Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
The day when it doesn't matter what kind of application you run under linux, all win32/directx apps are supported - is the day this will really take off. While I'm sure alot of these games will work under linux, the day when you can just install and play is when it'll make it to the big time.
30% Why would I want to run windows anyway ?
20% Its dreadful they limit it to subscribers for the RPMs
20% This great news, it means I can run X, Y but not Z
10% It sucks because Z doesn't work
10% If you want to run Windows you should install windows.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I am so close to switching over to linux, since the work that I do is mostly java programming and web design. Just the fact that I really like to play a couple games now and again.
I am just wondering if we will ever get the performance we get with games under windows. I know that they have a couple games ported, but in games like FPS where framerates are so important. I think that if Wine can perform in this area, we would see a lot more conversions to linux. Games sell computers, think of the first application that you baught, I know I didn't buy a word processor first(Links386 to be exact).
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?
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.
.. the Wine package for some reason has been removed from the RedHat Linux 9 distribution according to release notes..
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.
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.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
This is nice and all, respect to Transgaming.
But I just have to vent my concern over the lacking win64 support. The bit-gap between native win32/win64 and wine32 might be the final nail in the coffin for linux on the desktop.How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Gaming is a single-tasking app. While Windows supports every Windows game by definition, winex will by definition always be playing catchup. I have no need to integrate Windows games with a Linux desktop, so I might as well reboot into a Windows partition.
Theres enough Windows users to buy those Native ports using linux.
How do you attract Windows users? With games. You have to start somewhere, you need a market of gamers before you can sell games. Heres how it can work, use WineX to bring tons of new games, get maybe a million gamers to switch to Linux.
Now you have a million linux gamers, little independent Linux development companies can sell games, let the big companies sit on the fence while the little linux companies make plenty of money selling games, and suddenly the big companies will see how much money they could be making and start to port.
This is the only way, you need games to attract gamers, and you need gamers to attract games. So bring games, increased gamers = increased games.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
people into retro gaming, or required to use other old software. I'm so glad we are slowly approaching this point. UT2K3 has Linux support out of the box. The demise of Loki is something that I initially thought was going to set back the Linux gaming community for years, but then I've seen games like UT2K3, Castle Wolfenstein, and if you want to count their late to the punch arrival Never Winter Nights come out native. If we could only get Blizzard on the bandwagon, and Maxis more firmly seated the other developers would have little choice but to jump onboard. gatesh8r is right. If Wine gets to good to fast not only will it slow some developers to adopt Linux natively, it may loose a couple that we already have. I'm counting Apple as our new Ace in the Hole. The Mac actually has the attention of the developers, and porting from BSD to Linux should be much easier than porting from Windows to Linux. Of course if everyone adopts and improves on SDL and OpenGL they will have little to worry about when porting anyways. Especially if OpenGL2 ever makes it way to daylight with all the Active X type replacements it's supposed to have available.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
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
with any distro using glibc-3.2.2 (which is just about any new distro release). If you are using older distros, you may be happy and fine with it but if you use RH 9.0 or Mandrake 9.1 (or any other 3.2.2-based distro) you will not be pleased.
This isn't a winex problem, but a problem that affects ALL wine variants whether from WineHQ, Codeweavers, or Transgaming. The glibc developers have happily gone off and broken software everyone uses (again) for no real good reason. I imagine they change things here and there just so they have something to do or simply to try something to see how it works. LEAVE IT THE FUCK ALONE! IF IT AIN'T BROKE DON'T FRICKIN' TOUCH IT!
Sheesh.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
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.
Anti-Wine claim #1:
If a company can use WineX for their game, they won't bother making a true native port.
Here's the deal: If a company cares about it's audience, and a significant number of it's audience are running Linux, they are not going to want to use WineX. Why? Performance. Higher hardware requirements on games means you lessen your audience, so it's in a game developer's best interest to make the game as fast as possible, which means NOT using WineX. In addition to a game developer having to make their game run efficiently to reach more players, they have even more incentive to have their game run well due to competetion. If company X and company Y both have a FPS Doom 3 clone, and company X created a native binary while company Y did not, whose game will Linux gamers choose (assuming the games have comparable gameplay/fun factor)?
What if a company doesn't care about their Linux audience and decides to use WineX? Well, we lose nothing. If they don't care about their Linux audience (because it's much smaller than it's Windows audience or whatever) then chances are they weren't going to do a native port anyway. For example, it's obvious that Blizzard has no intention of porting to Linux in the near future. If they decided to create a Linux 'port' of World of Warcraft using WineX because it was extremely cheap, it doesn't mean that WineX prevented a native port. We lost nothing, but gain a title which is likely to attract many more Linux gamers, which will increase monetary incentive for companies to port their games to Linux. An example of a company that could have used WineX to port their game, but didn't, would be Bioware. They obviously care about their Linux audience (late port issues aside.)
To sum this point up, while WineX could cost us a native port or two, it will increase the Linux gamer audience to the point that it is significant, which is usually what is required for companies to even consider a native port of their game. And companies that do choose WineX during the Linux gaming movement's infancy due to monetary reasons will be reconsidering, because the savings from using WineX will be overshadowed by the return from reaching more gamers, and outselling a competetor whose game is less efficient because it uses WineX.
I'll be buying Neverwinter Nights from Tuxgames.com when it's stable under Linux, I'll be buying Doom 3 from Tuxgames, when it's released, and I'll be buying any other native Linux ports that I can get my hands on. I will also continue to be a Transgaming subscriber so I can play Battlefield 1942, the current game of the year (although, since BF1942 didn't run before, I had to dual-boot, which means I am registering my hits to websites as a Windows user. Is surfing under Linux important? Web hosts know the percentage of Windows users to Linux users.)
Why do I keep typing pythong?
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 WINE phenomena is peculiar...
Imagine that some guy has grown up with an oppressive, domineering, butt-ugly, and mean mother.
One night, he decides to do something rather independent -- something he knows that she would not approve of: He hires a hooker.
When she shows up at the hotel room, he hands her some of his mother's clothes to put on, douses her with his mother's perfume, and then he straps a mother mask onto the girl before he does his business.
Hey guys, if you're going to use Unix or Linux, use Unix or Linux.
You're creepin' me out.
--Richard