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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'. "
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.
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.
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.
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)...
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
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.