api. Maybe it's more realistic every time.

      --
      -- When did Ignorance Become a Point of View?
  87. Crossover supports LGPL by salimma · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ehm, Crossover developers actually support the license switch to LGPL.. it's Transgaming folks that have problems with it and encourage dual-licensing, because some of their changes involve propietary bits that cannot be revealed.

    Nothing stopping anyone from putting a propietary pay-only interface on top of an LGPL product.

    --
    Michel
    Fedora Project Contribut
  88. Re:COME ON.... by egreB · · Score: 2

    Why would you run either MSIE, Netscape or Mozilla? *cough*Opera*cough*

    Just had to (-8

  89. Wine with or without Windows? by Fastball · · Score: 2

    I've got a laptop dual booting Linux and Windows 2000. The Win2k I need for work. It is my understanding that Wine works best with a Windows install, preferrably Windows 95/98. Is that true? If so, why? I just can't get most things to work under Wine with my setup.

    1. Re:Wine with or without Windows? by Spoing · · Score: 3, Informative
      It is my understanding that Wine works best with a Windows install, preferrably Windows 95/98. Is that true? If so, why?

      It used to be. When Wine began, it was basically a loader for the libraries that came with Windows to handle the Windows API calls. Now, Wine handles those Windows API calls itself so having a Windows partition around is not necessary.

      That said, if you can't install a program under Wine does not mean that the program itself is incompatable with Wine. Having Windows around to install a program for Wine to use later can be useful.

      --
      A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
  90. Re:MODUP: Guide to running Photoshop, IE, Kazaa... by damiam · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you read the fucking page, it says "Hit Enter when prompted for a password."

    --
    It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
  91. Mysql does run under Windows...check Mysql.com by Spoing · · Score: 2

    The Windows version of MySQL uses the Cygwin libraries.

    --
    A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
    1. Re:Mysql does run under Windows...check Mysql.com by drugdealer · · Score: 1

      Yes, I know that MySQL runs under Windows using the Cygwin libraries. But it doesn't run under Cygwin. The question I posed is "how about running MySQL under Cygwin?" To see the difference (in case it isn't clear), try using MySQL with Cygwin Perl instead of ActiveState Perl. MySQL on Cygwin is MySQL in a (pretty much) UNIX environment. MySQL on Windows using the Cygwin libraries is MySQL in a Windows environment.

  92. Why, you ask? by burns210 · · Score: 1

    Because they can.

  93. Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What exactly is included in "commercial tasks." It seems to me that if I'm donating *my* spare computer cycles, and *my* electricity, you shouldn't take advantage of that by profiting from it. Oh well...

    Would you be willing to donate *your* money to help them operate? That is the alternative, and I think people are more likely to donate spare cycles and electricity than money.

  94. I've always wanted to see if I could take a Mac by multiplexo · · Score: 1

    Install VirtualPC on it. Install Linux under the VirtualPC environment. Install the PC version of VirtualPC in this environment running Windows XP, install VirtualPC on the Windows XP instance running Linux and see how far I could get. Of course I'd also like a girlfriend too so I wouldn't have time or motivation for projects such as this.

    --
    cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
  95. Re:Wonderful (I was skeptical at first...) by jonadab · · Score: 2

    > It's not that useful (yet) in-and-of-itself

    It's not _supposed_ to be useful in-and-of-itself. cygwin is useful,
    and WINE is useful, but running them inside eachother is a form of
    testing. Because of the nature of what WINE and cygwin are, there
    isn't ever going to be a large demand for the need to run them inside
    one another. (The occasional oddball case where it comes in handy
    for something, yes, but no large demand.) But being able to do it
    is an indication that both projects have reached a minimal level of
    mostly working. (cygwin, in my experience, works a good deal better
    than WINE; I don't know whether that's because it's a more mature
    project, or because it's doing an easier job (since what it's doing
    emulation of is better documented), or because Unix apps are more
    portable, or some combination, or what.)

    When they can run cygwin under Windows under VMWare under Linux
    under the Windows version of VirtualPC under WINE running on
    FreeBSD under VirtualPC for the Mac running under MacOS X, then
    I'll be properly impressed.

    --
    Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
  96. Nesting by TheBoostedBrain · · Score: 1

    0: Take a sun UltraSparc 10
    1: Forget about Solaris and install linux (aurora, for example).
    2: Compile and Install Bochs (boch.sourceforge.net).
    3: Run any Windows (9x/98/ME/NT/XP).
    4: Run Cygwin.
    5: Run Wine.
    6: Run Boch again (Compiled for windows).
    7: Run Red Hat Linux (x86 distro).
    8: Run VMWare.
    9: goto 3

    --
    -- When did Ignorance Become a Point of View?
  97. So speaks the non-developer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In order to get decent apps, you need a mature bridging toolkit. In order to get a mature toolkit, you need real-world tests. In order to get real-world tests, you need test cases with real software that you can control - i.e., that you have the source for.

    As we all know, emulators stress the limits of just about anything. Ergo, an emulator stands a good chance of finding something broken. And if we're emulating Linux on Windows on Linux, we have an easy comparison point - check that the double-emulated apps work the same way as the native ones. Ditto for Windows on Linux on Windows.

    So, this "party trick" is a valuable part of the process that gets you your pretty apps and your migration path. But you're opposed to this. This implies that either you're opposed to progress in this area, or you don't know what you're talking about.

    Evidence that I'm right: So far, the project has actually contributed fixes to the Wine project. Which, as an aside, is way more than you've done, by your own admission.

    So do the community a favor, and shut up.

  98. Re:COME ON.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    big woooo yay for obscure HHGTTG quotes!

    if i had mod points id give you one just for that sig :)

  99. Hey Skippy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Anyone who claims that "I'm not a troll, but..." is automatically a Troll. Someone who doesn't know the fucking difference between an API a GUI is a fucktard.

    Which means that you're either a troll or a fucktard. Take your pick.

  100. Re:MODUP: Guide to running Photoshop, IE, Kazaa... by nusuth · · Score: 2

    You are advocating a non-workable model based on goodwill of people. It is better for everybody if it fails sooner rather than later.

    --

    Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!

  101. Real applications by khanyisa · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There are some real applications that could come out of this rather than just endless virtualization - much of it could prove useful to ReactOS which aims to be a open source alternative OS to Windows...
    Also another in the pipeline which need a lot more work on Wine before anything will happen with it (XOpenWin, which aims to replace the Windows GDI with XWindows :-))
    Wine and other related things need developers, so sign up and get coding. Check out the wine-devel mailing lists for more useful info...

  102. Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough by Hard_Code · · Score: 2

    Wouldn't people be more likely to donate money to an actual *charity*?

    --

    It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
  103. Re:COME ON.... by egreB · · Score: 2

    Thanks (-8 Good job on noticing..

    Actually, the sig is supposed to be complete, including credits to allmighty Douglas Adams. But the /.-sig-limit limits it, and I never bothered to fix it..

  104. Re:MODUP: Guide to running Photoshop, IE, Kazaa... by Hilleh · · Score: 1

    Excuse me for having faith in humanity. Yeah, I understand what you are saying, people will naturally cling to cash if they can get free stuff. But I believe it is indeed workable. If it isn't, say goodbye to the OSS community as we know it.

  105. read TAOCP volume 1, question 1.4.xx by r6144 · · Score: 1

    There is a detailed analysis. And you can try that without having to use some payware or large free software.

  106. I'M DEDICATING THIS SONG TO NAVEWEISS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Let's melt away the foggy screen Let's stand in the light and not in the shade Till when are we going to escape into the game of forces You are allowed to cry sometimes like when something is breaking in your inside. Tell me a little about the moments of fear It's much easier to be scared, together And when cold winds blow outside, I'll blow hot fire on you Maybe one day you'll stop running between the shades of your soul. Let's melt away the foggy screen Let's stand in the light and not in the shade Till when are we going to escape into the game of forces You are allowed to shake sometimes Like when something amazing happens there inside. Tell me a bit about the moments of happiness Until the morning, among us, arises.. And when cold winds blow outside..

    1. Re:I'M DEDICATING THIS SONG TO NAVEWEISS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Damn HTML mode! Try 2

      Let's melt away the foggy screen
      Let's stand in the light and not in the shade
      Till when are we going to escape into the game of forces
      You are allowed to cry sometimes
      like when something is breaking in your inside.

      Tell me a little about the moments of fear
      It's much easier to be scared, together

      And when cold winds blow outside, I'll blow hot fire on you
      Maybe one day you'll stop running between the shades of your soul.

      Let's melt away the foggy screen
      Let's stand in the light and not in the shade
      Till when are we going to escape into the game of forces
      You are allowed to shake sometimes
      Like when something amazing happens there inside.

      Tell me a bit about the moments of happiness
      Until the morning, among us, arises..

      And when cold winds blow outside..

  107. Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You could try the Application Database.
    http://appdb.winehq.org