WineConf 2004 Wrapup

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Posted by michael on Thursday February 12, 2004 @03:46AM from the red-white-and-rose dept.

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!"

9 of 190 comments (clear)

Perhaps this is an improvement? by samuel4242 · 2004-02-12 03:49 · Score: 5, Funny

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.
CrossOver by cozziewozzie · 2004-02-12 03:56 · Score: 5, Insightful

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:Believe me, I love it as much as anybody, but. by IamTheRealMike · 2004-02-12 04:03 · Score: 5, Informative

Mods, please ignore this post, it's just a troll. Wine doesn't even have a TCP/IP stack, it (of course) uses the underlying hosts stack, ie the Linux/FreeBSD/Whatever stack. "Wait states for unsupported hardware" is entirely meaningless, Wine does not have hardware support, again that's delegated to the underyling operating system.
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.
Re:Wine and DirectX by SydShamino · 2004-02-12 04:04 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Re:Believe me, I love it as much as anybody, but. by jhunsake · 2004-02-12 04:06 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Win32 port anyone? by Dreadlord · 2004-02-12 04:11 · Score: 5, Funny

*sigh* still no signs of a Win32 port...

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The IT section color scheme sucks.
1. Re:Win32 port anyone? by wild_pointer · 2004-02-12 04:23 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Here Some Bill guy is working on it. It's not yet as stable as Wine but looks promising ;)
That's why it's 0.9 by Weaselmancer · 2004-02-12 04:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Re:I'd like to know that too by jeremy_white · 2004-02-12 04:49 · Score: 5, Interesting

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