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Interview - Jim White of the Darwine project

Posted by Hemos on from the bettering-the-platform dept.

Kelly McNeill writes "The Darwine project intends to port and develop Wine as well as other supporting tools that will allow Darwin and Mac OS X users to run Windows Applications. It is an open source project led by a growing number of developers including Emmanuel Maillard, Pierre d'Herbemont and Sanjay Connare. osOpinion/osViews had the privilege to speak to with the project's administrator, (Jim White) to tell us more about Darwine and where the project is headed. For those that don't know, Darwine is Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) for OS X on PPC. The following is the transcribed dialog of their conversation which is also available in an audible format on osRadio.com."

12 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. Confused.... by Vengie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    WINE is not an emulator....yet....on...a...ppc.....uh...isn't it actually an emulator? The idea behind WINE is that it puts a wrapper on native calls.....x86 instructions are x86 instructions....so DarWINE is more like, DarWISAE, because it is "sort of an emulator...."

    --
    When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
    1. Re:Confused.... by Vengie · · Score: 5, Informative

      Let me Clarify myself. If you read the article, you notice DarWINE combines WINE with a back-end emulator. The package, as it stands, is a syscall wrapper along with a back-end emulator. Hence, DarWINE *is* partially an emulator. [and the fun recursive acronym isnt as appropriate]

      --
      When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
  2. I got a better idea! by El_Ge_Ex · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How about a way to run Max OSX apps in Linux???

    I'm serious. It would be only fair since Wine is written to run Windows apps on an OS that Microsoft didn't intend.

    -b

    1. Re:I got a better idea! by dmayle · · Score: 5, Informative

      How about a way to run Max OSX apps in Linux???

      Well, if you're on a PPC architecture already, there's Mac-On-Linux. Though, I'm sure that by the tone of your comment, you actually meant x86. Well, ask and you shall receive. For the x86 folks (or just about anyone on Linux), there's PearPC. And you know what? They're both open source...

    2. Re:I got a better idea! by El_Ge_Ex · · Score: 5, Informative

      Motion, iMovie, Final Cut Pro, etc...

      One could argue that there are PC apps that have the same purpose as these apps, but some are merely adequate while others are near offensive.

      (Shake would be included too, if it weren't for the fact it was a Linux app before it ever was a Mac OSX app. Still, the Linux version likely won't see updates anymore.)

  3. Read the site by Alex+Reynolds · · Score: 5, Informative

    Apps are not running natively:

    "Developers should be able to recompile their Win32 Apps using WineLib and make them work in Mac OS X..."

  4. Clarification by torstenvl · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From the website: "We are currently working on integrating an x86 emulator in wine in order to run Win32 exe on a PowerPC Box. But on Darwin-x86 a Win32 .exe should run within wine" http://darwine.opendarwin.org/faq.php#5

    So yeah it will involve an emulator on PPC but remember that Darwin is also on x86. So WINE will still be NE but will be used in conjunction with something that IE (is an emulator). :-)

  5. Re:Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I thought wine only simulated the Windows API calls, so you still need to be running the program on the native windows cpu, x86. Can someone explain how this works on PPC?

    Do you realize that in less time than it took for you to write your questions, you could have clicked the link and saw that it uses QEMU to map x86 to PPC instruction calls.

    It didn't even require a 'googling' on your part, just a click.

  6. Wine is a godsend....but..... by Savet+Hegar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It fails to run a lot of popular software right out of the box. Last I checked, it wouldn't install IE6. Now now....before I am crusified, I have no love for IE. But it is a simple fact that many programs are built on top of it; many industry specific programs such as banking and financial programs.

    There's also the famed Photoshop incompatibility, that crossover has managed to overcome. When will the code be incorporated back into Wine?

    I realize Mac users have no need for a Windows version of photoshop, but I wonder if Darwin is going to be able to overcome the obstacles that Wine has not been able to.

    Support for .Net would also be a godsend since more of the newer windows software is starting to rely on it.

    --
    Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
  7. Re:Is there really a need? by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 5, Funny

    Gator, Mydoom, Welchia, CWS, Sobig, Nimda.

    Did I miss any out ;)

    --
    liqbase :: faster than paper
  8. Re:More pollution of OSX UI by agby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Its bad enough that Metal and Aqua are mixed interchangably without any rhyme or reason...mix in X11 apps and now Windows apps and I think we can safely say that visual consistency in OSX is gone.

    There is actually supposed to be some rhyme and reason to the Aqua/Metal looks in OSX:

    Apple Human Interface Guidelines

    See the section on Windows -> Window Appearance -> Brushed Metal Windows

    However, if developers choose not to adhere to these guidelines, there's little that can be done, unless the apps get hacked. Turning on metal is as simple as toggling a switch in XCode and Interface builder. You can disable the metal look in Safari by editing it's preferences as well...

  9. A mature Darwine will be far from useless by notNeilCasey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The idea for as I understand it is this:

    When the project is complete, OS X users will be able to open EXE files with Darwine. Darwine will use QEMU to execute the x86 instructions, however when the program makes calls to the Windows API, Darwine calls those functions in WineLib compiled natively for PPC.

    So, where Bochs and VirtualPC and others like them emulate the entire operating system environment (Emulated BIOS, emulated hardware, emulated Windows, and finally the emulated x86 application ... overhead city), Darwine allows applications to run essentially linked to native code - Wine/WineLib for PPC.

    Thus for most Windows applications, the GUI and event handling and everything else the Windows API is good for will be executed in native PPC code. QEMU will then emulate an x86 processor for all the compiled code in the application.

    Imagine some internal corporate application that uses all standard Windows widgets to let a user interact with some data: all those widgets plus the menu and root pane will be handled by the native WineLib code except when the programmer has included some special functions or number-crunching routines that are emulated on QEMU's fake x86.

    Think about it -- It's a lot better than having an entire emulated instance of Windows 98 (and maybe even an actual x86 box) to do the same thing.