Playing Nice: Reviews of CrossOver Office, WineX 4

JimLynch writes "One of the more common questions experienced Linux users get asked by those considering migrating from Windows to Linux is, "Will my Windows applications run under Linux?" Thanks to the folks at CodeWeavers, the answer to that is yes--for some applications, anyway." And Dan Dole writes "Linuxlookup.com staff member Rich reviews Cedega (WineX 4.0), give it a 20/20 score & Editors Choice Award. "The release of Transgaming's newest version of WineX, renamed Cedega, was met with considerable enthusiasm and interest in the Linux community last week. So much so that their server was inaccessible the day of release. Cedega is claimed to be much improved, offering the ability to play recent games released for Windows "seamlessly and transparently" under Linux. They provided me with a copy, and I was curious to see if it lived up to the hype.""

Comments

Wheeee

[rootus-rootus]

If only they'd develop native versions....

FP?

Re:Wheeee

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, good that stuff is starting to work on linux. Bad that it isn't native.

How will this affect the development of programs? "We will just make the windows version and force the linux people to use Cedega if they want to use our stuff"

Cynic? I'm a product of society baby!

Re:Wheeee

[Tony-A]

Cynic? I'm a product of society baby!

Ok, I'm an old fart and IMNSHO more cynical than you.
"We will just make the windows version and force the linux people to use Cedega if they want to use our stuff" ... and watch all our customers slowly jump ship to our competitors who do it native.
That's a short-term bridge. Only.
There is a difference between the "real thing" and "not exactly". It's slow. It's subtle. But it does matter.

We shall see...

[Coldeagle]

I'm usually critical of WineX, but hopefully it will work well with all of my games so I can get rid of my Winblows box :)

Re:We shall see...

[TheLetterPsy]

As excited as I always am to see a new article posted on /., I tend to get this sad feeling, as if refraining RTFA and trying to get FP instead will somehow decrease that poor webserver's burden.

Maybe one of these days, slashdot will get slashdotted . . . er, maybe not.

Re:We shall see...

[ScottGant]

I have Cedega loaded and I've been off Windows totally since last November. This machine has never even had Window loaded on it. Since day one it's been Linux (Gentoo btw).

Cedega(Winex) runs everything I would normally play if this were an XP box. My wife still has her XP machine, and the games that I had, I played on that machine. So when I went 100% Linux, I thought I would have to give up my games as I'm not a fan of dual booting...or else just play them on her machine.

As it turns out, the games I play (Warcraft 3, Neverwinter Nights, Everquest, Counterstrike, UT2003/2004) all either have a native Linux client or work great under Cedega. And from what I can tell, it will work with World of Warcraft when it comes out...which is really the only game I'm looking forward to playing in the near future (ther than Call of Cthulhu).

So guess what folks, I Windows ain't needed at all on my computer. Not that I'm a MS hater or anything, just didn't feel like shelling out 100 bucks for the OS as I had to build this machine with little to no money.

This is just my experience, you're milage may vary...especially if you're looking to play a game that isn't supported. But the ones I play, play just the same as if on Windows, yet faster as I can switch to another desktop while playing EQ full screen to check on something quickly. I mean, it's INSTANT switching to another desktop. Playing EQ full screen on my Wife's XP machine you have to wait and wait and wait to get to the desktop, THEN the computer runs like molasses.

Re:We shall see...

[Frogbert]

I'd like to use this soap box to ask the slashdot community for help. I have Mandrake 10 and I am trying, unsuccessfully, to get steam to run on Cedega. I constantly get "The game is not available" when I try to start a game. Has anyone had this problem also? Deleting clientregistry.blob doesn't help.

Prevent it?

[DaHat]

I'm forced to wonder if an application developer could put enough logic in their code to prevent it's running under Wine. It'd be an interesting attempt to prevent 'unauthorized' distribution of their product if they only authorize it's use under Windows.

Re:Prevent it?

[bobhagopian]

There's no reason for any software distributor to run away from Linux (with the exception of those in the OS market). Though Linux still represents a small portion of the desktop market, small enough that software companies wouldn't go out of their way to make their programs compatible, I also don't see any good economic reason why they would go out of their way to prevent use of their software on Linux. If Windows represents 80% of desktops and *nix 5%, these companies could now market their product to 85% of people instead of just 80%.

More importantly, the threat of unauthorized use is not any greater under Linux than under Windows. That's largely the point of Wine; the same programs run under Linux in almost exactly the same way that the run under Windows. I'll bet that the real threat of unauthorized distribution comes from little warez kiddies, most of whom run Windows.

Re:Prevent it?

[jejones]

Probably one could...after all, MS came up with the check to see whether MS-DOS or DR-DOS was living underneath Windows so it could display FUD.

Here's a simple one off the top of my head: check what the results of fopen("/bin/sh", "r") are, including what errno is afterwards.

The question is: who'd want to? A third-party developer probably wouldn't care, unless MS insisted on their making sure their app broke under WINE as part of some sort of agreement. I certainly wouldn't put it past the the folks who brought us "DOS isn't done till Lotus won't run."

Re:Prevent it?

[Dimensio]

You're thinking logically. Some software developers throw in deliberate restrictions that have no logical grounds whatsoever.

Case in point: Thief: Deadly Shadows. Ion Storm says that you MUST run the game under an account that has full Administrative rights. There is no reason to require that a game run with Administrative rights, and no sane Windows user should be using an account with Administrative tasks for playing a game. The restriction is not a matter of the game needing Administrative access for anything. The game can function just fine under a Power Users account. However, the geniuses at Ion Storm decided that they wanted to lock players into this asinine restriction, so they programmed the game to self-destruct by deleting all of the files in its System directory (the game's System directory, not that of Windows) when a non-Admin tries to run it. There is a workaround -- give non-Admin users read-only access to the files (since the game's config and save data is stored elsewhere) -- but that is an example of a completely illogical and pointless restriction deliberately placed on software by a developer. Having the software discover that it's being run under Linux via Wine and self-destructing in much the same way is not a far stretch.

Re:Prevent it?

[UtucXul]

The installer for the demo of Halo gives a nice error message about only running on Windows (with some list of supported versions) when run under wine in Fedora Core 1. So that could be a case of a program actually checking (since it did open up a window of its own to give the error message). Of course that is the closest thing to sucess I've ever had with wine.

Re:Prevent it?

[DaHat]

One word: Support.

How many software houses are going to want to support their application running under an unsupported operating system?

Oh yes, they can clearly say "We do not support running _____ under Linux, do so at your own risk" but that does not prevent the inevitable calls and e-mails, asking for support, hoping that an answer exists or worse... that they did not read the warning.

If Wine were perfect and could handle ANY Windows app then yes, it might be advantageous for a publisher to sell to Linux users for use under Wine... but lets face it, it's not perfect, it can't handle all apps.

The best way to avoid support for something is to prevent it. My favorite example, VMware... ever try to install VMware inside of a VMware VM? The install shield says no, saying that it is not supported. Period. And with that go any possible support issues down the line of someone having problems which could be caused by such a setup.

Also, when I said unauthorized distribution I did not mean 'piracy' I meant (and said) use under an unsupported/unauthorized operating system.

Re:Prevent it?

[IANAAC]

I'm forced to wonder if an application developer could put enough logic in their code to prevent it's running under Wine.

Microsoft already has. Try installing Office 2003 under CrossOver. You get a dialog box telling you you're running the wrong OS.

Re:Prevent it?

[IamTheRealMike]

You probably just need to tell Wine to report that it's Windows 98 or maybe 2K if the game requires that. The latest version of Wine (may not be released yet, don't recall) reports 98 by default.

Re:Prevent it?

[Prior Restraint]

I don't know which is more disturbing: that no one questions the assertion that programmers don't give a whit about logic, or that there is compelling evidence that many of them don't.

Re:Prevent it?

[Plac3bo]

The only reason I can think of for this type of restriction, would be to prevent the use of this game on a public machine, such as an internet cafe, library, school lab, or similar. Perhaps the license packaged with the game does not include public use like this, and requiring administrative privledges is the best way the company could think of to enforce their license.

Re:Prevent it?

[jonbryce]

And as far it is concerned, that wrong OS is Windows 98. You need Windows 2000/XP/2003 to run Office 2003.

Re:Prevent it?

[BiggerIsBetter]

True that. I've actually noticed many sites now have a notice saying "NO we will NOT port this to any other platform"! That's amazing stuff to me. I see an opportunity to "get in on the ground floor" of the commercial Linux software market, while these guys see a bunch of customers who won't quit bugging them. Linux is growing, Mac is growing, Windows is stagnating. Wake up app vendors, because if you don't get portable you're probably toast in a couple of years.

Re:Prevent it?

[Dimensio]

Heh. That wouldn't work with the machines at the local University's computer lab. They're all logged in with full Administrative access for normal users, and security is handled through "policy settings" (the university's IT department is wholly incompetent).

In any case, it still shows utter developer incompetence. If a dev had a requirement that a standard Linux app -- such as a game -- have full root access, they'd be rightfully lynched. Unfortunately there are quite a few morons who think that it's perfectly acceptable to run their Windows machines with full Admin rights all the time. Stunts like this only encourage that moronic practice.

Re:Prevent it?

[BiggerIsBetter]

Yes, I have ported (relatively small) applications. No, it's not always easy. You are right that potential customers may not become actual customers, but they will definitly not become actual customers if you don't.

There is also the chicken and egg to consider: We use a few Windows business apps, and they are the only reason we have Windows. If the vendors provided a Linux port we would buy it instead of the Windows one. But they don't because all their customers use Windows... I understand their reluctance, because porting is non-trivial for those guys. They embraced MS wholeheartedly and embedded FoxPro and so on into their apps. It's just not a good long term strategy to be that tied into one vendor's products.

At the moment we can keep on using Windows, but if the security scenario keeps getting worse, we'll be ditch it from our office desktops too - it's just not worth the risk anymore. Then we'll find or write something to do the job instead.

Re:Prevent it?

[bluGill]

Microsoft would do the entire world a favor, and save themselves a lot of security issues if the next version of office would refuse to run if the user has admin access. They have been saying for a while now that admin isn't a good idea, it is time to take that to the next step, and refuse it.

Admin does not need to run Word. Install it yes, but not run it.

Linux users don't normally run as root because it is a bad idea. Windows users shouldn't run as admin for the same reason.

Re:Prevent it?

[Asterisk]

Oh yes, they can clearly say "We do not support running _____ under Linux, do so at your own risk" but that does not prevent the inevitable calls and e-mails, asking for support, hoping that an answer exists or worse... that they did not read the warning.

And if they deliberately make their game incompatible with Linux, they'll get even more calls from Linux users who didn't read the label.

Cheese with my Wine

[SolidiusRock]

I'm not going to beat around the bush on this one, I'm not a fan of Linux. That aside, however, I don't see things like Wine gaining so much ground that it becomes the next Windows alternative that can run all your windows apps.

I will say that technologies like this do give light that Linux definitely needs to improve its "out of the box" usability. It's all about support, and IMHO, I feel that this is more of a "Look Ma! I can run some WinApps.."

Re:Cheese with my Wine

[eamacnaghten]

The vast majority of the most used generic Windows apps have Linux equivalents now - in particular OpenOffice.org is a good-enough drop in replacement for MS-Office, Mozilla.Firefox is better than IE, Evolution is comparable to most of the features of outlook and Mozilla/Thunderbird/Lots of others is more than good enough for Outlook Express and so on.

Where legacy gets a real problem (for moving to Linux) is the small specialist-apps a lot of the SMEs have that only run on Windows. These often are a simple specialist accountancy package and so on. As the Wine API becomes more and more complete in creating a working API - and it does not matter if it is a bit old - the more of these sites can be converted to linux. The more that happens the more apps will be ported to native Linux.

Wine and so on is a LOT more than a simple "Look Ma - Windows on Linux" exercise. Although it does not replace the MS-Windows environment totally - it is not designed to - it enables greater migration to Linux - and the more that happens the less Linux adoption will rely on having to run MS Applications.

Re:Cheese with my Wine

[PhiberOptix]

i have linux installed in my notebook. It is a rather old one, but still suitable for my needs.
I dont want to run win98 on it, much less pay $$$ for a windows xp upgrade.
All i need at work is a browser, ssh, sapgui and lotus notes.
I use wine daily at work to run lotus notes on it. it works flawlessly. actually, most of the time i forget that im "using" wine, as i have a icon shortcut that launches notes directly.
i dont know if wine will ever be "popular", but it is very useful for my needs, and i thank the developers for that

Re:Cheese with my Wine

[CowsAnonymous]

> I will say that technologies like this do give light that Linux definitely needs to improve its "out of the box" usability.

I wouldn't say that, I might say that it shines light on the lack of supported applications. I could say that a Mac or Windows operating system doesn't have good "out of the box" usability because much software is not suported by the other.

Re:Cheese with my Wine

[freshBlueO2]

Or like Rhaposody (online "purchased" music listening) which companies will probably NEVER make available in linux.

And I hope someone proves me wrong.

Re:Cheese with my Wine

[cerberusss]

in particular OpenOffice.org is a good-enough drop in replacement for MS-Office

I saw the headline of this story and immediately thought, someone's going to mention OOo as a replacement.

Have you tried, in a genuine office environment, received an MS Word document, edited it with OOo, exported it back and sent it to your coworker/manager/client?

Of course not. Because the im/export functionality of MS Office documents in OOo is nice, but not perfect. And that's why it's useless. So a looong time ago, I shelled out $55 (now only $40) for crossover office. Never looked back.

Re:Cheese with my Wine

[Stinking Pig]

And where it gets exciting is that there actually is pressure on SMEs to make the switch, probably for the first time since 1995, because backwards compatibility is getting tougher and tougher for MS to maintain. Maybe 25% of the companies I've worked with in the last few months have been unable to upgrade past Windows NT 4 or Windows 2000 because of incompatibility with their installed mission critical application base.

These are companies with an IT staff of about 5 people, all Windows-trained, maybe two of whom have some network skills as well. Sure, making the jump to Linux & WINE would be tough for them, but so's the jump to XP, or worse yet Longhorn. Let's just say the idea isn't being laughed at quite as quickly as it used to be.

Re:Cheese with my Wine

[Gheesh]

i dont know if wine will ever be "popular", but it is very useful for my needs, and i thank the developers for that

Remember that, with OSS Projects, the best way to thank them is to contribute (either with bug reports, code, documentation or money).

Re:Cheese with my Wine

[davidsyes]

"The vast majority of the most used generic Windows apps have Linux equivalents now - in particular OpenOffice.org is a good-enough drop in replacement for MS-Office, Mozilla.Firefox is better than IE, Evolution is comparable to most of the features of outlook and Mozilla/Thunderbird/Lots of others is more than good enough for Outlook Express and so on."

Well, I sure hope this can encompass Lotus SmartSuite. Or, I hope that Mozilla and the underlying code/widgets being added seemingly daily will allow for great duplication of Lotus Approach. I would like in LinuxLand/Open Source a WYSIWYG database that does:

--Forms (that can also contain chart widgets and cross tab widgets alongside data

--Charts that can drill down to the underlying data and, without changing the found dataset, display related data graphically, dynamically, and so on

--Reports that dispense with the Paradox/Abscess "banding"... reports need to be WYSIWYG, too, and more like the approach found in Lotus Approach

--Crosstabs that function and that print nicely, preferably with the ability to render a relevant chart alongside the crosstab. If the datasets are simple enough, it should be able to project and print relevancies

--Worksheets that can support drill-through and allow copying and pasting or updating of like-structured data in the same or other databases that the user has access and edit rights to

--Context-sensitive Edit and design mode palettes that are NON-MODAL. I cannot express in polite words the non-sensical, short-sighted, restrictive hand some developers use by forcing MODAL paletts or dialogs on the users. This needs to stop.

--Relational joins, schema engineering and built-in documentation and printing with costs, to-dos and more so the dev team or individual can manage the thing sensibly

--Quick, ad-hoc development of forms with tabbed panels that offer interesting and relevant views to same and similar datasets that form the main view.

--WYSIWYG field, object, and form editing.

--Real-time data editing to and FROM the Web, all in one package, not broken up into costly desktop, client/server, & web editions.

--Stand-alone executable/runtime so that end users and edit data and submit it for synchronization, or to be able to use it stand-alone

--Ability to restructure the schema and tables without taking down any tables. Joins I can understand, if a joined table is opened, though.

--User accounts internal or based on Linux user password file/s

--Under $200, Open Source, dual-licensed, and

Am I asking too much? Maybe, but let's get this thing rolling in a CVS, maybe based on Mozilla, teamed up with the Kexi project (www.kexiproject.org), and tie in ALL the major and even a goodly number of the minor distro makers so that Fortune X00 Enterprises can do a double-take and sign up to buy or sponsor the project and not try to strangle it in IP litigation "thick brown baloney".

(No, OpenOffice.org and StarOffice won't work for me. I need something like Lotus Approach, WordPro,and 1-2-3, but with an INTUITIVE database. SO & OO.o DO NOT HAVE THAT. Period. Not like Lotus SmartSuite. I need a word processor that has a tabbed metaphor for multi-file documents and that will let me keep my page orientation of each embedded document, unadulterated. I need my section and division markers to be tabs, not annoying ms-copying LINES mucking up the page or footer area.)

No, I have tried Omnis Studio, and it's not for the end-user, especially given the price points and the need to know some programming. I've seen Paradox years ago and it's too powerful for my needs. I'm not paying for nor using for free Abscess. Filemaker is nice, but too "Maccy" for me, in that it is only recently getting a facelift to "modernize" the forms view (I never liked the rolodex object...)

Regards,

David Syes

Re:Cheese with my Wine

[r_j_howell]

I hate to sound like a karma whore , but have you ever worked in an office that had only halfway migrated to a new version of MSOffice. What a nightmare! I've had better compatability between Open Office and Microsoft Office than Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office.

ymmv - I am hardly an office suite power user.

Re:Cheese with my Wine

[WhiteWolf666]

You might be right in some situations, but.

Our office ONLY runs OpenOffice.org.

No MS Office here, folks. (Actually, I think the one guy who has a laptop, who does his own maintenance, might be running Office 97 or something).

The rest of us I dragged to OpenOffice.org, and we haven't looked bad.

PowerPoint docs? Check. Word docs? Check. Excel? Check.

It works pretty well for us, thank you.

One or twice (but no more) I have encountered a problem where someone in the company received a document whose formatting got all screwed up on import.

They forwarded it to me, I fixed it, and sent it back.

Out of hundred of documents. The $299 (or whatever) licenses fee we had to pay per-seat is worth the couple hours of my time it too to fix those two documents.

Plus, (perhaps Office 2003 does it), I've sold EVERYONE on the export to .pdf. Of course, the people getting transitioned to Mac's already have them, and the linux people have it too, but the Windows crew get it as well, now.

In terms of document exchange, I find the .pdf have several advantages to sending someone a .doc.

I wish I could send out .sxw, but we just aren't in that day/age yet.

Re:Cheese with my Wine

[cerberusss]

Hmm, my tone was somewhat negative, but that sounds really great! There are some forces going on here in the company I work to go over to OOo. And yeah, the PDF export is an excellent feature which most MS Office users would love as well. Some do it with printer drivers, websites etc.

Just Tried WineX...

[pnatural]

... and now cedega. Gotta say, it's pretty painless on gentoo.

Per the ebuild instructions, I registered w/ transgaming, ponied up my 20 bucks (or whatever), downloaded the file, copied it into /usr/portage/distfiles, ran the emerge, then done.

I was playing American McGee's Alice 20 minutes after starting my first "run a Windows(tm) game on linux" adventure. Even impressed the Mrs. :D

Re:Just Tried WineX...

[stratjakt]

Alice is a no-brainer, quake engine, OpenGL, pretty straightforward. I have no doubt it would work.

Wake me when you play Far Cry, or Halo, or POP:Sands of Time, Call of Duty - or something from the last year or so. (Ie; something with DirectX 9+ with PS2.0).

Re:Just Tried WineX...

[Sparr0]

Far Cry works great, I play it every day. dunno about the others.

Re:Just Tried WineX...

[Anonymous Coward]

Call of Duty runs fine. So does Knights of the Old republic. Hrm...Yeah Painkiller runs too...oh i also installed star wars galaxies just for kicks and it even loaded right up. Theres your DX9.

Re:Just Tried WineX...

[Anonymous Coward]

WAKE UP!

Farcry linux installer

Re:Just Tried WineX...

[IamTheRealMike]

I'm glad you think it's straightforward. The months it took to develop the SHM wineserver were just because TransGaming like making things hard for themselves I guess. It had nothing to do with the fact that while Alice is like the Quake engine it actually is not Quake but rather an entirely different game. In the case of Alice, it was its mutex-swapping behaviour which caused the development of the SHM wineserver to speed up such pathological speed cases.

Re:Just Tried WineX...

[Cyph]

Two out of those will work. Though Far Cry has to run in OpenGL mode to work, Call of Duty works perfectly, and even Painkiller works.

Re:Just Tried WineX...

[stratjakt]

No, I don't think it's straightforward. I just think it's much more likely that a 5 year old OpenGL based game would work than a 2 month old DX9 based one.

Re:Just Tried WineX...

[furballphat]

Wake me when you play Far Cry

Oh my!

Re:Just Tried WineX...

[rd_syringe]

How's the performance on that compared to running natively in Windows?

Re:Just Tried WineX...

[Dreadlord]

Pretty well, but not as good as what it used to under Windows.

OTOH, PainKiller plays great, besides some missing effects, I can't tell the difference, it's a DirectX 9 game BTW.

Just like Windows?

[Myrmi]

Cedega is claimed to be much improved, offering the ability to play recent games released for Windows "seamlessly and transparently" under Linux.

So they crash most of the time?

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[Kjuib]

I once kinda got solitair to work on Mandrake...does that count?

This stuff ever work.

[jzilla]

From my experience, none of the windows emulation pakcakes ever works smoothly. You end up having to perfom bad "hacks", and live with partial functionality, which runs slowly and the whole time you have to live in dread of the inevitable memory leak crash.

wait, nevermind, that is almost exactly like using a windows app on windows.

Re:This stuff ever work.

[Anonymous Coward]

...windows emulation pakcakes...

Mmm, pakcakes...

Finally

[sjohnson]

My linux emulator will run seamlessly and transparently when I switch to linux.

actually the question I always ask:

[Killswitch1968]

"Will I have to deal with annoying dependency problems that take me hours to install the most basic of programs?"

So far that answer is still yes :(

Re:actually the question I always ask:

[BarryJacobsen]

"Will I have to deal with annoying dependency problems that take me hours to install the most basic of programs?" So far that answer is still yes :(

You should switch to Gentoo and trade your hours of dependency problems for hours of compile time :) It's what all the cool kids are doing...come on, you know you wanna. You don't want all the girls in our class to think you're chicken, do you?

Re:actually the question I always ask:

[Roadmaster]

Is it? I can say "no" since I started using debian. Now installing software on my red hat systems feels like a chore, but so far I haven't had problems using apt to install software that's prepackaged for debian, this includes a vast majority of programs you could possibly need so it covers the requirements of most users. I'll agree that dependency hell is just that, hell.

Re:actually the question I always ask:

[Sparr0]

youre crazy. i can go from a fresh linux install to having Battlefield Vietnam running in under an hour, including the BFV install. install Point2Play, get latest winex version, install BFV. done.

Re:actually the question I always ask:

[AstroDrabb]

Now installing software on my red hat systems feels like a chore

Um, so why don't you use apt under Red Hat or Fedora? It does the same thing as under Debian and makes installing rpms a breeze. There are plenty of red hat/Fedora apt-rpm repositories out there, a good place to start is FreshRPMS

Re:actually the question I always ask:

[MoonBuggy]

urpmi foo
apt-get install foo
emerge foo

I'd say that the answer there is no actually :-)

I'm not going to pay for it because..

[pagaman]

1) They don't accept debit cards & thats all I have.
2) They don't charge in . I'm sure my bank will charge me extra, for converting to a foreign currency.

Tell then I'm stuck with normal wine & half-life....well thats not too bad ;)

Re:I'm not going to pay for it because..

[pagaman]

Oops should be pounds sterling there (should have used preview)

Re:I'm not going to pay for it because..

[Captain_Loser]

well, if you are looking to get ahold of cedega/winex4, why not cvs it? There are instructions on the transgaming website on how to cvs the newest bleeding edge code.

Re:I'm not going to pay for it because..

[Anonymous Coward]

all the code that makes winex different to wine is not in the cvs

Re:I'm not going to pay for it because..

[r00zky]

3) They (winex) don't contribute back to the wine community any substantial quantity of code

Re:I'm not going to pay for it because..

[Fizzol]

An often repeated falsehood, it's simply not true.

Re:I'm not going to pay for it because..

[johnnyb]

You're right, but they promised to release _all_ of it when they had a certain userbase. Unfortunately, though, they haven't told anyone what their userbase actually is.

Re:I'm not going to pay for it because..

[Fizzol]

>hey haven't told anyone what their userbase actually is.

They said they would when they reached 20,000 subscribers. The last report (some time ago) was 4,000 or so. Transgaming themselves said in the thread here, on Cedega's release day, that they had not reached thier subscription goal.

Re:I'm not going to pay for it because..

[r00zky]

what do you consider substantial?
and
show the proof maybe?

Re:I'm not going to pay for it because..

[Fizzol]

From the 6/22 Cedega thread:

"Indeed, Cedega is not software libre. We've never claimed that it was. It's a commercial product that includes components dereived from Wine and ReWind.

Despite that fact, and despite the fact that we have not yet reached the 20,000 subscriber number in our original plans, we have contributed and we continue to contribute to the Wine project in a number of substantial ways. These include major contributions or rearchitectures of: 2D DirectDraw, DirectSound, DirectInput, DCOM, RPC, the WIDL IDL compiler, and wininet code, including SSL support. Additionally, we continue to maintain the X11 licensed ReWind tree, we've contributed code for a DIB renderer, and the Shared Memory WineServer.

Overall, we've contributed tens of thousands of lines of code under Open Source license term.

In particular, our DCOM, RPC, and WIDL work - required for use of InstallShield based installer - is extremely substantial work, and we are actively continuing to contribute that work to Wine and ReWind. We have probably spent as much engineering efforts on this as we have on our closed source Direct3D support.

If you want to see some of what we've contributed, just browse the wine-devel and wine-patches mailing lists.

-Gav

Gavriel State, Co-CEO & CTO
TransGaming Technologies Inc"

Re:I'm not going to pay for it because..

[r00zky]

that's not substantial! that's "extremely substantial" :P

ok, i stand corrected, they have contributed stuff, fine, but the D3D stuff is basical for (D3D)games, and it's closed source :(

Re:I'm not going to pay for it because..

[Lochin Rabbar]

Despite that fact, and despite the fact that we have not yet reached the 20,000 subscriber

Have you ever considered changing your pricing structure. I'm sure I'm not the only one put off by the subscription model, I just don't want another automatic $5 a month on my credit card bill. Several times I've considered taking out a subscription, but each time I've decided against it. If you charged a straight $30, and allowed a upgrades for a year, or the next major version, I'd probably be a regular customer. I'd be willing to bet that such a pricing model would generate more income than your current one.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[swv3752]

Pick an application and you can get a more definate answer.

So you are a troll, and with qualifiers, the answer is yes.

WineX Downsides?

[arieswind]

The LinuxLookup.com review touches upon this point:
The only downside I see is philosophical rather than a problem with Cedega itself. There aren't many Linux versions of popular games available. By making it so easy to run the Windows versions, there may not be much of an incentive to develop for Linux.

Now, not many gaming companies make Linux versions of their games, but suppose Linux gained a significant share of the desktop market. At a certain point, gaming companies will start making Linux versions, whether or not WineX can run the Windows version or not. If only because gamers are more likely to be tech savvy and the same type of people who would probably switch to Linux away from Windows before the less computer literate population does

Re:WineX Downsides?

[Carnildo]

As I see it, it's a victory for Linux if a game is released with a native Linux version, but it's also a victory if the developer officially supports WineX. It's only a problem if they count on WineX for running on Linux, but don't officially support it.

Re:WineX Downsides?

[kelnos]

i don't necessarily agree with them, but the wine folks have their own opinion about that argument.

Windows apps in Linux

[phorm]

But you're not necessarily try to get linux to "run all the windows apps."

What you are doing, is trying to get those last few apps that don't exist under linux to run. In my case, that's games, and some DVD authoring stuff which will probably have a linux counterpart soon (I've seen some but the UI is still coming along).

It took me awhile to customize my linux desktop, but I could probably do it again easily enough now, and I'm readying wizards/ISOs to allow others to use a similar desktop.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[dsci]

This isn't true, it's never been true, and it likely will never be true.

Of course, the best answer, I think, is "try it an see." Without source code to see how tightly integrated a program is with Win, it is very hard to tell. When you do the experiment, sometimes you get a pleasant surprise.

I recently finally migrated my main office workstation to Linux, and am dual booting since there are a few things I still need Winders for. One such, I thought, was a program called MoluCAD by New River Kinematics, a molecule drawing program that I really, really need.

The other day, I tried it with wine, and BOOM! It worked!! Yeah.

It's important, too, to document when a program does not work.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[aardwolf204]

How do we expect to be able to say YES to "Will my windows application work under linux" when we cant say 100% YES to "Will my windows application from 1995 work on windows XP?"

WineX is nice, but....

[Skraut]

I'd rather support those who are supporting the Linux community.

First of all there are many great Open Source games out there, Frozen Bubble and TORCS come quickly to mind.

Secondly games like Neverwinter Nights and UT2k4 are amazing, not just for the games themselves, but for the mod communities that surround them. Who cares if you can't give Sony $13 or $15 a month to play everquest. Give your money to Bioware and thank them for making a game so open that people have created MMORPG's that can be played freely with their software.

Same with UT. One look at duffer's golf, a complete Golf mod sold me on UT. I'm honestly not that interested in Golf, but if one can be made, and if it's a mod it'll run on windows and Linux, it's just the tip of the iceburg as to what can be done by modding the engine.

These are the companies and the mod communities we should be supporting. Yes there are a few windows games I'd like to play, but I'd rather not give those companies my money, since to them, I'm just another windows user.

Re:WineX is nice, but....

[Azureflare]

Are you saying that WineHQ/Transgaming/Codeweavers aren't supporting the linux community?

Because if you are, you're wrong. They aren't supporting the segment of the linux community that says "Ohh Noo Nothing but native linux apps for us, windows sux0rs and must burn in hell!" They're supporting the segment that says "Hey, I've used windows for a long time, and I like linux a lot, and I'd like to be able to play/run my windows stuff on my linux box. Can you help a guy out?"

There are plenty of developers in the world. These people are supporting that segment of the linux community that desires the ability to run windows applications on linux.

We can debate all we want about if this is a good strategy in the long term. But there's no doubt that these companies are strongly supporting (parts) of the linux community.

Re:WineX is nice, but....

[Fizzol]

>Who cares if you can't give Sony $13 or $15 a month to play everquest. Me for one. So some games you like have native linux versions, how nice for you. I like Everquest and have no interest what-so-ever in giving my money to Bioware. Especially after the way they dicked around the LInux community with the extremely delayed release of NWN for Linus. No thanks, I said back then that Bioware would ever get another penny from me, and I meant it.

Re:WineX is nice, but....

[Skraut]

I'm not saying Codeweavers and Transgaming aren't supporting Linux, I'm saying if I buy Warcraft III and play it under WineX, I am giving Blizzard money for making a game for Windows.

What insentive do they have for making Warcraft IV Linux compatable if Transgaming will do all the hard work for them?

Bioware overcame a lot of hurdles to make NWN available under Linux, including forcing MILES to make their sound system Linux compatable. Yes it took them a long time to do it, but it did happen. Every company that pruduces games for Linux is a major ally. The next time Bioware produces a game, they will know which technology will allow them to make it more cross platform. The next time a company uses the MILES audio system, it will be easier for them to convert the game to native linux.

This is what is important, companies contemplating Linux. The next company that uses the UT engine can convert their game easily to linux. The company that uses the LithTech engine can not.

Re:WineX is nice, but....

[Devalia]

I believe the parent is referring to Game Manufacturers who suppor Linux "out-of-the box" than buying games from manfucacters who dont and then running their software with Cedega

Re:WineX is nice, but....

[bill_kress]

I don't have a problem with Linux and wine at all, but if those are great Open Source games then the game manufacturers have nothing to fear.

Re:WineX is nice, but....

[cavebear42]

Wine is doing the Lord's work.

I would like to suggest a Linux desktop to my company in order to cut costs. Here's the problem, we use ton's of apps that require windows. I can't even talk about moving just the IT department to Linux until we can run remedy, MSN messenger, office, active directory (and the rest of the windows admin toolkit), windows remote desktop client, MS sql enterprise manager, ect., ect. This list could go on for days.

How do I accomplish this? Well, part of the answer is program replacements. I can substitute OpenOffice for MS office and get 98% compatibility. Gaim could go for MSN messenger if they can ever support file transfers with MSN clients (it's close guys.) But I found myself a long way out. Wine got lotus notes up and running, that was one more step. We are still a few steps out. If we could ever truly have seamless operation, I would be the first to sign on-board. We just aren't there yet.

Re:WineX is nice, but....

[TopherC]

Agreed.

I guess I'm in the position now that I run Linux on everything that I can, and get very annoyed when I can't. Windows is becoming more and more frustrating for me to use.

BUT, there are still a few Windows-only applications that are important to me, and I'm not convinced that WineX covers all these. Here's an incomplete list for me at present. Note that none of these are games:
* Corel Draw: Far superior to oodraw, kontour, xfig, etc.
* Pinnacle Studio: I'm not sure this is the best of the quick-n-easy home video editors, and it is the buggiest program I've seen in 25 years, but it can do the job. I need to investigate Cinelerra more, but they never even claim that it's easy to use or fast.
* Quicken, Turbo-Tax: Probably quicken can be replaced by gnucash, but I don't think there's any Linux-compatable tax prep software.
* Epson R800 printer driver: I'm waiting. But I also want decent color correction.
* Cakewalk, and other good audio editing programs out there such as Pro tools. Is there anything that runs on Linux which comes close?

So as much as I want to go 100% Linux, I just can't quite do it. I have to keep one computer at home running Windows. I'm a Linux zealot at heart, but am still intensely grateful for both cygwin and wine, and wish these projects the very best.

Re:WineX is nice, but....

[Dogers]

why cant you use remote desktop to get onto a windows server which has all the other things you need, like the sql manager?

as for AD, you dont mention if you want to connect on it (in which case you should be able to use samba or ldap as your login controller) or administer it, in which case its the same as the sql manager..

Re:WineX is nice, but....

[cavebear42]

Being IT I would have to administer it. My point was meant to be more generic but the Windows Terminal Server is a gerneric answer. The problem is that moving from a windows desktop to a linux desktop which is acting as a client to a terminal server is a huge step backward. Using a terminal server is so much slower than a windows client.

My point is that once Wine has evolved to the point that they support everything, we woln't have to be locked into an os. It will be a happy day.

Re:WineX is nice, but....

[Dogers]

having read some other posts, i wonder if Win4Lin would be able to run the MMC console for Exchange and AD - apparently it provides a full win98 environment..? Could be an interesting experiment!

Text of review

[arieswind]

Review of Cedega (WineX 4.0) Category Linux Software / Applications Product name Cedega Version 4.0 (WineX) Manufacturer name TransGaming Provided by TransGaming Price N/A Review by Rich The release of Transgaming's newest version of WineX, renamed Cedega, was met with considerable enthusiasm and interest in the Linux community last week. So much so that their server was inaccessible the day of release. Cedega is claimed to be much improved, offering the ability to play recent games released for Windows "seamlessly and transparently" under Linux. They provided me with a copy, and I was curious to see if it lived up to the hype. Cedega is available as an rpm, deb or tgz file. Point2Play is a graphical front end to Cedega and available in the same formats. Point2play comes bundled with all dependencies, a very nice touch, and includes the font installer program (also available as a separate download). I was installing on Slackware 10, so I downloaded the tgz files. A simple #installpkg for Point2play was all that was needed. Point2play retrieves and installs Cedega for you. It also downloads and installs Microsoft Core Fonts with the click of a button. Testing The first thing I noticed was a tab titled "System Tests". There are four tests that help to determine if your system is ready to run Cedega. "Test for Hardware 3D Graphics Acceleration" tests to see if your graphics card is capable of running 3D-intense games and if it has been set up correctly. I clicked, the familiar glxgears box opened, then I was greeted with two green graphs. They gave me an OK for OpenGL Direct Rendering and for 3D rendering speed. "Test for Sound Support" plays a sound, then asks you if you heard it. You are informed that Cedega uses the OSS audio device and told to consult your distribution's documentation if you didn't hear one. Thankfully, I did. "Test if POSIX threads (pthreads) are Required" gave me a confusing pop up box. It said "You are running a distribution of Linux on which Cedega requires the usage of pthreads on (ie. Very recent glibc). Unfortunately the maximum stack size on your distribution is not large enough for some games, and therefore you might have issues." I am then told, "When using Cedega 3.2 or newer, you may not need to use pthreads which can help avoid these problems." I admit ignorance here. I am baffled by the wording. I am being told Cedega requires pthreads, but with version 4.0 I may not need to use them, which can help avoid problems. My yellow graph boiled it down for me, saying "Some Games Might Have Problems". "Test CD/DVD Drive" checks the accessibility of the CD-ROM devices and if they are capable of supporting Copy Protected games. I got the green light showing my cdrom was available. The documentation is outstanding and will be a great help if yours isn't. Background Since I don't dual boot and lack free time, I haven't run Windows games in years. I have been happy with the standard Linux games, including Ksokoban, Kbounce, Ktron and of course Tuxracer and Tuxkart. Recent additions such as Frozen Bubble and the updated SuperTux have a modern feel. I haven't had much experience with Linux ports such as UT2004. I like that Cedega was giving me the opportunity to try out some modern games. Half-Life Uplink My first try was the demo of Half-Life Uplink, downloaded from the Nvidia site. I fired up Point2Play and clicked Install. A box opens asking for the path to the executable, the program title, the Cedega version to use, and two check boxes (big EXE and Run Directory). I found the path, named the program, left the default Cedega as my choice and clicked both boxes. Big EXE supports games packed as one large executable. Run Directory sets the current working directory to the game executable directory. You also have the option to mount and unmount your disk. I clicked continue, and I was transported back to the days of the ugly install wizards. The Wise Installation Wizard popped open, and the game installed without a hitch. The game icon now showed up in my main wi

Re:Text of review

[arieswind]

holy crap.. im sorry i messed that one up, heres the fixed version...

Review of Cedega (WineX 4.0)

Category
Linux Software / Applications

Product name
Cedega

Version
4.0 (WineX)

Manufacturer name
TransGaming

Provided by
TransGaming

Price
N/A

Review by
Rich

The release of Transgaming's newest version of WineX, renamed Cedega, was met with considerable enthusiasm and interest in the Linux community last week. So much so that their server was inaccessible the day of release. Cedega is claimed to be much improved, offering the ability to play recent games released for Windows "seamlessly and transparently" under Linux. They provided me with a copy, and I was curious to see if it lived up to the hype.

Cedega is available as an rpm, deb or tgz file. Point2Play is a graphical front end to Cedega and available in the same formats. Point2play comes bundled with all dependencies, a very nice touch, and includes the font installer program (also available as a separate download).

I was installing on Slackware 10, so I downloaded the tgz files. A simple #installpkg for Point2play was all that was needed. Point2play retrieves and installs Cedega for you. It also downloads and installs Microsoft Core Fonts with the click of a button.

Testing

The first thing I noticed was a tab titled "System Tests". There are four tests that help to determine if your system is ready to run Cedega.

"Test for Hardware 3D Graphics Acceleration" tests to see if your graphics card is capable of running 3D-intense games and if it has been set up correctly. I clicked, the familiar glxgears box opened, then I was greeted with two green graphs. They gave me an OK for OpenGL Direct Rendering and for 3D rendering speed.

"Test for Sound Support" plays a sound, then asks you if you heard it. You are informed that Cedega uses the OSS audio device and told to consult your distribution's documentation if you didn't hear one. Thankfully, I did.

"Test if POSIX threads (pthreads) are Required" gave me a confusing pop up box. It said "You are running a distribution of Linux on which Cedega requires the usage of pthreads on (ie. Very recent glibc). Unfortunately the maximum stack size on your distribution is not large enough for some games, and therefore you might have issues." I am then told, "When using Cedega 3.2 or newer, you may not need to use pthreads which can help avoid these problems." I admit ignorance here. I am baffled by the wording. I am being told Cedega requires pthreads, but with version 4.0 I may not need to use them, which can help avoid problems. My yellow graph boiled it down for me, saying "Some Games Might Have Problems".

"Test CD/DVD Drive" checks the accessibility of the CD-ROM devices and if they are capable of supporting Copy Protected games. I got the green light showing my cdrom was available. The documentation is outstanding and will be a great help if yours isn't.

Background

Since I don't dual boot and lack free time, I haven't run Windows games in years. I have been happy with the standard Linux games, including Ksokoban, Kbounce, Ktron and of course Tuxracer and Tuxkart. Recent additions such as Frozen Bubble and the updated SuperTux have a modern feel. I haven't had much experience with Linux ports such as UT2004. I like that Cedega was giving me the opportunity to try out some modern games.

Half-Life Uplink

My first try was the demo of Half-Life Uplink, downloaded from the Nvidia site. I fired up Point2Play and clicked Install. A box opens asking for the path to the executable, the program title, the Cedega version to use, and two check boxes (big EXE and Run Directory). I found the path, named the program, left the default Cedega as my choice and clicked both boxes. Big EXE supports games packed as one large executable. Run Directory sets the current working directory to the game executable directory. You also have the option to mount an

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[stratjakt]

Can you name a Win32 app that doesnt work on Windows XP?

cedega rules

[ultrabot]

I've tried cedega as well, and I must say I'm a little bit surprised on how well it works, at least with Debian Sid & new nvidia drivers. Configuration is a snap (just tell them the mount points & drive letters of your windos partitions), and you are pretty much ready to go. One less excuse to boot to Windows - and for many, the last excuse.

Now what we need is a good daemontools-like utility that can mount non-iso images without converting to .iso's first... ;-)

Re:cedega rules

[Soul-Burn666]

just before the last sentence I have thought about that aswell....
isn't it possible to run daemon-tools thru wine or something?

wine

[sewagemaster]

since there are quite a few other versions of wine out there...

has anyone had any sort of sucess running windows apps, particularly office on linux - on a free version of wine, not crossover?

Not if I can actually get DRI to work on my ATI 9200 chipset (annoyingly impossible even after trying the free-closed-source ati drivers)...

Re:wine

[richmaine]

I had an oldish ATI 7500 on my wife's box. Tried to upgrade her to a 9600 (I forget which particular 9600 - doesn't matter). I couldn't get the ATI accelerated drivers to work at all, so I had slower performance with the new card. A Tale in the Desert went from a bit anoyingly slow to unplayable in Linux (SuSe 9.0).

A broke down and bought an NVidia 5200, which I know isn't near the top of the line, but is quite adequate. In theory not as nice a card as the ATI 9600 I had. But the NVidia works. I've still got the ATI 9600 sitting on the shelf.

CodeWeavers CrossOver Office runs Games

[Anonymous Coward]

Its never talked about much, but CrossOver Office 3.0.1 does run games. I have been playing Half-Life, Max Payne, American McGees Alice, and Diablo II on it since about ver 2.0. Hardware Acceleration supported. So WineX is not your only choice here.

Its the way to the future . . .

[kingjosh]

This is awesome. In fact, I believe that the best possible thing that can happen is more compatibility. Most Windows users absolutely despise Windows, and don't change because they are s-c-e-e-r-e-d! To be able to alleviate this fear, WineX apps are like bridges, training wheels for an OS.

• Grandma, you CAN still use Quicken and Word, but you won't get SpyWare anymore!
• Your business depends on Micro$oft OfficeXP? While you try out OOO we can set you up with this WineX app . . .
• More examples could come, I'm sure you get the point.

Re:Its the way to the future . . .

[SolidiusRock]

Ah yes...

I love how people think that Linux is void of the things that happen to Windows. I'm sure if the tables were turned, we'd see that Linux would have just as many problems to it. I am a Windows user and by no means do I hate the OS. Your hard generalization of Windows users doesn't give much to go on.

Trust me, when the time comes, Grandma will just be as pissed with Linux's spyware, viruses, and bugs as Windows. You can only make something as good as it's creator, and let's face it, we're human.

Re:Its the way to the future . . .

[kingjosh]

Except we can look at the source code and fix it. Big difference, with Linux big brother corporations don't hold the key, the users do.

Re:Its the way to the future . . .

[buht]

Perhaps,

but millions of Linux users can fix that shit and make it globally available faster than thousands of MS employees.

You can trouble me for a nice cup of shut the hell up! You're in my world now Grandma.

Re:Its the way to the future . . .

[Ded Mike]

I feel my time is better spent with .NET development

So you make less than half the pay of a dedicated and accomplished Linux or Java programmer and have to work in the idiot box that is Windows.

Dude, I have nothing but pity for you.

Don't need it.

[jonathan_atkinson]

We already have Neverwinter Nights (and expansions), Quake 1-3, UT2004 (and no doubt all the sequels, because the UT engine supports Linux so well), we're getting Doom 3. Why do you need Windows compatibility? Sure, maybe you can't play your crappy licensed EA games, but all the really serious game developers have seen the light, and activly develop for Linux.

The only Windows games I'm going to want to run are Duke Nukem Forever and Half Life 2. Oh, wait... they don't exist...

--Jon

Re:Don't need it.

[Algan]

all the really serious game developers have seen the light, and activly develop for Linux.

How about Blizzard? I'm a big Warcraft/Starcraft fan... I think Warcraft3 is one of the 6 or so games that run on Macs though. How about Civ3? Don't tell me about FreeCiv, I tried it, it is crap.

Re:Don't need it.

[jonathan_atkinson]

Civ: Call to Power has been ported to Linux by the now defunct Loki Games. It's quite easy to find copies of it online, however.

Their whole catalogue is also listed on their site, here.

--Jon

Re:Don't need it.

[Captain Segfault]

Of course it has... but C:CTP is a crappy game compared to Civ3; the windows version at least is filled with bugs and missing trivial features (you run out of money, the game lowers wages, which late in the game causes your cities to revolt) and the AI sucks, at least relative to Civ3 or SMAC (which has been ported, of course, but is now next to impossible to find) or the Civ games.

The saddest part about it is that C:CTP had potential. It would probably be a fairly good game if they'd put as much work into it post release as the Sid Meier crowd puts into their games. It has the addictiveness of the civ games, but that tends to go away when I run into one of the games major bugs.

Re:Don't need it.

[ppanon]

From what I heard, C:CTP was basically just the Civ2 engine with new tiles and control graphics. Yawn. The tiles were harder to recognize in C:CTP than in Civ2, and they didn't even have the animations for the foreign leaders. They would have been better off releasing an internet play module for Civ II.

Re:Don't need it.

[snuf23]

Well my current playlist:

Rise of Nations
Battlefield 1942 and Vietnam (as well as the Desert Combat mod)
City of Heroes

There are countless others not available on Linux or don't run on Linux.
Basically if you are a casual computer gamer than Linux or Macintosh are fine. If you are an enthusiast you are going to be at least dual booting Windows. Especially if you are into MMPOGs or want to play the latest without waiting (i.e. BF 1942 - now out for Mac after almost TWO years).
Alternatly, just get a console. But once again if you are a diehard gamer you'll probably have a console (or two) and a PC (or two).

Re:Don't need it.

[Mr_Silver]

We already have Neverwinter Nights (and expansions), Quake 1-3, UT2004 (and no doubt all the sequels, because the UT engine supports Linux so well), we're getting Doom 3. Why do you need Windows compatibility?

Damn right. We have 5 games that work under Linux, who wants to play the other 299,995 anyway? :o)

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[red floyd]

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 15.

It's sloppily coded and refuses to run unless you're Administrator.

Does that count?

Perhaps better?

[phorm]

Actually, one of the things that has kept me from fully switching to 'nix is the game support. Now, however, I'm finding that some of my games regularly freeze in XP (driver issues perhaps), and I'm looking forward to testing WineX to see if they play better. At the least I'd think that they shouldn't freeze the OS.

Re:Perhaps better?

[johnnyb]

For desktop users on Linux, there are a lot of things that, while they don't freeze the OS, they might freeze X.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[Sparr0]

Machines. Its a RTS game originally written for Win95.
Sim City 2000 Network Edition. self explanatory.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[Waffle Iron]

"The answer to that is yes"

This isn't true, it's never been true, and it likely will never be true.

OK, but that sentence fragment has a totally different meaning than the complete sentence from the story header.

Given that, I don't see why you bothered commenting.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[stratjakt]

No, not if it still runs as administrator.

Running is running. There's been plenty of crappy linux apps that refused to run unless they're root.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[molarmass192]

You've got a point on the whole WINE thing. I'm not a big fan of running apps under Wine although I think it's a "neat" idea. Actually, I was a paying Transgaming and Codewavers customer at one time, until I discovered Win4Lin. Now, if I need to run a Windows app under Linux, and for the record, the only one I do run is mofo-ing WebEx, then Win4Lin is the best way to do it. You get to run a full Win98 instance on top of the stability and security of Linux. Why use Win4Lin instead of Wine? It's fast, really fast, since Win98, although not the stablest OS ever, was actually very stingy on resources. Also, pretty much any non-3D app for Windows runs on it. If it crashes, it takes about 5 seconds to restart it. If they took the time to add full 3D support into Win4Lin the whole game thing would also become less of an issue. It's too bad Win4Lin doesn't have an open source alternative to help move along in that direction, but for $89 it's priced comparably to the Crossover product in terms of what people purchase that for.

Probably not going to happen

[The Angry Mick]

I don't see this as ever likely happening. Mainly because it would be a classic case of "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face". Why go out of your way to piss off a potential customer base? All most commerical developers really care about about is that their software isn't pirated and they get paid for their efforts. Regardless of whether the app is designed to run on Windows or not, folks would still be expected to pony up a licensing fee. Just because you can now run MS Office on your Linux box relatively painlessly doesn't mean you get a free ride from the folks at the BSA.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[0racle]

Star Trek: Armada, Star Wars: Force Commander, Star Wars: Rebellion. Games are also apps, and all three of these worked fine in 2k but will either crash or be unusable in XP. when my girlfriend upgraded to 2k, the print shop program that came with her printer wouldn't even install yet worked fine in 98.

I'd have better examples but I just have windows for games now, but its pretty well documented that Windows backwards compatibility isn't always so backwards compatible.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[dsci]

There's been plenty of crappy linux apps that refused to run unless they're root.

Okay, I'll play along, since you opened the door. Can you name one Linux app that only runs as root?

Re:Don't waste your ching

[Dimensio]

When was the last time that you tried it? I spent last night playing City of Heroes on it. While there are some UI issues (it has a real problem of registering mouseclicks on certain menu options, though it will eventually get them), the game ran at pretty much the same framerate as it does under Windows XP.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[stratjakt]

I've played Armada under XP.

About a month after XP was released an update came out that specifically addressed compatibility with older apps, have you used it?

And do you know about the compatibility options? Checking a box makes the environment anything from 95,98,ME,XP.

I play a ton of old games, and have had no problem getting anything working under XP. I dont doubt there are some crappy old incompatible apps, but I don't know of any.

Don't say he didn't warn you

[Anonymous Coward]

You just have to realize that if he's chopping bits out of other people's sentences, he's just expecting you to do the same to his post:

This ... will ... troll ... Everyone on Slashdot ...

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[Sparr0]

This points out a nice goal. Eventually Wine* will be able to claim better windows compatibility than Windows' latest incarnation has.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[typobox43]

Sonic CD. :/

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[Laur]

It's too bad Win4Lin doesn't have an open source alternative to help move along in that direction

Try QEMU. It can run any version of Windows and is pretty fast. I haven't compared it to Win4Lin, since I don't own that program, but give it a shot.

defusing your intellectual dishonesty

[Anonymous Coward]

Have any software company guarantee their software will work even 90%. Hell, have Microsoft give you any guarantee at all regarding Windows. Go ahead, I dare you. Guaranteeing it will crash on you doesn't count.

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN!!!

[IamTheRealMike]

But the same is true of Windows. Patches Microsoft has released to Windows have broken applications before, and new versions of Office they released are not always runnable on older versions of Windows.

I don't really see your point. Your asking for guarantees you don't even get with regular Windows.

Crossover Office

[dangerz]

I purchased a license to Crossover Office several months ago. At first, I figured it'd run rather slow and wouldn't be good enough for production. I paid anyways just to try and support the programmers.

I installed Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop. Microsoft Office is practically transparent as to how fast it runs. It loads up very fast and runs very smooth. As far as Photoshop, it runs pretty good as well. There are little bugs with the different windows and the toolboxes, but it works. for the most part.

For production, I dont think Adobe Photoshop is ready yet (version 7 by the way). Office I think is more than ready. I also installed IE so I could preview websites I'm working on in IE natively without having to go to another windows computer. On top of that, I installed the Quicktime plugin and I watch trailers from Apple.com with no lag.

I give Crossover Office a 10/10. Well worth every penny I spent.

Re:Crossover Office

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget, the new Crossover office 3 is only $40, not the $60 it used to be (I think that's what it used to be). AND it comes with the plugins suite, so you don't have to buy it separately!

You definitely get value for your money when you buy that product. I agree that it is definitely worth it.

Re:Crossover Office

[Alan Hicks]

I also installed IE so I could preview websites I'm working on in IE natively without having to go to another windows computer.

Can you confirm whether or not they've fixed the IE encryption key bug yet? Importing encryption keys into IE running under Crossover wouldn't work. I'm not talking about regular ssl keys signed by third parties. What I'm referring to are self-signed keys like what Bank of America uses to communicate with bankruptcy officers.

IIRC, the key jsut wouldn't install. You'd go through the wizard's steps, and they would all run, but dump some error message right at the last and fail. I believe this was with both IE 5 and IE 6, but it's been over a year so I simply don't recall.

Re:Crossover Office

[jsebrech]

IIRC, the key jsut wouldn't install. You'd go through the wizard's steps, and they would all run, but dump some error message right at the last and fail. I believe this was with both IE 5 and IE 6, but it's been over a year so I simply don't recall.

Did you submit it as a support request on codeweavers.com?

Re:Crossover Office

[justforaday]

For production, I dont think Adobe Photoshop is ready yet (version 7 by the way).

I think you might want to let Disney know about that...

Re:Crossover Office

[Alan Hicks]

Yes I did. I conversed with them via e-mail on several occassions. I was not particularly happy with their answers. They said it was a bug they had known about for some time, but couldn't seem to resolve. Several people had asked about it, but they at that time had no solution.

Re:Crossover Office

[swillden]

I purchased a license to Crossover Office several months ago. At first, I figured it'd run rather slow and wouldn't be good enough for production.

I did the same, and expected it to run well. The Office apps were painfully slow, so much so that I decided I'd rather just boot up Windows in VMWare and run them there.

I wonder why our experiences were so different? I was running on an 850MHz PIII laptop. You?

Forget software... how about old hardware?

[IANAAC]

I have an old (from 1996) parallel port MIDI interface from MOTU that REFUSES work under XP, even with the "updated" drivers.

That's an obscure example, but I'm sure I could come up with something more common, say, like printers or scanners.

Bottom line, it's not in thrid party developers' interest to keep supporting older stuff. They want you to buy their new products.

Re:Forget software... how about old hardware?

[Sunda666]

aureal vortex2 sound cards... had to do a bunch of hacks to get it going on win2k, and performance is far from stellar...

Incredible, but vortex2 works better now on linux than windows... gotta love open-source-hackers...

cheers.

Re:Forget software... how about old hardware?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a no-brainer. WinXP dropped support for a ton of 486 and Pentium-era stuff that was supported in previous versions.

Re:Forget software... how about old hardware?

[BlackHawk-666]

I have a logitec webcam that the bastaards stopped developing drivers for after Win95. I've basically had to bin it, even though it was quite decent because I can't get driver support.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[christopher240240]

Rebellion works on my winxp machines.

Ermmm...

[elFarto the 2nd]

...So much so that their server was inaccessible the day of release.

I'll think you'll find that was the slashdotting they recieved.

Regards
elFarto

Re:Speed Difference

[schwaang]

So WineX puts some kind of software layer between the application and Linux? I hope game performance dosnt take a hit.

No that's not quite how it works. Applications contain calls to functions, something like OpenFile("C:\some\filename").

The code that implements OpenFile() would normally be in a Windows .dll, let's call it msfile.dll.

WineX creates a Linux version of the msfile.dll, so the the application runs the Linux code instead of Windows code.

The speed could be faster or slower, depending on how good the WineX code for msfile.dll is versus the Windows code.

[In the example above, msfile.dll and OpenFile() are made-up examples to illustrate the principle of different implementations of the same API.]

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[christopher240240]

That is not a sentence fragment, it is a sentence (albeit one that is poorly constructed).

The true answer is 'it depends'

[nurb432]

If you are running something that has been 'certified' on Crossover, it will 'just work'.

They also document what is certified and what is not. So there wont be any question.

I assume its the same for WineX ( I'm not a gamer ).

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[molarmass192]

Just thought of another app ... it was a old VB 3 16-bit app ... WINE gacked on it with some Win16 heap error but it ran fine in Win4Lin. This isn't the WINE-devs fault, looking at the WINE traces this thing was doing all kinds of crazy heap juggling to get around addressing limits and besides who in the hell uses 16-bit apps anymore??? If you're interested, I logged a WINE bug on it about 2 years ago if I remember correctly. Anyhow, the point is that this is a good example of the type of unbelievable non-mainstream legacy bullshit apps that are still in use out there. BTW, I hate VB with an insane passion, I think it's Linda Blair in the Exorcist kind of evil.

Re:Speed Difference

[Dr. Descartes]

It does but in such a way that would keep an individual such as myself away. Now, granted I haven't installed Cedega yet but Hearts of Iron had pointer speed slow down at times. Same thing for Warcraft 3. I had huge issues with Steam and Counter-Strike/Day of Defeat with WineX 3 where I had framerates of 3-7 fps whereas under Windows XP, it averages 60-70 fps. Transgaming's support asks for me to install the latest version and try it. I will eventually.

I'm unfortunately addicted to Hearts of Iron which runs decently enough under WineX 3.

Gaim?

[cr@ckwhore]

In the article, the author gives an example of an application that doesn't work properly under WineX ... GAIM. Well, WTF... why the hell would anyone running WineX try to run Win2k GAIM when the app is native to *nix anyway? Just a thought.

Re:Gaim?

[drinkypoo]

Last time I tried, gaim didn't work (crashed a lot) on windows, either. I can't imagine why you'd expect it to work on wine.

Re:Gaim?

[chriskenrick]

In the article, the author gives an example of an application that doesn't work properly under WineX ... GAIM. Well, WTF... why the hell would anyone running WineX try to run Win2k GAIM when the app is native to *nix anyway? Just a thought.

They did the same for UT2004(it has a Linux port too). Perhaps better app examples could have been chosen.

Linuxlookup.com

[Linuxlookup.com]

I apologize for not keeping up with the requests, we never could withstand a thrashing from Slashdot. Perhaps it's time for me to look into a different CMS with fewer bottlenecks. So, if anyone in community/other site owners would like to share their solutions with me, I'd like to hear from you. Reached me at ty @ linuxlookup.com

Re:Linuxlookup.com

[imag0]

Check out Drupal. It has a cache feature to help out in case of slashdottings.
I have not RT'd the FA, but if you're stuff is PHP based, check out Phunami. I came across that one a few days ago and it looked pretty interesting... Caches pages depending on referer.

Cheers!

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh.. try it and see. Yes... I had a Sony DVD/CDRW and it had only the initial bios. Downloaded the bios update utill... it was windows only... ran it under wine... and it worked flawlessly. But I don't think I'd do this with any REALLY critical part... not just yet.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[molarmass192]

This is more of a VmWare type thing. Win4Lin doesn't emulate the hardware, it emulates DOS. Something comparable would be more like if FreeDOS could be made to run in userspace on Linux and then used it to run Win98. The real selling point about Win4Lin over VmWare is that, like WINE, it uses your local filesystem so there no disk image file. Now, I think (think) that the latest VmWare allows this too but I haven't tried it.

inaccessible the day of release?

[Xshare]

So much so that their server was inaccessible the day of release And now, thanks to Slashdot, inaccessible again!

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[GreyPoopon]

That is not a sentence fragment, it is a sentence (albeit one that is poorly constructed).

I'll do you one better. It's a run-on sentence. Replace the commas with semicolons and it will be a bit better. :-)

Re:Confused at the aim of this project

[dangerz]

Because there are 4 and a half billion windows programs that people still need. I've used linux for almost 7 years now, and the whole time I've also had a windows box sitting there next to me.

Thanks to Codeweavers, I can finally only go on that windows box when I want to play games. Soon enough, I won't even have to do that thanks to WineX.

You see, yes linux to us is much much better. But to the rest of the world, of which programs are still mainly suited for, they like windows. And until the programmers stop developing programs for windows that we need, we need to be able to run them. And that's where Transgaming and Codeweavers come in.

And although there are linux alternatives, realize that the Windows counterparts have had years to tweak everything before we even started. It'll be a while till linux catches up and Crossover is helping to keep that while going smooth. OpenOffice is a great alternative to Microsoft Office. Gimp is no alternative to Photoshop though. There is no Macromedia Flash for linux. Crossover fixes all that.

I love linux just as much as everyone else, but even I see the faults that linux has. It's not until you see those faults though and how well linux actually handles them that you truly appreciate this operating system.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[Short Circuit]

The answer is always yes.

Even if you have to install Windows XP under VMWare, it's still possible. It's just a matter of how many different ways you try before it works.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[StillAnonymous]

Interstate '76

Great game.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[christopher240240]

Here's a sentence fragement for you: Touche

Re:Don't waste your ching

[Fizzol]

>Maybe it does the office crap better than the games, but then they should not pimp it as a gaming solution.

You're confusing things. WineX isn't meant for running "office crap" it's meant for running games and it does so very well.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[0racle]

It works for about 30min, then I can expect it to crash at any time.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[0racle]

Im glad it works for you, but I've had nothing but graphics corruption and sound errors making it unplayable, and I've tryed every patch I can find, and the sound got worse. Compatability settings didn't change anything.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[christopher240240]

Truly, I have never had a problem. And I have had friends literally play for days at a time. One thing, though. I don't use compatability mode. I just treat it as a native xp app. IIRC, all lucasarts games were both nt and 9x compatible, and admittedly, I haven't had the best luck with 9x compatability mode, so that might be your problem.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[Laur]

This is more of a VmWare type thing. Win4Lin doesn't emulate the hardware, it emulates DOS.

I thought Win4Lin did emulate hardware. From their site they say that Win4Lin "provides a complete virtual PC environment for the Windows operating systems." Elsewhere it says that they provide a virtual network card. I may be wrong, however, since as I said I have never run the program.

Something comparable would be more like if FreeDOS could be made to run in userspace on Linux and then used it to run Win98.

DOSEMU sounds like what you are describing, and I know people have been successful running Windows 3.1 on it. No Windows 95 and above, though.

The real selling point about Win4Lin over VmWare is that, like WINE, it uses your local filesystem so there no disk image file. Now, I think (think) that the latest VmWare allows this too but I haven't tried it.

Yes, this is a convenient feature. Maybe the QEMU guys can implement it eventually. Right now it is still a fairly new program.

still a crutch

[Truekaiser]

this still allows companys to not port their products over to linux.
it gives them a cheaper option, leting someone else deal with the problem of geting the program working under linux rather then doing it themselfs.
companys act like electricty when it comes to spending, they always go the route of least resistence(lowest cost).
until wine/winex and the equivilent programs are stoped then linux has no hope of geting any native version of any hit game or program, unless it was coded for linux to begin with.

Re:still a crutch

[poohsuntzu]

You can't really be serious, right? Please, oh please tell me what evidence you have to support such a philosophy. In fact, please tell me that if your opinion is the case, why more and more companies are making ports to Linux? (UT2003 and NWN come to mind), even AFTER WineX was a huge hit? WineX is a direct statement that Linux users want games, and will do what is needed to get them.

My proof is in one company after the other beginning to port games to Linux. Neverwinter Nights, Unreal, America's Army, etc etc, despite WineX3 existing. Where is yours? Where is this proof that Wine applications are convincing companies to not port?

Re:still a crutch

[Truekaiser]

esay. the unreal series has a linux port out of duty epic made one to thank the linux comunity for being their primary source of servers(about half last time i checked were run on linux). neverwinter nights was do to a very vocal comunity. and americas army is a form of army propaganda/recurtment tool so they made a linux version to reach all they can. they all were made for other reason then winex, now your arguement might have merit if say, microsoft released a version of halo for linux, or ff11, or everquest, or serious sam.

Re:still a crutch

[poohsuntzu]

so they made a linux version to reach all they can. they all were made for other reason then winex,

That is exactally my point. Just because winex exists does not mean that games will never be ported. Just because winex exists does not mean companies suddenly stop porting to Linux. Be it the users demanding a port (NWN) or the comapanies beginning to offer it freely (UT), WineX is not holding them back.

And until you can find proof that companies are specifically holding back Linux ports just because of WineX, it's still just rumor and speculation compared to proof of companies making linux Ports little by little.

Re:still a crutch

[Truekaiser]

actualy it does. if a game either
1. doesn't owe the comunity for hosting anything
2. have a very vocal comunity about wanting a linux version.
then they will not be willing to make one cause winex will be doing it for them. by playing a game via winex or useing a windows only ap in wine all you are doing is telling the comapny to continue to make only a windows version, you are not telling them that you want a native linux version, the only way to do that is to be very vocal(like nwn) or show to the company that they owe the linux comunity(like epic and the unreal series)

Re:still a crutch

[poohsuntzu]

You are just repeating yourself. Show me -proof- that the companies think like this. Show me documented -proof-, statements, interviews, in which companies have said that.

If you can't, then once again you are still spreading rumors and speculation, and that is a Bad Thing©

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[Frizzle Fry]

Is "untested" or "bronze" really a more definite answer? That's almost all I see there.

Re:What? Compared to Winbloat?

[AtariEric]

Thanks for the visual.

So popular that the website was down?

[grubber33]

No, it just got Slashdotted. :P

Unfortunately I've read some horrible stories on their own website (in the support section and new forums) about people having a bad time getting their already-working games working under Cedega. In fact, I've read an unfortunately large number of posts saying that they've downgraded to WineX because of the number of bugs. I'm not sure whether the editor noticed this but those facts certainly don't merit a 20/20 in my book...

I use CrossoverOffice daily -- it rocks.

[Dr. Zowie]

I recently bought CrossoverOffice to have access to Microsoft Weird and Internet Exploder (required by upper management to access company forms). I was delighted to find that it runs flawlessly under my bit-rotting Red Hat 9 system.

I've tried perhaps a dozen other apps (including YetiSports) and they all worked with no glitches.

The one feature that CrossoverOffice appears not to support well is trashing your whole system with malware -- you can grant your applications read-only access to your main file-system, or limited write access to particular directories.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[DAldredge]

Name them.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[jayminer]

Win4Lin does not emulate the hardware (including mainly the CPU, as it's the hardest) but instead it maps Windows (or DOS) calls to Linux kernel calls. That's why it's blazingly fast.

Re:Confused at the aim of this project

[revividus]

I mostly agree, except that I downloaded Crossover Office last night and tried to install Macromedia Flash MX 2004. Wouldn't work, unfortunately, though I've read reports of others successfully using it.

WineX has always worked well for me, but Crossover has always been a little buggy. Perhaps it's more usable on other distributions (I use gentoo).

Flash and my checkpoint VPN client are the only things I boot to windows for right now. I expect eventually there will be a reliable way to run them, or I will cave in and buy VM-ware...

apt-get rocks

[NumbThumb]

I run Red Hat (don't ask me why), and thus first tried the RH package manager, UpToDate. It sucked. Then I tried Ximian Red Carpet -- which is a cool tool, but there are next to no applications on the channels, and what you get is quite old. Finally, i discovered that apt-get will run under RH just find. I never looked back. The only feature i miss is it telling me (like Red Carpet does) which updates are most urgent.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[Lew Payne]

What's the difference? I can't get Windows applications to *work* with windows. Sure... they load and run for a while... but they inevitably crash. A program that *works* doesn't *crash*.

I suspect that before we can get Windows applications to work under any emulator that runs on a non-Windows o/s, we must first get the Windows application to *work* under Windows.

But that's just one man's opinion.

Re:DO need it.

[ReelOddeeo]

Why do you need Windows compatibility?

Just imagine. You are a Linux user. How else do you expect to run the Windows version of OpenOffice.org without Wine?

Think of all the great open source software on Windows. Software you want to run. Mozilla. The GIMP. Inkscape.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[Requiem18th]

Autocad 2000, i'm serious! Well at least my version refuses to even install in xp, it says, "this version of autocad is for win98" what does 98 do that XP can't?

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[snuf23]

I the case of the games you mention - the fact that they don't work with XP is in truth a FEATURE and not a bug.
Saving anyone from experiencing Force Commander is a saintly act.

Hmm...doesn't list support for Cygwin

[foidulus]

Now that would be the ultimate in very difficult to implement pointlessness!

Re:True

[nicolas.e]

Funny. I tried it in wine (not x), and it work quite well. The only problem was that starcraft was trying to use RAS, which is not implemented... So no net.

BTW, I have a 1800+ with 512megs.

Run the numbers and don't be shy

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time you play a windows game, do you take the time first to send the game developers an email saying you would like a linux version that is native? If ya'all million gamers out there did that *every time*, just take the minute or two it would take, along with the other people who run these various apps that "need to be run under wine", just MAYBE you could get native linux versions. Snail mail, fax, 1-800 number, whatever. Don't miss a chance, don't do it once, do it every single time you have to use wine or be forced to boot into something you really do NOT want to use. Why put up with it? Really, why do that? You are the customer, tell them what you want! Just politely inform them, "well, today I wanted to run your ..whatever. Too bad I can't run it under my functional and secure OS choice, oh no, I got to use an emulator thing or run an OS I really don't like or trust. That is really going to make me stop and think next time I need a new game, app, whatever, where it comes from". Polite and to the point. Make an impression by the numbers. It just might work.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[Sj0]

Just off the top of my head...

Mechwarrior 2:Mercenaries(win32 version)
ZPC
Fighting Force
FFVII
Soul Reaver:Legacy of Kain

There are more, and there are quite a few that aren't games, but being the old game fan I am, I stick with what I know. :P

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[genner]

"It's not even a troll or flame, though it will be modded as such, no doubt." Ever notice how every one who says this automatically gets moded insightful?

I even tried grafting 'win' dir to /var/lib/wine

[davidsyes]

Hmmm...

I am a Lotus SmartSuite fan and am deeply disappointed that there is not enough demand for IBM and Lotus to port it natively (nevermind the IP matters/excuses)

Growing weary of some "invalid license" rubbish from Crossdresser after I simply deleted my .cxoffice dir and some other related paths and after I tried to reinstall it from my Mandrake 10 Power Pack (retail), I decided to once again try WINE. Can I say "Wine is NOT Exemplary"?

I struck upon an idea:

"What if I graft my 'win' folder created by the Win4Lin install and place it in the /var/lib or other path that wine is expecting to find it in?"

So, after running WINE and seeing where the config files want to find windoze98, I renamed the WINE-created folder and placed my folder that I have repeatedly used with mainly successful recoveries and reinstalls since 2000 or 2001.

The Lotus SmartSuite installer behaved very normally except for the EULA page and except for the "x" boxes being less than crisp. The features selections went fine, and the the install seemed at the end to hange and wait forever, doing the same in Crossdresser, but not in W4L or native windoze98.

SmartSuite DID install, but the result was a horrid, detestable, crying shame. There are soooo many convolusions of .dll placements that I am EXTREMELY suspicious as to why this was done. Maybe in the old days, Lotus realized it was too easy to just take the wretched 28-floppy install of SmartSuite for windows 3.1 and w95 and copy the final image from disk to CD or to slave the source as a target disk and then copy the contents over. That is what I did when my machine would crash. I'd go to my backup disk and recover.

However, it no longer is so simple, thanks to the damned mainly-anti-piracy registry. I honestly feel the registry is mainly to confound and confute app-snagging pirates. BTW, I PAID for my SmartSuite disks...

ANyway, Unless Lotus, IBM, & CodeWeavers get together and work this out, a LOT of IBM customers who probably would switch to Linux and want to drag along their year 2000, 2001, or 2002 SmartSuite investment will be furious-- furious at themselves for NOT generating demand, and furious that IBM wasn't proctive.

SmartSuite, if upgraded to 2004 standards, could trounce StarOffice and OpenOffice--if, iff, ifff you like Lotus Approach, the end-user, non-developer, non-geek WYSIWYG relational database front end, and if you like Lotus WordPro and Lotus 1-2-3. I do. Hence, I keep upgrading Win4Lin or figuring out a way to make my paid-for copy fo Win4Lin work across upgrades.

The complications with this upgrade hell between KDE, the Kernels and Mandrake and NeTraverse are making me VERY interested in finding out more about loopback or Linux-inside-Linux distros so I could avoid thinking about "which kernel, gcc, libthis.so, libthat.so, kde or whatever" anymore.

I can imagine the hell companies must be going through when they upgrade kernels and find out the one they chose was premature, and not supported by NeTraverse or that they should have been more connected to NeTraverse before choosing a kernel...

David Syes

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[cbreaker]

Ohh yea, just throw in some "full 3D support" and we'll be all set.

We'll see how many decades it takes them to get that done.

Every game said runs under Winex/Cedega just fine

[ClassicG]

Most of Blizzard's games run near-perfectly - Starcraft, Warcraft 3, Warcraft 2 BNE, Diablo 2 are all virtually indistinguishable from running them on Windows. And Civ3 works very well, with just a couple minor issues that don't affect gameplay at all (font rendering is a little 'off' in places, and the sound sometimes goes a little haywire). I just recently played through Knights of the Old Republic on Linux, and I was able to get through the entire game without a single hiccup.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[TrancePhreak]

Way to spread a blanket statement and get modded insightfull... What Windows applications don't work with Windows, and what version of Windows are you trying them on. These are things you neglect to mention, and thus you are only trolling.

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

What's funny is that I have some games that run better under WineX on Linux, then they ever did on Windows.. go figure.

PhotoShop and color management?

[john bigbootay]

Anyone worked with color management and PhotoShop with Linux? It's nice that PhotoShop 7 works, but what I really need is support for my printer and monitor color profiles.

Bad Review

[ksc]

Sorry, but does anyone have a review that actually includes: 1. Never games. The games listed pretty much worked fine in previous versions of WineX. 2. Installing games from CD as opposed to downloaded demos? 3. Cut scenes working? 4. MMORPG's such as the latest Evercrack and Dark Age of Crackalot (New Frontiers)? The review was lacking ("Hey, let me try some demos and some games from 1994!") and too short. Screenshots of installation is good, but what about some shots from the actual GAMES (ideally including FPS)... And some mention about the distro the review was performed on etc...

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[Zorilla]

Can you name a Win32 app that doesnt work on Windows XP?

Digital Orchestator Pro, a MIDI editor application. The installer messes up majorly. You have to install it in Windows 98 and then copy libraries over by hand and then it might run if you're lucky

Re:MS fanboy?

[Zorilla]

I am sure every app ever written for a MS OS still runs fine under WinXP. All those old DOS programs have no problem running in XP.

Let's see....Doom. Don't bother trying the vanilla DOS version in XP, it runs really slow with sound on. I really like jDoom now anyway, but still bugs me that the once popular violence scapegoat doesn't run well in XP.

That also eliminates other Doom engine games:
Heretic
Hexen
and Strife, which doesn't have a source port.

Vortex Linux drivers

[Hungry Admin]

I wish to put my old vortex card into a Linux box in order to get hardware sound mixing, can you tell me the best place to get the drivers from? Sourcefourge?

Re:Vortex Linux drivers

[Sunda666]

Sourceforge drivers (aureal.sourceforge.net) *do* work (I was one of the developers at the time), but are just a hack over some mess of binaries released by aureal just before it died. They are very limited, but pretty stable (and hardware mixing works very well).
The best shot these days are the vortex ALSA drivers for 2.6.x, I am using them for a month on my gaming box, and wow, every feature of the card is supported (except perhaps the wavetable, not sure, never used MIDI under linux besides timidity++). I had only one problem with this drivers, was playing UrT and the sound disappeared and I needed to rmmod/modprobe the driver again. Just once.

cheers.

Re:Vortex Linux drivers

[Sunda666]

Ops forgot to mention that is always useful to apply patches to the driver in the vanilla kernels, because linux is a lazy bastard and could not care less about our poor soundcards ;-). The homepage is here.

cheers

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[Lew Payne]

What Windows applications don't work with Windows?

Well, for starters, Outlook 2000 doesn't work with Windows 2000. It freezes and/or crashes at times, and needs to be restarted. Another would be Windows Media Player, which if not rebooted weekly, runs out of resources, gets confused, and starts to spew out "The procedure entry point ASFSendTimeToTime could not be located in the dynamic link library WMASF.DLL.

On another note, Word 2000 has several glaring errors involving phantom font changes, where if you override the default font for part of your document and then start using indents (bullets, etc)... and then go to the end of a bulleted line and delete a character, then move your focus and then come back to that line and hit enter, your selected font disappears and is replaced by the default document font again. Lots of quirks, not to mention crashes if the application is used for more than a week without reboot.

Anyway, I've given you concise examples of BROKEN software... without even pointing you to Microsoft's knowledge base, where literally hundreds of items are marked as "known problems" with no fix planned for them.

By any other term, this constitutes BROKEN software that does not run correctly on its intended operating system... not to mention that said operating system has problems of its own.

So, before accusing others of trolling, I suggest you do a little research on your own. Google is a wonderful tool. Reboot your system (so that it has a chance of not crashing) and try Googling for more info next time, before accusing.

You can't be serious

[Moraelin]

"Try it and see" with _commercial_ games? Yeah, that's got to be a great plan. Might as well spare 100$ for Windows, even if at the expense of blowing 40$ for each game which doesn't work. Or doesn't work well. Or seems to work, but after 10 hours you hit a brick wall compatibility-wise. Or works only until you update some library.

Why, with only 5 such games you've already paid $200 to save $100. We really need more such financial plans ;)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against WineX or anything. Au contraire.

I'm just against the idea that "try and see" even starts to cut it when we're talking commercial programs. (Except for those who pirate games on p2p networks, in which case "trying" yet another game costed nothing. I wish they died a very slow and very painful death.)

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[BlackHawk-666]

KDM, GDM, Postfix, etc.

Re:I hope it runs Internet Explorer

[Eunuchswear]

You don't need winex for ie6, it runs ok on straight winehq.

In fact you don't need crossover to run office (word'n'excel), it works on straight winehq too.

Wine? Oh, it's ready...

[SanGrail]

Well, I know Wine has been achieving essential Windows functionality for at least 6months ago.

How so?
Well, one of my flatmates workmates - he's a programmer, and they're all working on Linux - received an email attachment he couldn't open, so ran it under Wine...

This is the essential problem that Linux is going to have to face soon. Most of the reason's Windows is so virus ridden, isn't because of the system, it's because of the user's doing very stupid things.
Actually, I'll correct that - most Windows users are not stupid, just ignorant - the workmate was stupid, he should have known better.
But my point, changing to Linux won't make a user any less ignorant.

You completely missed the point

[dsci]

The question he asked was "will it work?" To answer that requires an experiment. It can be tried on SOMEONE'S computer SOMEWHERE before you buy it.

My example was I 'tried it to see' with commercial software that worked fine. In my case, I already had the license, and by the way, the commercial developers were glad I 'tried it' and let them know it worked.

And btw, this is not about playing games on Linux just to save $100 on Windows. I moved my systems over to Linux not to save that money, because I already had Windows. The real issue, imo, is this: I run Linux, and I want $COOL_APP, which was COMPILED for Windows. Can I still use it? That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Sometimes, life is not as complicated as we try to make it.

ATI Radeon Mesa DRI driver + Battlefield 1942

[martinflack]

I'm using the Mesa DRI driver and I can't get Battlefield 1942 to work with Cedega.

I have to give credit to Transgaming, Gavriel State himself dropped in on my forum thread and gave the reason why, which I thought was cool of him. (BTW, if you had experience with the old message board on Transgaming's site, they've now switched to phpBB - Thank God.)

The reason is because the driver doesn't expose the 'GL_ARB_vertex_program' OpenGL extension. I could use the official ATI driver which does have that extension, but Gavriel says there's a bug in that which makes it not work with BF1942 too well, and they're working with ATI on it.

Come on open source guys! Our 3D drivers are already more _stable_, let's make them more _capable_ as well so the card companies just shrug their shoulders and decide to endorse the open source version. ;-)

Re:"The answer to that is yes"

[why-is-it]

Some *hardware* that worked under 98 is not supported under XP!!

I purchased an microsoft sidewinder gamepad because it was well-priced and really solid compared to the alternatives out there.

(Cue appropriate m$ joke)

When I upgraded to XP, I expected that it would work fine - especially since it was an m$ product. As it turns out, m$ has not written XP/2K drivers for the gamepad, and according to their website, there are no intentions to do so.

I have a few games that also don't work under XP:

• Black and white
• Heavy Gear 2
• Monkey Island 2
• 11th Hour

I have had mixed success with the compatibility modes. One one XP system, I was able to get System Shock 2 working, but could not on another XP system, no matter what we tried.

Why not do this?

[Dekeman]

Here's a Screenshot of Mac-On-Linux which allows users of PPC enabled Linux Distros Yellow Dog Linux to run Mac OS on their computers. This ss shows a PPC Linux user with Mac OS open and Virtual PC running on it, and DOS running on Windows. Just add a few emus and you're all set.