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

I hate to whine

[Anonymous Coward]

but wine still seems like one of those apps that need geek'ness to get things working. For whom are they aiming the product for these days, joe average?

I appreciate what they are doing, but at the moment would it not be better to go 100% unix or 100% windows.

Wine and DirectX

[SydShamino]

Next up, Tom Wickline put together a presentation about getting applications to run. Tom has worked quite a bit with Wine and CrossOver Office and had some tricks for getting things to work. The key to just getting something to run seems to be using native Windows DLL's. He has a copy of Windows 98 to copy things to and from. Generally he starts with CrossOver Office and adds the following things in this order:

* Internet Explorer
* DCOM98 (as opposed to DCOM95)
* MDAC.Type
* MS Scripting update (SCR56.exe)

Lately he's even added native DirectX 8.1 to the mix. Some form of this combination will get Wine to run about 85% of the applications and games he's tested.

That's cool and all, but DirectX 8.1 is outdated. EverQuest, for example, upgraded to DirectX 9 this week, breaking support for anyone who ran it in Linux.

I was about to move completely to Xandros 2.0 on a home machine, knowing that, if the included CrossOver Office wouldn't run EQ, WineX would. Now I'm comtemplating a dual-boot machine. But that doesn't work as well since our home file/print server is being booted into a new OS.

Unfortunately, most people only play the latest and greatest when it comes to games.* And to keep people centered on Linux when it comes to gaming, latest DirectX support needs to be a top priority.

* (Me, still playing EQ five years after its release, being an obvious exception.)

WINE Windows Driver Support

[MrNybbles]

Jan had to reimplement about 300 functions in order to make the driver, NTFS.sys, work. Jan used four different methods to implement the necessary calls:

Pass the call straight through to ntoskrnl.exe (yes, the real WinXP ntoskrnl.exe)

It would be nice if someone worked on native NTFS support for writing to the disk that worked as well as it does in Windows. As far as I know the 2.6.x Linux kernels support writing that can't make a NTFS file larger on the disk.

What seemed to interest everyone was not the fact that the native NT drivers can be used for filesystem access, but how it could be extended to support other drivers. In particular, native Windows printer drivers, serial drivers, video drivers, and networking drivers may be able to be implemented using a similar method. All that special hardware using "Win" soft drivers might be possible to get working.

I hope they get some support for Win9x drivers too since I have only one program on Windows that WINE can't run because of some special drivers it installs and expects to work. At least that's why I think it's not running. That's one problem with Windows support: Windows is not one operating system.

Legality question..

[stratjakt]

If calls are being passed directly to/from drivers like NTFS.SYS and the actual WinXP kernel, does using Wine require a licensed copy of XP?

AFAIK you can't freely redistribute the XP kernel and system drivers.

Will we see WINE shut down at MSFTs whim one day?

ReactOS

[dcuny]

For me, the most interesting thing happening in Wine has been the ReactOS project. Basically, it's an attempt to clone the Windows NT operating system.

There have been a number of attempts to clone the Windows OS in the past (i.e. Freedows and the Alliance OS), but most of them have self-destructed with no real product.

The ReactOS, on the other hand, has managed to get the core NT working, and has been added the Wine libraries to supply much of the functionality. Earlier last month they released a version with a functioning Windows Explorer clone, and they seem well on the way of reaching the goal of running OpenOffice and Mozilla by October, 2004. The target of a fully functional Windows OS replacement is only about a year away.

Re:I'd like to know that too

[jeremy_white]

We are only able to do the work that we do because of the money we receive from our customers, most of whom are single end users.

All of our work on Wine goes back to the public Wine tree. I think its fair to say that Wine runs MS Office 2000, XP, Photoshop, and a wide range of applications only because of the money our customers have sent us. So, yes, I think it makes a huge difference, and we greatly appreciate it.

Further, there is one misconception I wish to correct. We've actually changed our development process recently so that all of our Wine work goes to the public Wine tree as soon as our developer makes the change, without regard to CrossOver releases.

Cheers,

Jeremy White
CEO, CodeWeavers

Re:I'd like to know that too

[jsebrech]

if a newbie can insert his windows app cd, run the installer under wine and have a application link inserted in a windows directory in the gnome menu that is already associated with wine and that app

Crossover office adds apps to the menu and desktop on my system (debian + kde). That's the diff between crossover and wine, you pay for the polish.