Slashdot Mirror
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'. "
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?
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
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 :-)
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!
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
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.
/.) 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.
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
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
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.
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?
As Max Planck once said: basic research is when I don't know what I'm doing.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
I'd really like to see this.
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.
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.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
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.
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...