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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.
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That's cool and all, but DirectX 8.1 is outdated.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.
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.
You notice there aren't any projects to run Mac OS apps under Linux.
Au contraire.
Oh, no prob. If Windows does it, should be a snap for those Linux boys. /., multiple times?
So, you wouldn't happen to have an NTFS spec handy? Maybe you could get one from MS?
So far, I consider Linux reading NTFS and writing verrrry carefully without changing number of blocks a file uses to be impressive given it is all reverse engineering.
But hey. There's a solution, maybe you remember seeing this posted on
NTFS full write
Oh, and btw, WINE does work with 95 too. Check your configs and documentation.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
The Linux Kernel 2.6.x so far does not have very good NTFS writing support. With few exceptions I would suggest not using 2.6.x NTFS support until it nolonger says it is experimental. Also, I think the NTFS.SYS driver from WINE calls the Windows XP driver ntoskrnl.exe. The NTFS.SYS talked about in the article is part of WINE.
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
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.
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