WineConf 2004 Wrapup

IamTheRealMike writes "Well, the attendants are back home and the writeups have been written - WineConf 2004 is over, and Brian Vincent of Wine Weekly News fame has written a comprehensive account of the conference. Wine hackers the world over congregated in snow-covered Minneapolis to talk shop and try and locate the magic bullet to make Wine better, faster. Cheers!"

Comments

CrossOver

[cozziewozzie]

I wonder how many of the improvements can be attributed to the Crossover code. IIRC, the Crossover people release all their changes back to the WINE tree after a time. IMHO, this is a good example of a company staying alive while helping out the community.

Anyway, running Office smoothly is a great thing. This and Photoshop are two very important steps to getting Linux on more desktops (last time I tried Photoshop, it crashed after a while and Office complained about some access violation).

Re:Wine and DirectX

[SydShamino]

And to keep people centered on Linux when it comes to gaming, latest DirectX support needs to be a top priority.

Of course, I mean for the Wine folks. For the rest of the Linux community, getting developers to release native Linux games is more important.

That's why it's 0.9

[Weaselmancer]

Plus, Wine is not a product, it's a project. Codeweavers makes a product based on Wine, and so does Transgaming.

Codeweavers product is aimed at people who want to use Linux, but communicate 100% with MS Office people. And use MS plugins in their Linux browsers.

Transgamings product is aimed at the hacker/enthusiast who wants to be on the cutting edge running DirectX games on their Linux install.

Eventually, Wine will be a near 100% replacement for the MS API. Buy a MS piece of software at CompUSA, drop it in your Linux distro, and it works perfectly.

And once that happens, you will see Linux begin to take over the desktop. And that's why Wine developers are heroes. Keep up the good work!

Weaselmancer

PS: The submitter is hoping for the "magic bullet" that'll speed up wine, but may have missed just such a magic bullet in the article he posted. It's a shared memory wineserver, currently experimental. I'll quote from the WineHQ page:

Gav showed a dramatic demo of American McGee's Alice running under both WineX and WineX with shared memory. In that particular game the sound and graphics threads needed to sync with each other at an astounding rate. Typical WineX performance produced about 50 frames per second. By moving to shared memory the framerate nearly doubled to about 95 a second.