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Is Wine Destined to be a Specialist's Toolkit?
Bryan Porter asks: "I've been using various Wine based products lately (ex. WineX, CrossOver, etc.), and have found several companies basing portions of the software on Wine (I believe Virtuoso 3.0 utilizes Wine to some extent). My question for the Slashdot community is, is Wine destined for specialization only? We've got well-working versions of Wine hacked into a cross-platform gaming system, hacked into cross-platform productivity systems, etc. Will we ever download just one Wine, or is the best solution a customized one?"
I have noticed a few programs involving wine. It is interesting to see so much software involving a utility that makes code that global. I wonder where the idea of universaly (SP?) executable code is going?
I've been using various Wine based products lately
I''''ve been using wine bast pruducts too1 And don't tell me I got uh prublem, cause I don't, see.
I kin handle it. So whayt if sometime I wake up onna sidewalk an don remember goin ta sleep? I kin sttop any time I wan.
Hell, I didnt start drinkin cept to take up the time tween the blue screen od death anfd the three fingger salute.
You wanna make sometin ov it? Alla shoqw you whooze boss1
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
This year, I decided to make the leap from dual-boot to linux only on my desktop (MS was wastin' my disk space). Of course, I had to have Counter-Strike, or I would've gone mad. I started off with plain-vanilla wine, but even with opengl configured perfectly, I couldnt get the fps I needed (my machine 866mhz p3 512mb ram, geforce2 32mb vid card). I got winex 2.x, which worked marginally better, but still not acceptable. When winex 3.0 came out, I snatched it up. My fps is decent now, but still not native-Windows quality. I guess the moral of the story is: specialized wines are better. I think it's terriffic that so many people/groups are utilizing the wine core, and optimizing it for whatever. Thanks to TransGaming and others.
Look at the number of people running "tweaked" Linux kernels, instead of the "vanilla" version from Linus. The same thing applies to Wine.
People have special needs, and it is a good thing that software can be adapted for that. Now, as Wine is a compability layer, it is even more sensible than most other software to special needs in different environments. So don't expect the specialized variations to go away anytime soon.
Also, it is not necessarily a bad thing that there are many variations out there. As long as the improvements all trickle back to the common source everyone will reap the benefits eventually. (Now, older versions of Wine are not LGPL, but whatever.)
The more work put into wine, the closer it gets to windows APIs. It never gets there, but the closer wine gets to the windows API, the harder it gets to improve it. Sooner or later, opensource developers get bored for not getting much out of a lot of work. So the companies move in and try to get a niche market to stay afloat.
The companies exist because theres a huge market of running windows software on unices and wine isnt exactly there. Any company can invest in marketing and sell enough copies to pay for the marketing plus their salaries. The free software developers would much rather develop interesting stuff in native Linux/BSD at full speed, and port it everywhere.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I've been using various Windows based products lately (ex. Windows 2000, Windows XP, etc), and have found several companies basing portions of the software on Windows (I believe Microsoft Office utilizes Windows to some extent). My question for the Slashdot community is, is Windows destined for specialization only? We've got well-working versions of Windows hacked into a gaming system, hacked into productivity systems, etc. Will we ever download just one Windows, or is the best solution a customized one?
I have tried to use wine a few times in the past. And it took too much time to set up the emulator. And when it worked finally, most of my windows programs used functions that wine couldn't handle yet. Because Windows keeps changing, it will be difficult to catch with the changes every time.
I installed about 20 versions of various Wine products over the time in search for working internet banking solution (that needs MS Java or something like that) and had big troubles getting the thing installed and configured properly with each new version. Never did the previous ~/.wine/config work out of box, and the config that came with the distribution failed as well.
There are various things that need to be configured. Some of them I know best and they will never change between various wine versions (like where my Win ME partition is), about some I have no opinion (like whether for particular DLL the order is builtin, native or vice versa). The config should be split and the second part with the technical details should be autoconfigurable, ideally with a bunch of regression tests like Perl and Perl modules have, which would make it easier to check if the configuration and features supported matches ideas of Wine developers. I really do not know (or care) if the correct line is
"msvcrt" = "native, builtin"
or not and I believe I have no simple way of figuring it out (except trying all combinations at all lines, and even there my MS IE might fail because of MS or Wine bug, not because of misconfig).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wine
Is
Not an
Emulator
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Anyone remember DOS-EMU? By the time it hit 1.0 and pretty much 'just worked' nobody gave a rat's rectum about DOS anymore. So it was a top notch piece of software that nobody cared about by the time it was completed. And it had the advantages of a) shooting at a stationary target and b) not actually having to rewrite DOS, just provide a virtualized environment for it to run it.
I'm afraid this is WINE's fate, especially since it was only recently protected by the LGPL. The commercial interests seem content to ignore the newer source trees and just keep applying their closed improvements to the last free tree. Had the LGPL switch happened BEFORE Crossover Office and WineX the story might have been different since the need for Wine is currently higher than the need for DOSEMU was. Five years from now though and I expect most of the critical application gaps to be closed and Wine will only be needed for games, which means Transgaming will be able to man the tollgates for the forseeable future.
Democrat delenda est
I'm also using wine for some windows program tests. I think the problem for the common usablity is, that often programs replace the original windows files by customized ones. Also there are many versions and wine can only have one. Most setup's handle this for native windows versions. Wine has the problem, that the dll's and others from the programs need the right version of the simulated dll's. That is the cause for most of my problems with wine. The unimplemented functions are often in the log, but mostly it works without them, when the dll seetings are right. For someone not knowing much about windows internals, it's hard to get the right settings. When all this works, yes, you have the problem, that even simple programs, are very slow. Don't know why.
The only thing keeping me on Win98 is European Air War.
I have tried to get European Air War working under WINE. It is possible I am just hopeless.
If I knew someone had done it I could and would try - tonight. I am rebuilding home machine after she said I think I know that person and tried to run the attachment - which I checked with an updated [specifically for this] virus checker).
Thanks In Advance
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant