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WineX (And Warcraft3) On FreeBSD

Dan writes "Kenneth Culver has implemented the Linux ftruncate64, truncate64, and mmap2 syscalls in the linuxulator on his computer, (mostly cut 'n pasted the mmap2 from regular mmap with a couple of changes) and with these changes it is possible to run the Linux version of WineX (the one you have to pay for) to run Warcraft 3 on FreeBSD." If WineX is interesting to you, this earlier article on playing Windows games with WineX (under Linux) may be worth a read.

8 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Performance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The FreeBSD Linux emulator isn't really an emulator as such: it substitutes a different syscall table for the FreeBSD one and runs the ELF binary as if it were Linux. Sometimes it's slower than Linux, sometimes it's faster. Performance should be much the same as Linux.

  2. Re:Performance by dubstop · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't think that BSD actually emulates Linux. My understanding is that BSD exposes a Linux ABI. I suppose that there might be a little bit of manipulation behind the scenes when a Linux function is called, to adapt it to an underlying BSD call, but not to the extent that it would be called emulation.

    If this is the case, there shouldn't be too much of a performance hit.

    I could be wrong though, OSX is more my sort of thing.

  3. Re:Performance by Jimmy_B · · Score: 5, Informative
    What is the performance like when BSD is emulating linux which is emulating windows?
    No emulation is occuring; WineX implements the Windows API, and this article says someone implemented some Linux API calls on BSD. It doesn't involve any translation of machine code, which is the slow part of emulation; theoretically, it should run at the same speed as the Windows version, if the device drivers are of equal quality.
  4. Re:Wine compatibility problems by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 5, Informative
    Check out some screenshots I took last week of Wine on RedHat 8 - these are not faked, Wine runs all those apps (not always perfectly though).

    There are more here

    I use Wine almost every day to run IE6 with the Adobe SVG Plugin and it works great. How do I do this? Simply, I got a copy of Crossover (a commercial distro of Wine) and pointed it at a build from Wine CVS.

    Wine isn't yet easy enough to setup for most people, so Codeweavers do it for you. Think of them as the Redhat of Wine. It is possible to do anything you can do in CrossOver with WineHQ wine, but it's a lot harder. Wine is scheduled to get "ease of use" some time around 0.9 and 1.0 which are happening probably sometime mid to late next year.

  5. wineX from cvs(for free) by gl4ss · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://frankscorner.org/wine/modules.php?op=modloa d&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=6 8&page=1
    title says it all;
    "If you don't want to spend 5 bucks on WineX, you can always try compile it yourself, but the CVS version of WineX is a little different from the commercial version:
    * no support for Installshield installers
    * no copy protection code

    To install WineX from CVS you must have CVS installed on your computer."

    --
    world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  6. Re:Performance by MouseR · · Score: 4, Informative

    My understanding is that BSD exposes a Linux ABI. I suppose that there might be a little bit of manipulation behind the scenes when a Linux function is called, to adapt it to an underlying BSD call, but not to the extent that it would be called emulation.

    [...]

    I could be wrong though, OSX is more my sort of thing.


    Mac OS X does just that when you launch a CFM-based Carbon App.

    CFM ("Code Fragment Manager") is the old ABI of Mac OS. When the Finder launches a CFM-based application, withint the native Mach-O -based Mac OS X ABI environment, it actually launches another application called "LaunchCFMApp" and passes your app as a parameter.

    LaunchCFMApp does exactly what this Linux ABI thingy does on FreeBSD: it loads the "foreign" application's ABI, creates a vector map in memory and connects all function calls from the "foreign" ABI to the "native" entry points.

    This is not emulation, but rather, dynamic re-linking.

  7. Re:Wine compatibility problems by Spoing · · Score: 4, Informative
    I've followed Wine for a couple years, and it just started to become practical for a wide variety of programs in the last 6-9 months. Before that, a few programs worked well enough for normal use.

    Over the last year, I've bought Codeweavers Crossover (both Plugin and Office) and a subscription to Transgaming's effort. Take a look at the programs listed in the main Wine tree and at Transgaming's site.

    If you want to roll your own, most of the code is available in some form from both branches, though the commercial distributions are more polished. If I were to deploy Wine over a large number of machines, I would probably go back to building my own just to cut costs.

    --
    A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
  8. Re:WineX by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 4, Informative
    Will there be a port to Windows any time soon?

    Actually, yes

    Ha! Gotcha! :)