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'. "

Comments

Wonderful.

[aussersterne]

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!

No...

[mumblestheclown]

'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..

Re:No...

[Ed Avis]

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.

Re:doubts about future of wine

[CeZa]

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.

Re:doubts about future of wine

[Angry White Guy]

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.

Re:Is this really all that important?

[frostgiant]

>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.

Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough

[acm]

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...

Re:MODUP: Guide to running Photoshop, IE, Kazaa...

[Hilleh]

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.

Re:What's this?

[OneEyedApe]

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.

Re:What's this?

[stefanlasiewski]

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.