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Winex 3.0 Released
syntaxman writes "You'll find the information thread here, or see the release notes. The pre-packaged files (rpms,debs,tarballs) are available only for subscribers."
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I have been playing everquest in winex for the past four months and I have to say I am getting less memory leaks than windows. If EQ crashed all I do is close that windows killing winex instance and start a new now walla. In case of windows I have to reboot w2k box since it freezes up or gets slow as molases.
I hope vendor do provide linux client in future besides windows there are a lot of us who plays purely in linux.
"doesn't wine work on some sort of Virtual Machine"
No.
http://www.winehq.com/?page=myths
it still has several annoying starcraft bugs that i ran into after less than 10 minutes of testing. also, when you disconnect from a game in counter-strike it greys the screen and hangs, i had to killall wine to get out...if they could just get over themselves and release their patches to winehq things might go better
At least the war on the environment is going well
Wine was probably removed from Red Hat 9 because it is incompatible with the new threading library (NPTL or whatever it's called). The Wine people have now come up with a workaround, but a real 'port' to the new thread system isn't done yet.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
If your are too lazy to compile, and to cheap to subscribe, you can always wait for a couple of days until the merry men at FreshRPMS build the RPM for you.
You can get a pre-packaged (unofficial) binary for RedHat 9 here: http://newrpms.sunsite.dk/.
Or install from source.
Or even switch distro :) (says while writing this on his RH8 box and as a packager of Wine for RH8 on sf.net).
Now flame me if i am wrong, but doesn't wine work on some sort of Virtual Machine, thus adding an extra layer between the hardware and the code?
;)
Flame On!
But sadly no. Wine ( as the acronym goes : WINE IS NOT AN EMULATOR )
It is the libraries and system support that allows linux to direclty execute PE executables, and link them to libraries which have the same interface as Windows itself.
It is a layer in the sense so is QT, GLIBC, etc.. and other libraries that provide support for application services on top of the Linux Kernel.
Wine can be used to facilitate the porting of software from Windows to Linux, via WineLib. It essentially allows the one to code a windows app and compile it for linux. Not quite a perfect fit, but with a little intrepidation, you can get good results.
Another way to look at WineLib is to think of the counterexample: Cygwin. Cygwin is a set of libraries that allow *nix software to port to Windows.
WineLib and Cygwin are covered by the same benefits and limitations:
Do they feel like they are native apps?
-- not quite.
Do they run pretty good?
--for the most part
Could you build an application that people would use on the alternate platform, via the library?
--you bet.
Having used wine for some time, I'll tell you three things:
1. It ain't bad. It ain't the answer to your problems either, but if your app works under it reliably, you won't be dissapointed much.
2. Configuration is the key. 99.9% of resolvable issues I see on the Users' mailing list end up being resolved by a proper configuration. What is a proper configuration? Who the Fcsk knows
3. Perfection is not the goal, but part of the journey. Microsoft has had umpteen years, thousands of programmers, and billions of dollars to build windows, in all it's 'glory' . Comparitivly, Wine is done my a mere handful of extremely talented people, who are replicating and improving that what MS took billions to build. It won't be done today, tomorrow, or even this year, or maybe ever, but it does get better every single day.
Flame off!
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
> I am just wondering if we will ever get the performance we get with games under windows
:)
With most games yes.
> I know that they have a couple games ported
More than just a few games work in winex
> like FPS where framerates are so important.
Yep.. games based on slightly older engines, such as the quake3 engine (rtcw, moh, jk2, sof2), and Halflife (Counterstrike)... pretty much run at the same speeds in WineX and WIndows already.
What would be interested to see is how new games such as bf1942 run on it.. bf1942 is cpu/gfx card intensive, and doesn't run nateively in Linux (unlike ut2k3..)
> Now flame me if i am wrong, but doesn't wine work on some sort of Virtual Machine, thus adding an extra layer between the hardware and the code?
No... wine is an implemenation of the Windows API.
All I can say is that Transgaming sucks. Why do I say that? Well, I subscribed to Transgaming for a year and **my** experience was that:
*Their development cycle is slow.
*I couldn't any games out of the box.
*I couldn't find any tried and true instructions to get a game running under linux in their forums ( or anywhere else on their web site, for that matter..
*Their forums are very disorganized, trying to search them is a lesson in futility. And when you do find some information, it's always a hodgepodge
of 'Joe User tried this' and Jane User tried that' , nothing like 'If you are running Mandrake Linux with WineX ver. X.X., then do this to get the game to work...'
Oh, and I think 'Want Linux Games?' advertisement is nothing less that misleading. Originally it made me think Transgaming put out ports of games for Linux. In truth, if you 'Want Linux Games', you better go somewhere other than Transgaming...they will only give you Winex.
My whole experience with Transgaming is...rip-off.
I can't afford a sig!
HanzoSan wrote:
OS/2 only lost because they didnt try. I didnt see a single OS/2 on any computer except for maybe IBMs computers and eventually IBM even took it off their own computers.
IBM certainly tried with OS/2, but not until it was too late.
OS/2 version 1 was too slow for the machines of the day, and shipped without a GUI partially because Microsoft fscked IBM over on their joint development deal. IBM pushed this version, but got laughed at because nobody wanted to run it.
Version 2 was much better, and had a good GUI but developers and IBM marketing really didn't get behind it, feeling burned from Version 1.
Version 3 (The first OS/2 Warp) was even better, it was faster, the machines were faster, the GUI was really polished, critical apps had native versions, developers started getting interested, IBM's marketting really pushed it well. OS/2 Warp sold more retail copies in its first year than its contemporary, Windows 95. The problem was, that was the year that the heavy duty Windows OEM licensing really started, OS/2 was flooded out of the market by computers shipped with Windows 95 preinstalled.
By Version 4, IBM knew that OS/2 really couldn't compete in the wild against Microsoft's OEM deals, so they focusesed their marketing on their core strength, corporate sales, and did reasonably well.
So if OS/2 did bad it was because of IBM, I had wanted to get OS/2 Warp and an IBM but the cost was ridiculous, this is why I never purchased it and its the same reason I never owned a mac.
While IBM certainly holds most of the responsibility for OS/2's failure, Microsoft shares some of the blame too, for backing out of their codevelopment contract, and anticompetitive OEM deals.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Make no mistake, while Wine is getting damn good it is not perfect or even practical for all Windows software. Some software will probably never run under it, most will not run without some tweaking, so don't expect it to. OTOH, if you tried Wine even as late as a few months ago you might be surprised how things have changed. It all depends on what you 'need' to run.
Many of the main Wine sites have reviews of software and what works -- or how to get it to work. Keep in mind that if a comment is old, even a few weeks, it may not apply to the latest version of Wine. Usually this is a good thing, though some regressions do happen, so you might need a specific 'vintage' for a specific application.
That said, here's a good list;
Frank's Corner -- always deserves a mention
The official Wine Application Database sponsored by Codeweavers
Transgaming's WineX game list and search engine
Wine Headquarters -- also sponsored by Codeweavers -- is the main Wine site and has the detailed and oft quoted FAQ-o-Matic
For more information, check the links on any of these sites.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
WineX will not run games on any non-x86 platform. WINE stands for "WINE Is Not an Emulator" and that statement is quite true: all it does is translate Windows API calls to Linux API calls. Since this does not alter or in any way affect the machine code of the game program itself, you cannot use Wine (or WineX) to play games on a different platform.
Do you like Japanese imports?
My experience with them has been the opposite. I subscribed for a year (it will be up in August or September I think).
:) , but I'm very satisfied with how WineX has progressed.
*Their development cycle *is* slow, I agree.
*I initially had trouble running stuff 2.0 or 2.1
2.2 solved lots of problems for me. GTA3, Half-Life, all worked great.
Deus Ex runs under great under 3.0pre1. Star Monkey does too. I can't wait to get home from work and try BF1942.
*I had trouble with a few games at first, but the FAQs solved usually solved the problem. If they didn't work I could always, *always* find an answer in the forums.
*The forums are a bit disorganized. I wish you could view them like the gentoo forums, and without all the extra side menus like the rest of the site has. Also, your complaint about not having per-distro instructions kind of stretching it, because WineX, for me, has worked the same on three distros (redhat, LFS, and gentoo). It *can* be work to get games going, but once you get it working you should be able to apply the knowledge anywhere (and you could post a guide to the forums if you want to help everyone else out).
Also, with paying comes voting. I like being able to vote on what gets done. (Don't like a game? Set it to -2, take that everquest!).
I don't feel ripped off at all. Maybe that's because I didn't have high expectations when I first subscribed
Vote for global prefs bug
Well, WineX didn't do it alone. The majority of the infrastructure is based on WINE so they deserve as much credit for WineX being where it is. WineX did add copy protection support and some impressive performance improvements in the rendering code. WineX does contribute back to the WINE project so they do do the respectable thing.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
many vst instruments work with wine and a program called vstserver. There are many nice aydio apps for linux nowdays. Linux audio is here to stay man
I'm counting Apple as our new Ace in the Hole.
It's good for developers to support ANYTHING besides Win32, but I'd rather have developers starting with Linux, and then porting to OSX, UNIX, and Windows - for the simple reason that OSX is VERY sweet, but doesn't encourage cross-platform coding (at least from what I've seen of their dev tools). Same with Windows. People who write for Windows tend not to care if it runs on any other OS, their focus is only on their own system, and this closes down their future options should they change their mind, or if they are successful and want to expand. My experience is that this is true with Macheads as well, and Apple Corporate doesn't seem at all interested in bringing OSX apps over to Linux, just getting them from Linux over to OSX....
It's best to use strictly open standards which allow for easy cross-platform portability if you're at all interested in supporting other OSes. I've talked to guys who said "If I had only thought of that BEFORE I wrote the whole thing in VisualBasic (or whatever)..." Being able to write your code using open tools and thus support three or more platforms from basically the same codebase (like Opera) is very very cool.
But yeah, OSX is definitely a VeryGoodThing. It's nice to have Apple join the party, and it's interesting to watch how Apple Legal interacts with the OpenSource movement. Apple has a lot of strengths and a lot of things to bring to the table - if they decide to get into the game in a big way and deal a few hands themselves. Hopefully, they keep heading in the "right" direction (openness and sharing). They may get a gold star from the teacher yet.
> JK2, SoF2, RTCW, and Q3A have a significant performance hit on a modern graphics card
I guess it depends on your definition of modern graphics cards. The aforementioned games are all based on the Quake3 Engine.. which is over three years old now. On modern video cards (as in... GeForce2 and up, or original Radeon and up), all of the games above should run smoothly, unless you are running 1600x1200@32 bit@4x FSAA or something crazy like that.
Anyway, these games pretty much have FPS caps where it's not worth getting more FPS. Q3A, for example, 90% of people have their FPS capped at 125 fps. Why? Because it provides the best strafe jumping physics. SOF2, another example, enforces a FPS limit of 90.
> especially if you're running non-nVidia.
I guess Radeon 9700/9800 owners will have something to say about that!
> there's a lag in any "busy" scenes which just isn't there under Windows.
Um.. I didn't notice that at all with my old system GeForce 3 ti200 (on Athlon 1.4), or my current system gf4ti4600 and Athlon XP 2200+.
> A big deal if you're a hardcore gamer? Certainly.
If you are a hardcore FPS gamer, you probably aren't using high graphics detail anyways. I've been a hardcore competitive gamer since 1998 or so (went Quakeworld->Quake3...), and almost everyone in the hardcore competitive scene uses r_picmip 3 or higher, very low res, vertex lighting, etc..
Please check the release notes - this was one of the things that we fixed with WineX 3.0.
Take care,
-Gav
--
Gavriel State, CEO & CTO
TransGaming Technologies Inc.
gav@transgaming.com
The workaround is only partially effective. you will still run into (at least) the incredibly annoying message about there being no "wineserver-socket" filey-thing. You will still have to manually rm -rf the damn thing after/before every individual run of winex to get your app working. So, if you use winex to install a game and don't start the game from the install screen (if it has such an option) then you will first have to go to the .transgaming directory and rm -rf the wineserver-socket dir and then try to run your game. After you close out, you will need to do this again next time you want to fire up winex.
They could at least add a cleanup script to the release to delete this damn thing as a matter of course at before actually starting wineserver.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.