Transgaming releases "WineX" 4.0 "Cedega"

visy writes "Transgaming has opened a new site at today and are announcing WineX 4.0, now dubbed Cedega after a unique variety of grape. Transgaming claims Cedega allows "Windows ® games to seamlessly and transparently run under Linux, out-of-the-box, with outstanding performance and equivalent game-play". Will we see a new era of game compatibilty?"

Comments

Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

It's really a shame I won't ever get to use this, since Transgaming forced Gentoo to pull the packages for WineX from their distro.

Will Transgaming ever learn to work with the open source community instead of mearly tolerating its existance as an annoying necessity to business?

Re:Too bad

[gaijin99]

Since its the Lesser GPL, they have a bit more leeway. Under section 2 of the LGPL they must distribute all modifications to the LGPLed libraries under the LGPL, but they are allowed to simply use the LGPLed libraries alongside closed source work. Additionally, until March 2002 WINE was distributed under the MIT license [1], so as long as they never used any post March 2002 WINE code they'd be perfectly free to modify and not release their changes.

Brad

[1] Side note to the snarky BSD poster: which is basically the same as the 3-clause BSD license. So much for the inate superiority of the BSD license, huh? Not that I don't like the BSD license, but claiming that its a panacea is just so much nonesense. I think the world needs both licenses, personally.

Re:Too bad

[Turmio]

Wine hasn't been under the LGPL from the beginning (which dates far far back to the 90's). WineX is derived from Wine from the era it was still licensed under the X11 license that allows this. The main Wine tree was re-licensed under LGPL partly due to TransGaming's actions (they promised to contribute all their changes back to the main Wine tree but they didn't) and some of the Wine developers wanted to prevent similar from happening from in the future and thus they changed the license to LGPL under which, as you stated, that couldn't happen. Not all developers agreed that Wine should be under LGPL so another fork, ReWind was made that continues to use the X11 license. Interesting is that the LGPL'ed main tree can pull patches from ReWind but not vice-versa. Most contributors to Wine however dual-license their patches so that both trees can benefit from the efforts (and also WineX since TransGaming can use source from the ReWind tree if they want to).

Shared Wineserver

[meridian]

When are we going to see a shared memory wineserver. This would be the best way to see a significant speed increase in Wine, rather than it having to launch a new Wineserver process for each application run. Transgaming were working on this some time ago but seem to have ditched the idea.

A couple of questions...

[StressGuy]

X-gamings site seems to be more fluff than substance. Having a hard time determining what games they support. I've got a couple of little ones and, if I can get games like "Freddy the Fish", "Reader Rabbit", "Blues Clues", that would make it worth looking into for me.

However, I'm also looking at Crossover Office (or the SuSe "Wine Rack") for office compatability. Can I install both this and Transgaming's software or will they stomp on each other?

Thanks,

Is it ok?

[Apreche]

I'm still torn as to whether or not to pay for winex. I tried using the free/cvs version and it kind of worked. Of course, I didn't actually get any games to work correctly, not even simple ones, so it didn't work at all. First off, if I pay for winex and I get version 4.0 can I just never pay again and keep using 4 forever? I mean, as long as there aren't any games that come out for windows that I want (very very few lately) it shouldn't be a problem right? Also, is there a computer limit on winex? If I pay for version 4 once can I install it on 3 linux boxes without paying 3 times?

All I really want to do is to play Steam and all of the mods and stuff that go along with it, in linux. If I can do it for a really low one time fee and never pay again, then I think this is a good deal.

Re:Just buy Windows you cheap asses !

[etymxris]

Seriously, instead of trying to get a buggy emulator to work why don't you just install the games on a Windows partition.

I know this is a troll, but it is a question many ask in earnest. The answer is simple. Some people wish to enjoy at least a small portion of the cornucopia of applications developed for the Windows platform without supporting what they see as an evil company.

Even if TransGaming is not software libre, those who would use it have already made the choice to give up some of their freedom of use in exchange for enjoyment--very few games that would require WineX are themselves libre. However, one may wish to support the developer of a game without supporting an evil organization that they are associated with.

An analogous situation might be, for example, going to a live performance of a band rather than buying their CD in a store, as, presumably, the live performance gives a minimal amount, if anything, to the RIAA, while giving plenty to the band.

Re:How well does this work?

[gaijin99]

Depends on the games you consider critical. I subscribe, and it does let you play many of the newer games just fine. Warcraft III, etc. OTOH some of the less popular games don't work (Dungeon Keeper and DK 2, StarTopia, etc). If the game is an FPS or one of the other ultra-popular type games, than odds are that it will work, otherwise its a definate maybe.

Personally, I love it, and I don't regret paying for it [1]. When I want to play a supported game I don't have to boot back to Windows, and that's definately a good thing. I do wish they'd spend a bit more time making the older stuff run though. I vote for it every time I can, but the bulk of the votes always wind up going to the latest FPS candy...

.

[1] Put that in your pipe and smoke it, all you "Linux users won't pay for anything" dips.

New Win ZPI for Longhorn

[essreenim]

So my wuestion is about Avalon.
In 05/06 Window$ will release a new OS with a brand nre API - Avalon - based on a completely new file system/table... WinFS (or whatever its called)

I've no doubt they will make this the most convoluted file system ever seen with no chance of proper reverse engineering or even emulating.

So, shouldnt we be pushing for new and smarer ways to develop more sophisticated OpenGL render engines faster and better so Linux can compete eith Window$ in gaming rather than living off M$ scraps? ...

Re:New Win ZPI for Longhorn

[Doogie5526]

WinFS actually sits on top of NTFS (for backwards compatibility)... and I also think this was one of the many new technologies that are planned to be dropped from Longhorn (which is still many many years away).

I think the point of this is to shut people up about, "The only reason I haven't switched is because I play games." After that, with more people on Linux, a Linux native version of a new game gets released, and it gains more support. Finally, more and more publishers look at making Linux versions.

Hopefully, this will be set in to action before Longhorn is released (you know, right after Duke Nukem Forever).

One more thing, I believe most games don't use too much anymore of the Windows API than the winmain() function (to run the app in windows). The rest is engine code or DirectX/OpenGL. So I doubt it will be that much of a problem when the day comes.

I'm pretty sure it's still spelled "Windows" and "Microsoft." If they did change the name to "Window$," I'm pretty sure there'd be a Slashdot story on it.

Re:Support Codeweavers

[Rushuru]

Alright

wget http://source.winehq.org/source/ChangeLog

I count 14826 changelog entries
$ grep @ ChangeLog | wc -l
14826

226 of which are from a transgaming employee
$ grep -i @transgaming.com ChangeLog | wc -l
226

And 1701 for codeweavers
$ grep -i @codeweavers.com ChangeLog | wc -l
1701

So Transgaming gave back a little after all. But not that much. I browsed the top transgaming changelog entries and they concerned relatively minor stuff, like fixes for alsa audio support.

Sorry but I'm still convinced that Transgaming has been a bad wine citizen (the fact that the licence permitted it doesn't change my opinion), and that they were deceiving the community when they said they'd give back everything to wine after they reach a certain number of subscribers. I guess they have reached that number since they have not yet filed for bankruptcy.