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