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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!"
He pointed out that Microsoft Office now "just works. You can use it all day long and you won't see the difference." Then he added that wasn't 100% true because, "The Paperclip still doesn't work." Seems like Wine runs Office better than Windows.
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).
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.
to make Wine better and faser?? I Run word 97 on my linux box and its 100 times better and faster! I think they're not looking for a bullet but a WMD :-)
Seriously though, Wine is one of the most impressive feats of software engineering I've seen, the ability to emulate a closed source platform is a real achievement.
It's hard enough to remember my opinions, never mind the reasons for them..
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.)
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
...and I thought they were talking about the drink! I was thinking "wine hackers"? Shouldn't that be "sommeliers"? Man, it's still way too early in the day...
Nah, Sommeliers are closer to quality assurance workers, than wine hackers. Wine hackers would be more like people who make their own wine at home, and try to get the alcohol content as high as possible.
~ kjrose
I read that the attendants are back home. Are the meeting attendees geriatric geezers that needed help at the meeting? :-)
Of course, if the poster can show specific sections of code he feels have "fundamental flaws" and describe them satisfactorily then I'll take my words back.
From his journal....
The Specious Project
09:45 AM February 12th, 2004 [ Add Friend | #61699 ]
Hi, thanks for reading the journal.
Any posts from this account are part of the Specious Project, which challenges the quality of the Slashdot moderation system by posting plausible-sounding, yet factually inaccurate comments to Slashdot stories.
Usually a simple Google search will reveal any errors, and anyone moderating Specious Project posts up are reacting only to the sound and tone of authority, rather that the actual content. We try not to talk to those people at parties.
*sigh* still no signs of a Win32 port...
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
WineX can't just support every single game released for Windows, this is simply impossible, at least right now.
However, WineX supports the big hits pretty well, Call of Duty, Max Payne 2, Warcraft III, check out their list of supported games.
If you are a subscriber, you can vote for games to get more support, and if the game is popular enough, they'll work on it.
WineX works great with supported games, and has dramatically decreased my Windows boots.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
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?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You notice there aren't any projects to run Mac OS apps under Linux.
Au contraire.
We'll we all know that the Specious Project started on Dave Cutler's work with PDP-11's during WWII. By inventing new opcodes, like, BSH and WRG, Dave and Allan Turing were able to break the Enigam codes that the American and Germans were using at the time. That's how we got the plans for the AtomicBomb from the Germans.
The Specious Project was also the first atempt to pring Opject-Oriented code to simple Babage style difference engines like the PDP-11.
(How did I do... am I part of the Specious Project now???)
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
While win is great and all, and I hope it gets better it has too many problems that are not being addressed. The biggest problem is how much of a pain in the butt it is to configure. Wine needs some sort of easy or automatic configuration tool. I mean, when it's easier to set up xfree86 than it is to set up wine we have a problem.
The second and most obvious thing is that because wine exists then less software will be made for linux in the meantime. There is at least one person out there who said to themselves "why bother porting this windows app to linux, they can just use wine". Many many open source apps are ported to windows every day because we have tools like cygwin and minigw with which to recompile them. I think this is the biggest barrier to linux taking more market share. Many people I encounter wouldn't mind switching, but there is always one or two applications that they absolutely need that hold them back. Wine can help, if it works for those apps, because that person will be able to switch. But wine can also hurt because that app will never get a real port, especially if it is closed source. The fact that wine is hard to configure and that it doesn't work perfectly tend to make wine more hurt than help.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Well, the point had always been that the Office division of MS is a milk cow, System brings quite some money in but is attacked by Linux and XBOX Division (as well as the media division) is loosing money like hell...
...
Wine continuation just means that when (rofl) Linux has dethroned Windows on the desktop(/rofl) Microsoft can with no problem continue pushing it's Office suite everywhere...
Maybe putting all this devellopment time and brains on OpenOffice / MSOffice compatibility and TheGimp Tools/Dev/Filters would allow us what we really need..a really free, top to bottom OS...with all the goodies softs available for free...
"This and Photoshop are two very important steps to getting Linux on more desktops"
I might be wrong, but I think I'm closer to the mark than you are...
Get Oppenoffice working for cheap AND MS doc compatible (almost totally done), push for the SMEs and Big Companies to get cheaper hardware by getting them Microsoft free and then you will see that Photoshop is announcing a native Linux version by it's nice, userfriendly editor...
When you are at that point, most editors will come and shell out Linux versions... Binaries only, maybe, but Linux versions anyhow...
Wine was all right and fine an idea 2-3 years ago, when Linux didn't fully have the basic apps.
Now that we have them...
There is only two position in IT Market, the best or the cheapest... If we get all for free, editors will try and provide the best for a fee... Or so it was to work
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I bought crossover partly because I wanted to support Wine, and I have know idea if I'm actually acheiving that or not. Anyone got any info?
btw I've used Photoshop under the latest crossover and it ran fine, although ImageReady was pretty buggy.
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.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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.
Alcohol volume in wine cannot go above 16.8% because the yeasts that attack the sugars will stop doing their thing at such concentration of alcohol.
--
The world is divided in two categories:
those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.
Sometimes you have this old, closed-source 16-bit program (possibly for an old, out-of-date piece of external hardware) that you really can't replace because all of this other stuff is built up around it. The company isn't around anymore, but the version of the application won't run on modern, supported versions of Windows for some reason. This is where WINE can really help you out.
It can help in other ways, too. My Playstation 2 was having a problem reading discs. In searching for a local repair place on the Web, I found out that several people sell cheap "self-repair" guides, but these are in some wacky Windows hypertext browser format (probably to prevent copying). Worked fine in WINE, and I had repaired my own PS2 for $10 in less than an hour.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Take a look here. Granted it's not as polished as VMWare and not as speedy but it's progressing.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I didn't say Wine was useless...
Just, if you have that old 16 bits apps running on a dying computer, I'm sure you can find an old desktop somewhere, slap 98 or DOS 5 on it and keep it running...
I made the jump to full Linux less than 6 month ago, and now all my computers are Linux Based (Firewall is Astaro Linux, web/mail is E-smith, the rest (file server + desktop) is installed with Knoppix Cluster (debian))
Whenever I must do something Windows only, I ask my girlfriend for her keyboard, and later look for an alternative Linux solution.
Usually, I end up either with a multiplatform Java app, or with a Beta project from Sourceforge, and my need is fullfiled.
The problem is not with Legacy softz, for they will run on their old versions of whatever OS they need.
The problem is completing Linux's software portofolio so that Large Editors find it attractive to support their soft on Linux...
Choice, the cheap (as in free) against the best (as in payed-for version), until the free soft becomes better again, and so on...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
16.8% is absolutely not a hard limit. Yes, most champagne yeasts poop out around 16%... but then, most ale yeasts give up before 12%. With a slow fermentation and a good yeast, a mead can easily hit 18%... and rice wines (which have lower initial sugar concentration, it's really a much more complex process) can hit 20%, 22% with skill.
I've had this sig for three days.
The best word processor running on Linux is Microsoft Word.
In OpenOffice, I tried to create a simple numbered list, where I stop the list but then continue it at a later point in the document, but I couldn't figure it out.
MS Office on cross-over Wine is what I use and I am productive.
Since he ended at -1, I don't think that proved it. His post is modded up, which causes people to react by pointing out what's wrong with it, and it immediately dives to -1. So the system works okay in my opinion, provided that the post doesn't spend too long at 5 before getting struck down to -1. I think that he did show that some poeple react to the tone of authority (by the fact that anyone modded him up at all), but not that the moderation system is broken. More of a statement on human nature than on slashdot.
I'd rather be lucky than good.