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.

Comments

WineX

[91degrees]

I'd love to try this, but I don't have a *nix system.

Will there be a port to Windows any time soon?

Re:WineX

[StefMeister]

This is just silly. If one wants people to use Linux, you've got to eliminate barriers keeping them from doing so. WineX is a solution (although it may not be perfect) for lowering one of the most important barriers: 'Can I still use that Windows app that I use so much when I switch'.
Read this interesting article by Joel Spolsky, about removing barriers for more info.

Furthermore, do you really think there are less people developing OSS because there's WineX. I don't think so, maybe fewer developers will try to rewrite a win application that works perfectly wih WineX, but they will develop something else instead (work enough if you ask me).

Stef

Re:WineX

[IamTheRealMike]

Will there be a port to Windows any time soon?

Actually, yes

Ha! Gotcha! :)

Where is the WineO port though?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just waiting for the WineO port so I can sit on my park bench and game all evening.

*hic*

Performance

[jorleif]

Anyone actually tried this?

What is the performance like when BSD is emulating linux which is emulating windows?

Re:Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Performance

[dubstop]

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.

Re:Performance

[burts_here]

What is the performance like when BSD is emulating linux which is emulating windows?

Wine Is Not an Emulator.

and quit wining.

Re:Performance

[Jimmy_B]

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.

Re:Performance

[evilviper]

For one thing it's not emulation, just a compatibility layer that intercepts and converts syscalls.

I've experienced absolutely no noticable speed drop when running Linux apps under FreeBSD/OpenBSD (not that I run a great deal of programs that way).

In fact, the catch-phrase always being touted is that some Linux apps actually run faster under BSD than they do on Linux. I thought everyone had heard that, but I guess not.

Feel free to ask a die-hard Linux elitist to try and explain that some time. :-)

Re:Performance

[MouseR]

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.

"bsd is dead" blah blah

[mackstann]

i can picture all of the AC's scurrying to open up ~/text/bsd-is-dead.html to begin pasting away.

Xgames

[katalyst]

Games seem to be a major factor when it comes to choosing an OS (or even a console). Thanks to apps like Wine and orgs like Loki, we'll have em all someday on the *nix systems. Things are looking up. I got hold of The Return to Castle Wolfenstien beta for linux before I could get a Windows version. And if you're targetting Linux , why not the rest of the *nix distros. It's all moving in the right direction. How about a KILLER game for the *nix platform which can NOT be run on windows........

Re:Xgames

[Rew190]

Microsoft will find ways to break Wine support.

They won't simply let nix develop game support without any resistance.

This is not a dupe

[Old Wolf]

Note - this is not a dupe

I feel that this is informative, due to the extremely high dupe story rate on slashdot in the last few days.

Linuxulator?

[Jugalator]

What's a "linuxulator"?? Hmm.. Sounds kinda like my nick.

Anyway, can't they just call it an "emulator"? Or is an emulator running under Windows a "winulator"? *sigh*

Sorry if I'm picky, but it's just adds unecessary confusion. Or *is* actually a "linuxulator" something different than an emulator running under Linux, so there's actually a reason for this word?

Dogma

[khakipuce]

If I buy a big electric motor and a fan and connect it to the grid, I can use it to drive my wind turbine continuously to produce light to power the solar panels on my roof to produce electricity for my house.

I have many tools in my toolbox, this saves me having to drive nails with a screwdriver.

Wine compatibility problems

[Woogiemonger]

I've only tried wine with various installations of Redhat Linux .. various versions of wine too, including WineX. This was a year ago, and maybe things have changed since, but I remember wine being a joke of a technology. I could not get it working right with absolutely anything. The funniest was, as luck would have it, with a Blizzard product, Starcraft, which apparently was one of the easier applications to get working. Well, I managed to get everything working except the mouse. It's hard to play Starcraft without a mouse. There was something fatally wrong with each and every software I used, no matter how simple, except for Windows solitaire. Maybe getting that working was just a delusion. Admittedly, my hardware was not completely standard, but with absolutely nothing working right, it's ridiculous. I do remember one thing though. Wine was pleasantly fast. Unfortunately, that doesn't quite fit the bill.

Re:Wine compatibility problems

[IamTheRealMike]

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.

Re:Wine compatibility problems

[Spoing]

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.

Re:Wine compatibility problems

[MsGeek]

Actually if someone is such a mIRC junkie that they want to get it running under WINE, they should take a look at XChat. XChat is a fairly faithful Open Source replica of mIRC.

What I want to see is a IRC client for Linux/FreeBSD that behaves just like IRCle, a client for Classic Macintosh. I just like it...it's the IRC client I've used for years and it's as comfy as a broken-in pair of jeans for me.

Cool: This is what open source is about

[Paul Bristow]

I do not run *BSD, as I know Linux and am comfortable with at after some 9 years of use. However, it is a great testament to the power of the open source concept that this is possible at all. I am tremendously impressed with the BSD guys for achieving this.

Remember, it is a Good Thing tm to have a computing infrastructure made of diverse systems. So the more code that can be run on Linux , *BSD, Hurd, OSX and others the better.

Today, Wine is probably no less compatible with a random version of windows than any other random version of windows.

wineX from cvs(for free)

[gl4ss]

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."

Re:wineX from cvs(for free)

[muyThaiBxr]

Well, I actually compiled it on FreeBSD, but due to some linux-isms that I didn't bother porting properly and just wanted to see if it would compile (or better yet run anything). The version I managed to compile on FreeBSD wouldn't run anything, so that's why I went ahead and plunked down my $5 per month and got wc3 working on FreeBSD :-)

pay?

[Jacek Poplawski]

to run the Linux version of WineX (the one you have to pay for) to run Warcraft 3

Pay for what? Isn't Warcraft 3 working ok free WineX version? You are allowed to use WineX from CVS without any paying.

Re:Lack of BSD software

[quantum bit]

It's no wonder that BSD lacks behind linux in software when it is missing important system calls!

No, BSD just got it right the first time :-P

From a freebsd-emulation mailing list post:

To me, it looks like mmap2 takes an offset that's a page index, rather
than a byte position. Since linux passes the offset with a 32-bit
long, rather than a 64-bit off_t like we do, they need to do this in
order to be able to map offsets larger than 4GB into a file.

So mmap2 would be redundant on BSD...

wineX is nothing more than a novelty for games

[t0qer]

Running your windows games using winex is like trying to swim laps wearing a 3 peice suit.

WineX is not a replacement for native ports.

Who cares

[nurb432]

Its not considered emulation in the computer market. It is using translation, not emulation.

End of discussion.