WineConf 2005 Sets Deadline for Wine 0.9

IamTheRealMike writes "As WineConf 2005 took place last weekend, the Wine developers discussed the project's direction and future. A new deadline of September 30th for the 0.9 release was set by Alexandre Julliard -- the release promises to bring an end to the system of monthly snapshots and provide a new focus on ease of use and stability. A new GPLd application regression testing tool called CXTest was demoed, as was some of the great Direct3D work being done lately. Finally the CEO of Gupta gave a talk. Gupta have ported their 4GL RAD tools to Linux by working with Codeweavers (who sponsored the event), and their experiences were documented in a fascinating presentation. Overall: big thumbs up, but it's not obvious enough that there's enterprise-level support available for Wine. Check out the group photo and the new Wiki!"

Comments

Deadlines

[Anonymous Coward]

Made only to be broken.

Re:Deadlines

[stupidfoo]

And why was a conference necessary to make this deadline? Why does everything have a conference these days?

Re:Deadlines

[Janitha]

Its kind of like going to the library to study, no distractions. When you have a conference usually everyone motivates everyone else to stay on subject and get the job done. When its over the network, or simply just a meeting online everyone might be doing something else... one playing wow, and some other guy coding a new hack to show off, conferences really gets the job done.

Re:Deadlines

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, good question. You know, we should get a lot of people together, all in the same physical place, to study the phenomenon.

Of course, any such gathering would have to ignore its own existence... if it even once asked 'why are we here?' the members would become locked in endless recursion and would starve.

Re:Deadlines

[Anonymous Coward]

Conferences are cool (It's more like a convention really). It's one thing to have "Kudos" on a mailing list, it's another to make jokes and discuss technicalities in person. It's a reinforcement thing, it maintains group cohesion and group identification. It's also probably an invitation only event which is reinforce all those things even more so.

Re:Deadlines

[Danuvius]

And why was a conference necessary to make this deadline? Why does everything have a conference these days?

Good questions!

Let's schedule a conference to find some answers!

I could be out of line...

[wcitech]

Call me crazy, but isn't it deadlines like these that cause software products to often be lacking? I might understand if this were a major for-profit corporation who NEEDED a release in order to satisfy their fiscal department, but isn't this an open-source not-for-profit project? Why have deadlines?

Re:I could be out of line...

[Anonymous Coward]

Motivation?

Re:I could be out of line...

[thaneross]

Deadlines encourage the development of critical components that are the most needed at the time. While this can lead to bad things if the time constraints are unrealistic, it's better than open-ended all-over-the-map kind of work you'd get otherwise.

Re:I could be out of line...

[cdgeorge]

I guess this is because it's very important to set goals. While the deadline in itself is kind of annoying, one can afford to wait for the perfect software while it has a (better) running version.

Re:I could be out of line...

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Why have deadlines?

Well from a project standpoint, it's a motivational tool to have everything in order within a resonable time. Just because its a community effort does not mean there shouldn't be deadlines.

With a deadline, developers can hurry up and finish their contributions so that the organizer can assess where they are at and set new goals. Deadlines are not just fiscal.

Imagine hiring a contractor to build your house. Wouldn't you set a deadline? Without one how can you plan on the next phase of construction? Imagine having painters standing by waiting for the framers to actually show up (I know its extreme - but hey this is slashdot!).

Re:I could be out of line...

[m50d]

Like debian, wine has been far too long without a stable release. By all means don't rush it, but you do need to actually release a working version once in a while. At the moment any stable version of wine is stable purely through luck - they're just cvs snapshots.

Re:I could be out of line...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you even read what you type?

Re:I could be out of line...

[hunterx11]

1. According to the Surgeon General, persons should not drink alcoholic beverages while reading /. because of the risk of brain defects.
2. Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to post coherently to /. and may cause health problems.

Re:I could be out of line...

[cerberusss]

Why have deadlines?

Because that's when testing can start. While software starts with development, it's testing that finishes it off with that shiny look :)

A little bit off-topic: every developer should really check out Brian Marick's website. This developer has a firm focus on testing and offers lots of hands-on tips.

Re:I could be out of line...

[hey!]

And, if we deleted the word "cold" from the dictionary, we wouldn't have need for central heating anymore. ;-)

It's not deadlines that are toxic to commercial endeavors -- it's deadlines * promises, driven by the imperative to capture customer before the competition does. If you promise more than your competitors, but too far in the future, then you have no competitive advantage. If you promise too much less than your competitors, but sooner, then you have no competitive advantage.

The ideal is to have much more than your competition, much sooner. The only way to do that is to be more productive than average.

Since mathematically everyone can't be above average, the typical experience is that you end up with an unfinished pile of shit when your deadline rolls up. Deleting some of the pile simply leaves you with a smaller pile of shit. So the only solution is to let the deadlines slip.

Re:I could be out of line...

[h4rm0ny]

The critical difference is who sets the deadline. A bunch of developers saying "we want to have it done by dd/mm/yy" may be good motivation. A manager or salesman coming in and saying "it will be done by now()" is not - most of us have probably had to deal with people like that at some point. It's not good.

The deadlines we set ourselves are hopefully sensible ones.

Re:I could be out of line...

[bobzieruncle]

The deadline is on release 0.9. I'd be more concerned about arbitrary deadlines on the 1.0 final release.

Re:I could be out of line...

[Blakey Rat]

And 0.9 is "stable?" I thought 1.0 was the stable release...

Re:I could be out of line...

[Anonymous Coward]

So the only solution is to let the deadlines slip.

Or ship the product as is. At least that's what Microsoft does.

Re:I could be out of line...

[webhead04]

Why have deadlines?

I know what you mean, but without some kind of target to aim for things just could keep dragging on forever. I'm sure it's a soft deadline, I mean no one is going to lose a job if the deadline slips as in a for profit project.

I dont know what compelled me to look at the picture, but I did. Just yesterday I heard the term 'Nerd Herd' and it popped into my head and I had a good, spontaneous chuckle.

Re:I could be out of line...

[m50d]

It's the difference between beta and alpha. A 0.9 release will be a lot more stable than cvs snapshots - try comparing firefox 0.9 with one of the developer snapshots or nightly CVS builds from around that time.

Re:I could be out of line...

[Anonymous Coward]

With that mention of Debian, you reminded me f something important I've been meaning to post on Slashdot. My girlfriend and I were discussing Linux the other night and we were curious as to why there are no pro-lesbian Linux distros. We currently use Fedora and Debian at home, but these are certainly male-centered distributions and it would be nice to see a distro made by goth female geeks like ourselves. So since my girlfriend's name is Leslie (my name is Thilde), we kind of had a chuckle at the idea of naming our Debian based distro: Lesbian Linux. Leslie is much more the hardcore coder than I am. I'm pretty good with Perl and graphics, but she really delves into the C source code. After thinking about it for a while, we wondered, has anyone else already come up with a distro called Lesbian? Our internet searches didn't bring anything up, but what better place to ask than Slashdot. So how about it? Anyone aware of any prior projects? We post AC because, well... this IS /. after all. Two lesbian geek girls who like the whole goth thing and look it are very likely to cause a riot if we posted under our real accounts. Thanks!

Les and Thilde

Re:I could be out of line...

[Anonymous Coward]

No it won't. It'll be as done as it's done. It'll still fail to run 435347598347598347598347 windows programs correctly, because it's not "finished." The change will merely be a psychological one.

Re:I could be out of line...

[Miffe]

Lesbian GNU/Linux

Re:I could be out of line...

[grcumb]

" And 0.9 is "stable?" I thought 1.0 was the stable release..."

There's a difference between 'stable' and 'feature-complete'.

If the working parts of an app are solid, but the app as a whole is not feature-complete, then it makes sense to keep it in beta (i.e. sub-1.0). But there's no harm in making it clear to people that the parts that do work aren't likely to break in unforeseen ways.

Does that make it any clearer?

Re:I could be out of line...

[Muramasa]

we're talking about oss here. A lot of projects never even reach 1.0 but are quite usable.

Re:I could be out of line...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be happy to get deadlines like that. By boss usually wants things to be ready by yesterday, last week or last month.

Re:I could be out of line...

[Bert64]

Well perhaps by rushing and releasing beta quality code, they hope to emulate windows more accurately.

Re:I could be out of line...

[Narchie Troll]

Let's all shove hard pricks into our queer faces.

HUAuGUAUGUAUuauguauGUAUUGUALG(AUGLAHGOTP#)%*#)(! @N O CARRIER

Thanks to CodeWeavers

[XanC]

We use their fine product to allow library patrons to run MS Office on some of our public workstations. It's great to know how much they contribute back to Wine and the community.

Kudos to them!

Re:Thanks to CodeWeavers

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wondering how that decision came up -- clean out a Windows install (assuming NT), plug in a Linux (which distro, anyway?), then proceed to get codeweavers wine licenses to run MS Office on some of them.

I'd have thought to leave those machines running Win32 and MS Office and let the Linux boxes run OO.org instead. It just seems a bit odd, especially for a library, to go with this "best of both worlds" solution instead of just going Linux or sticking with MS stuff.

Re:Thanks to CodeWeavers

[Anonymous Coward]

Mabye they wanted a version of MS Office that wouldm't work on their current Windows version? Their options would be either to upgrade to Windows XP or use Crossover Office to run the new Office (presumably Office XP).

Re:Thanks to CodeWeavers

[Anonymous Coward]

From a financial standpoint, wouldn't that mean getting licenses to an MS Office that won't run on your current machines? That in itself seems to border on insanity...like buying a P4 chip for my motherboard that only supports PII (then having to buy a new motherboard in the process)

If the MS Office licenses were donated, would it still make sense to invest in WINE licenses just to get them running on Linux boxen? Even that seems odd.

Re:Thanks to CodeWeavers

[XanC]

There are many advantages to using Linux instead of Windows, especially in a public workstation setting. I won't go into them all here.

One of the issues that could have been a showstopper is that people want to continue (at least for now) using MS Office. Thanks to CodeWeavers, it's not a problem.

Re:Thanks to CodeWeavers

[Eberlin]

I'm with you, man. I work at a library with an aging WinNT population (Thanks to the B&M "First Hit Is Always Free" Foundation) that would probably go catatonic if they were "upgraded" to XP. From what I understand, they're trying to raise funds to get newer machines to replace the current ones (PIII 600Mhz, 256MB RAM).

Basically, what I was wondering was what the arguments were to push for Linux where you are. I'm sure Linux would do wonders with our aging hardware here and possibly save the place some money in hardware upgrades as well as maintenance costs. However, the MS mentality is prevalent and probably difficult to sway.

I guess the questions go:
1) How'd you get Linux in past the bureaucracy?
2) What distro and what do you do for maintenance?
3) How do the patrons react? (that whole "learning curve" argument)
4) Why not cold-turkey to OO.org? Public demand for the popular and familiar hasn't stopped the government from making unpopular decisions before. ;-)

Re:Thanks to CodeWeavers

[XanC]

Ah yes, the Foundation. Get a tax deduction for locking in libraries who'd otherwise switch to Linux. Brilliant!

Your questions:
1) Fortunately, there's not much of a bureaucracy. We're a single library that's actually its own taxing district, so really I only had to convince a couple of people to give it a try.
2) Debian. First Woody with a bunch of backports, upgraded to Sarge not long ago. I'm hoping that Sarge will be stable for a good long time. I'll most likely end up using backports for things like Firefox and OpenOffice. In any case, apt-get upgrade keeps things up to date with a minimum of fuss. Systemimager is used to keep all the machines in sync, so I only have to apt-get in a chroot in the master image.
3) The patrons' reaction was somewhat mixed in the beginning. I should point out that there were still quite a few kinks we were working out. Also, at the time, there were quite a few more IE-only sites than there are now. Currently, we rarely have a complaint. Occasionally we catch a grumble that something's different from the way they're used to, but that's about it.
4) We had 11 MS Office licenses, and might as well use them. Also it was comforting to be able to say "Yes, it's a new system, but this browser's pretty much the same and here's your exact same office suite!" Plus, CodeWeavers has educational discounts, and only makes you buy as many licenses as you'll have concurrent users.

I've appended a little HTML document I wrote up after the fact about why switching was good for us. Some of those items could have been done with Windows (with some difficulty), others not. A huge savings has been in my time: Now, instead of dinking with Windows problems, I was able to implement all those features in the public workstations, and then go on to write loads of useful Perl analyzing catalog reports and otherwise helping other aspects of the library. My job has become much more creative and productive.

Some other advantages not mentioned in the document:
1) Users can stick in any USB storage device and use it instantly, without the Hardware Wizard popping up.
2) We put OpenOffice on all the machines, including ones that had never had an office suite before. It's been a big help to have an office suite on every machine.
3) We're looking at fancy things like network scanning and network CD writing.

Probably the biggest problem we're still facing is lack of Shockwave for Linux. CodeWeavers can run this plugin, but that has license implications, and we've chosen for now to not go that route. Mostly it's kids' games that have problems, but they can always find one that's traditional Flash that works. We're not all that concerned about this one.

Our systems sound pretty similar to yours; they're 667-733MHz Dells with 256MB. Originally they had 128MB; we doubled the RAM and saw HUGE performance gains. I should tell you that logging in is fairly slow, especially the first one of the day. We're using KDE because of the great Kiosk mode, and because people are comfortable with it. Of course, with Sarge stable, it's not going to get any slower, and it's acceptable now. Once KDE's loaded, performance is generally fine.

Here's that document. If you need any other info, feel free to mail me at xan@NOSPAMcharbonnet.com.

Advantages of the New Workstation System:

• Consistency

  Each workstation is in a known state each new session.

  Previously, changes would build up over time, and the 25 workstations would have 25 different configurations. Nobody could be sure how a given workstation was configured. This led to patrons switching machines frequently trying to get something to work.

  Now, with a combination of the "Log Off" feature and nightly synchronization with a master workstation, the patron's experience is independent of which workstation is chosen.

  Also, once a problem has been identified and solved, it tends to stay that wa

I was there

[Anonymous Coward]

They had a showing of Sideways and several wonderful tastings.

Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just curious if something like this would be possible, i.e. to have a plugin to VisualStudio.NET that will notify at the time of writing the code whether a certain function exists inside the Wine compatibility layer. The thought behind this would be to get into developers' heads the idea that either not being lazy or rather putting in a bit more effort at the time of writing the code would ensure compatibility down the line and open up more avenues of possibility for their application.

Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just curious if something like this would be possible, i.e. to have a plugin to VisualStudio.NET that will notify at the time of writing the code whether a certain function exists inside the Wine compatibility layer. The thought behind this would be to get into developers' heads the idea that either not being lazy or rather putting in a bit more effort at the time of writing the code would ensure compatibility down the line and open up more avenues of possibility for their application.

You phrase that is if you think it's wrong that Windows programmers write application without having Wine in mind.

Designing software around a compatibility layer intended to emulate your actual target system is idiotic. You design for a platform, not an emulation of one. If you want your application to run on multiple platforms, then write it for multiple platforms.

Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Designing software around a compatibility layer intended to emulate your actual target system is idiotic. You design for a platform, not an emulation of one. If you want your application to run on multiple platforms, then write it for multiple platforms.

Except Wine Is Not an Emulator. Its an implementation of the win32 environment.

Programming code to be compatible with multiple implementations is like using POSIX standard C libraries over native implmentations. Which is actually the preferred method.

Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit?

[vadim_t]

Well, it's just the way you write for multiple platforms in pretty much every language. For example, when writing C code you have to have in mind where it's going to run. If you call mmap you have to know that it doesn't exist on Windows, for instance.

A tool that would allow me to specify a list of systems I want to be compatible with and then warns about things that wouldn't work on some of them would actually be very handy.

Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit?

[Anonymous Coward]

The acronym serves to point out that Wine is not a computer emulator. It is an emulation of the Windows platform, though.

If you're writing with a non-complete, fairly incompatible approximation of a platform in mind, then you're a fool. You can draw as many flawed analogies about POSIX C libraries as you like - it just isn't sane thinking when you could target a cross-platform toolkit like wxWidgets.

Wine is extremely useful for running applications which never had non-Windows systems in mind. That's what it's for. Don't mistake it for a target system. I don't even see why you need somebody to tell you why that's a bad idea.

Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit?

[Anonymous Coward]

To add to this, reasons why it's unwise to target Wine:

* It hasn't reached version 1.0 yet.
* Things are constantly changed around and tweaked. What's the point in writing something which may well become broken in the next release?
* Again, there are better methods to write cross-platform applications - libraries and tools actually DESIGNED for this purpose.
* You're limiting yourself to what Wine actually does implement. If you can only use half the features of the intended target, why bother using it at all? Again, use the right tool for the job.

Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wine is extremely useful for running applications which never had non-Windows systems in mind. That's what it's for. Don't mistake it for a target system. I don't even see why you need somebody to tell you why that's a bad idea.

To quote TFA for you:
"First, no matter how well you run or port your application, as soon as you mention Wine there seems to be a general shrug of, "Oh Wine? Then you're not a real Linux application." Of course, Win32 apps are just a different toolkit compared to Qt or Gtk and Wine's goal is to make them first class citizens on Linux."

Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit?

[Spy der Mann]

i.e. to have a plugin to VisualStudio.NET

Or you could switch to wxWidgets.

Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit?

[Mad Merlin]

That's actually a very good idea, but not so much for new projects. As others have said, I think writing a portable application is a much better idea than writing a Win32/Wine tolerant application, as a truly portable application will run on far more than just Win32 and x86 Linux. Having said that though, just going through and tweaking (or implementing the missing pieces in Wine instead!) an already existing project so that it's also compatible with Wine is a pretty good idea. If you coupled something like this with QEmu/VMWare so that you could test a program out in Wine at the same time that you test it out on it's native platform, I think you'd be quite successful.

Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but if you'd read TF-posts, you'd see that the complaint is TARGETTING Wine, i.e. writing specifically for it.

Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit?

[cortana]

wxWidgets will tell the programmer which Win32 APIs aren't supported in Wine? :)

Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit?

[Anonymous Coward]

A different toolkit? It's a different executable format, with a different ABI, that makes use of a completely different threading model than POSIX. The UI suffers from being built on an entirely different windowing system that has numerous predefined conventions programs expect to be in place that X makes no promises about keeping, so programs written for Windows will never interoperate seamlessly.

Programs running in Wine will never be first-class citizens, unless that's the only way you run anything.

Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that wxWidgets is a memory-wasting API that produces clunky interfaces that look stupid on every platform.

Wine, the perfect emulator

[Venkata Prasad]

Have been a regular user of wine (specially to play many of those funny little flash games)... most of them work wonderfully well...

I wish I could even use WINE to develop applications for windows tooo (not that I develop many)... That would help me completely free the win partition on my system.

Kudos WINE team... many of us are looking forward to use the stable versions!

Re:Wine, the perfect emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

Does visual-mingw work on wine? If so, try it. Alpha or not, it works well enough for me to use on windows.

Re:Wine, the perfect emulator

[hourieh]

I wish I could even use WINE to develop applications for windows tooo (not that I develop many)... That would help me completely free the win partition on my system.

Actually looks like it is possible, haven't tried it myself though.

Re:Wine, the perfect emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. It's not. Wine Is Not an Emulator.

Re:Wine, the perfect emulator

[diegocgteleline.es]

On the contrary, I've never been able to use wine beyond calc.exe and things like that. I've never been able to run things like IE on XP - call me stupid, I've wasted hours trying to configure it and nothing.

Re:Wine, the perfect emulator

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

You can easily run IE (and lots of other stuff) with Codeweavers Wine. Of course, there's not much point since Konqueror/Firefox/Opera pretty much all blow IE out of the water. (Although it can be handy for cross-browser testing.)

Re:Wine, the perfect emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

Try http://www.von-thadden.de/Joachim/WineTools/

It will help you if you can't get the applications working by yourself. They recommend using 20041019. Microsoft Office 2000 fails to install with the latest CVS, but after it is installed it works fine with it.

Re:Wine, the perfect emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

Use Winetools (wt2) to install IE. There's a base installer which helps you install the prerequisites and then it downloads and pretty much installs IE for you. That's how I've gotten it to work. Otherwise, just use CrossOver Office and their excellent installer interface.

no Win32 port...

[Anonymous Coward]

The "no Win32 port of Wine" joke will be posted in 3..2..1..

Re:no Win32 port...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhmmm, such a thing exists, several of the wine dlls can be used to replace Microsoft dlls (if they aren't dependend on Unix)

Re:no Win32 port...

[Spy der Mann]

Hey why not make an alternative winxp? That will use the wine DLL's instead of Microsoft's.

We could call it WineOS and make it GPL. Hey that reminds me, what happened to ReactOS? Is it out of the radar or what?

Re:no Win32 port...

[Anonymous Coward]

Read http://winehq.org/?issue=272

We were at the conf.

-sedwards

Re:no Win32 port...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is something like that, called Revolution OS (or something similar). They aim to create Windows NT4 compatibile OS using Wine.

You know...

[MisanthropicProgram]

there will be no Wine before its time!

Ok, OK! I won't give up my day job! Oh wait, I don't have a day job.

I going to go and cry now. Manly tears.

Re:You know...

[JambisJubilee]

I cry mainly tears, too!

Women

[alta]

Wow, all the women in that pictures really says a lot. ...Geeks

Re:Women

[Reducer2001]

NERDS!!!!!

Re:Women

[eric_brissette]

Geeks... I see Hyperion there on the left.. I can't believe Zero_Cool couldn't make it to the photo.

Re:Women

[Sun]

Sorry to ruin it for you - all the girls in the pictures are Wine (and Samba and ReactOS - it's been quite a diversified conference this year) wives and GFs. None of them attended the actual lectures.

Re:Women

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn you msygonist pig.
Viva women's rights!
May you be physically emasculated in your sleep!
Grrl powa!
Debain-women CREATED DEBIAN!
WOMEN CREATED OPEN SOURCE.
YOU MEN STOLE IT FROM US.
OSS WOULDN'T EXIST WITHOUT THE SMARTNESS OF WOMEN!

I hope all you worthless men die. There would be no more wars and technology would advance 1000000.00.00%

Re:Women

[stubear]

No girls, but there were some rather girly looking men.

Re:Women

[Anonymous Coward]

Debain-women CREATED DEBIAN!

Perhaps you stupid fems would do well learning to spell before trying to compete in a mans world? Well, that is, if you can call linux geeks "men".

Re:Women

[Chemisor]

Hey! Whom are you calling 'women'?...

Group Photo

[dgos78]

All those bodies, and so little testosterone.

It's a joke! Sorry, I couldn't come up with anything else.

Re:Group Photo

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's so bad you need to apologize for it. Why post anything?

"I couldn't come up with anything else?"

Are you compelled to make a post to every story?

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[Tharkban]

From Wine's web site: Myths

As Wine's name says: "Wine Is Not an Emulator":

wine bugs havent seen enough work

[Eternal_Flame]

I like wine. I really do, I've been using it for over a year now and have never had many real (unsolveable) issues from the few win games I own or any other win32 app I feel like running under it.
My only true complaint with Wine is how 2/3 of the apps that do work give weird errors and require a lot of tweaking before they actually execute correctly. Its not that I seriously mind messing with the wine config files or spending the time to do so, but it would just be a whole lot easier if it worked by default. Some of the smaller bugs I've found havent been solved over the course of the last year, and I can only hope this new system of deadlines encourages more rapid development to fix the little things those before any new work is done in other areas like directx or 3d support

Re:wine bugs havent seen enough work

[^me^]

despite having experienced exactly what you're discussing, I would prefer to have a 1.0 focus on API completeness rather than application compatibility.

Application compatibility is a neverending target, however, API completeness is a solid and realistic goal.

Re:wine bugs havent seen enough work

[Chemisor]

> Its not that I seriously mind messing with the wine config files

I do. Want to tell us what to do to get Microsoft Word to run? Or where to find out?

Re:wine bugs havent seen enough work

[compm375]

It's called OpenOffice... But if you really want MS Word working, get CrossOver Office. http://www.codeweavers.com/

Re:wine bugs havent seen enough work

[Sun]

But that's just what the 0.9, and 1.0, releases are all about.

The idea is to focus Wine on the "just work" angle. We've had TONS of improvement already. Wine now autogenerates a basic configuration when first run. We got rid of the config file. We added a GUI configuration tool (readonly at this stage). We made drive mapping immediately clear to anyone who bothers to look.

We still have a little more to go. That's why Alexandre allowed himself to bring up a deadline for 0.9. We need the configuration tool to be able to change the settings. This, in turn, requires that the settings in the registry persist. Having said that - we're not that far off.

Shachar

fine and dandy but...

[0110011001110101]

will M$ still be blocking all wine (/.)?

Free beer to all!

Nerds

[Stibidor]

When I saw the group photo, I thought, "What a bunch of nerds!" And my heart longed to be there...

Wine 1.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the performance target for Wine 1.0 that any (and I mean *any*) Win32 program will run on Linux?

Re:Wine 1.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. We just have to figure out which apps to support.

Re:Wine 1.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the performance target for Wine 1.0 that any (and I mean *any*) Win32 program will run on Linux?

That will never happen. Even Microsoft can't get *all* Win32 programs to work on newer versions of Windows. Some of them depend on low-level hardware access, specific Win9x kernel data structures, etc.

The best I'd hope for is that any *sane* Win32 program will run on Wine. Meaning any program that sticks to the Win32 API (and maybe even programs using undocumented functions, but not the ones using crazy hacks).

Re:Wine 1.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that not every Win32 application runs on *any* Win32 operating system. While wine is - and probably never will be 100% perfect - neither is Windows. There area way too many software and hardware differences between different implementations for this to ever be the case.

A huge benefit of wine is that you are free from lock-in having the source code also makes it easy to roll out different versions etc.

Re:Wine 1.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey WINE is only 12 years in development. It's still a little early for a 1.0 release.

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

Wine is an api emulator. Linux is a posix emulator.

Uh oh, Slashdot linked to a public Wiki

[Anonymous Coward]

Here come the Wiki defacers...

Go nuts!

[FooBarWidget]

Many people on the photo actually have wives and girlfriends, they're just not on the photo.

Go nuts!

Re:Go nuts!

[jdhutchins]

Most people in the picture have wives AND girlfriends? As in at the same time? Gee, I didn't know wine developers were that popular!

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[Tharkban]

why do you use the word emulator?

Wine implements the windows API. Linux implements the POSIX API.

API's aren't emulated, they are implemented.

Gupta's Centura (SqlWindows)

[Anonymous Coward]

Centura is a horrible piece of software.
The language is horrible.
The runtime is horrible.
The editor is horrible.

Nuff said...

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it an emulator? WINE does not emulate any hardware instructions or capabilities.

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't have the delay associated with traditional emulation, dynamic recompilation (JIT), or even ultra high level emulation (UltraHLE). There is a relatively small performance hit with 2D graphics but that is about it.

Wine - methadone in a windows world

[Anonymous Coward]

i used wine, to get off windows. now i'm clean. if i can do it (maybe) you can do it too.

There are too many incompatible versions of WINE

[filterchild]

It's about time we got an official release of WINE. I've been getting into Linux music lately and WINE is one of the biggest problems. I'm trying to run freest (a wrapper for Windows VST plugins using WINE), and it is incompatible with the newer versions of WINE. So when WINE goes stable, Paul Davis will hopefully fix whatever's keeping fst from working with new versions of WINE.

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

Wine is an API emulator because it acts as a "compatibility layer". Linux IS POSIX, but X was never designed to run windows apps. By the same logic, Java is an emulator, but that is not the case. Java apps are "intended" to be multi platform, windows apps are only designed for windows.

BSD's Linux support is a "kind of" emulator, but the ABI's are really similar, and therefore it may be too sutle to be considered an emu.

Just in time for Longhorn...

[hey]

... which will change all the APIs

Re:Just in time for Longhorn...

[Anonymous Coward]

You couldn't ask for more. If people can't run their old Windows apps on Windows anymore, maybe they'll switch to running it under Wine on Linux. Once they've done that they'll never go back.

Re:Just in time for Longhorn...

[bcmm]

And all the vendors will instantly stop coding stuff that can run on, say, Windows XP, because they know that everyone went out and upgraded on the release day...

Apps will still be written for old version of Windows (and Wine) for a long time.

Longhorn will rain on the parade...

[shawnce]

With all of the changes coming in Longhorn it is gonna be interesting to see how long it will take for WINE to gain parity.

The have a lot of API to implement.

has anyone tried the directx9 patches?

[Sark666]

from here: http://directxwine.sourceforge.net/

Curious what dx9 games people have thrown at it to see what works. Also wondering when these would make it in mainline.

Re:has anyone tried the directx9 patches?

[oliverthered]

wondering when these would make it in mainline

Soon, A lot of refactoring has taken place and I've been trying to iron out the bugs outside of winecvs so that I can send in clean, reasonably well tested patches. Some work has already made it to mainline, and I've got some more work implementing stateblocks that should be going in tomorow.

I need to stop playing MMORPGs

[Minwee]

I can't be the only one who expected to see "" under each of the names in the group photo.

Re:I need to stop playing MMORPGs

[Minwee]

Nor can I be the only one who just had a hard, brutal reminder to Preview and look closely before submitting. Let's try that again.

I can't be the only one who expected to see "<WINE Developers>" under each of the names in the group photo.

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[DA-MAN]

From Wine's web site: Myths

As Wine's name says: "Wine Is Not an Emulator"

I remember reading an article from one of the developers (think it was Tridge) where he was asked if Wine Is Not an Emulator, then what is it. His response was "basically an emulator".

That's Feature Deadlines, not Release Deadlines

[CarpetShark]

It's feature deadlines that lead to bad software: sales-oriented people telling the public that the next version will have some whoop-bang feature, and it'll be ready in two month's time (which happens to perfectly coincide with the christmas shopping spree).

A number of Free Software/Open Source projects recently have had success with a different approach, which is to set a Release Deadline. The difference is that, with a release deadline, only features which are ready by the freeze date make it in. Otherwise, they're held off until next time.

Unfortunately, Debian (and apparently, Wine) haven't been managing this, and instead, the releases slip until Feature X is ready. Open Source and Free Software can be developed quickly, but on the other hand, when you're depending on Free Software's constantly evolving featureset, any particular "Feature X" can take a LONG time.

Re:That's Feature Deadlines, not Release Deadlines

[kbielefe]

it'll be ready in two month's time (which happens to perfectly coincide with the christmas shopping spree).

I can finally prove to everyone who thinks I'm crazy that I'm not the only person who does all their Christmas shopping at the Independence Day sales.

Re:That's Feature Deadlines, not Release Deadlines

[CarpetShark]

Hehh, well, I didn't mean that the marketing types were saying it right now ;)

Are WineHQ and CoderWavers enermies?

[julie-h]

I thought WineHQ was angry at CodeWavers for not giving back the code, that they have improved!?

Re:Are WineHQ and CoderWavers enermies?

[DarkOx]

No, No, WINE and codeweavers have always been pretty cozy as far as I know and are mostly the same people. Its transgameing or whatever their name is this week that you're thinking of.

Re:Are WineHQ and CoderWavers enermies?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're thinking of Transgaming.

Re:Are WineHQ and CoderWavers enermies?

[PitaBred]

Not CodeWeavers. They're good people, they do Crossover office and such. Mostly at Transgaming, who do the Cedega stuff (no longer WineX)

Geeks and testosterone

[CarpetShark]

Hmm. I'm not convinced that geeks lack testosterone, despite their usual small size. After all, geeks are generally male, so there must be some connection there with male hormones. Also, some geeks consider themselves slightly autistic, and autism is sometimes considered to be a form of "extreme male brain".

Re:Geeks and testosterone

[CarpetShark]

Actually, after looking at the photo, I won't even agree with the abnormal body suggestion. They all look like normal males to me.

Boring...

[introvertSoul]

Where are the chicks? What a boring conference it must have been!

Re:There are too many incompatible versions of WIN

[TeknoHog]

I've been getting into Linux music lately

So why use Windows tools any more?

This is not a troll, I use Linux and Free software to make music myself, for example Audacity, Ecasound and Soundtracker . These are definitely not the most advanced examples, but they suffice for me for now.

Will WINE be relevant?

[Eric Damron]

This is not a troll or flamebait. I really wonder how much longer the concept of running Windows applications on Linux will be relevant? WINE has been a slow moving product. I remember playing around with it ten years ago and to this day most applications fail to run properly under WINE. This isn't a statement about the quality of the development team but rather the difficulty in porting the libraries from a closed source OS that is continuously changing.

It just seems to me that Linux is coming into it's own. How much longer will it be before many programs are released for Windows and Linux? As more and more applications are released for both platforms WINE becomes less and less important.

I haven't purchased a new Windows program for some time now as Linux comes with everything I need for my day to day work. It would be nice to be able to run some of my older stuff under Linux but that's mostly games. I've supported WineX or whatever they are calling their product now days for years with monthly donations in the hopes that it will become very useful but still there are only a handful of games that run perfectly under WineX. Most don't run at all.

I'm thinking that rather that rewrite the Windows libraries we should concentrate on libraries like SDL that can be installed on both Windows and Linux thus giving the developer a uniform API that can targeted both OSes.

Re:Will WINE be relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've used it 10 years ago and you're still commenting?

Damn, I use wine to run 33 different Windows applications I *need* to run in linux, and they all work flawlessly.

Re:Will WINE be relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice to be able to run some of my older stuff under Linux but that's mostly games.

How much longer will you be relevant when you answer your own question in the same post.

-9 Redundant.

Re:Will WINE be relevant?

[orfanotna]

Assuming that Wine developers can get it to run most Windows apps, it'll be very relevant.

As long as there is even one old Windows app that they need, people are going to stick with Windows, or at least have a copy around just in case. I know some people whose killer app for Windows is Diablo 1.

New crossplatform development is great, but for most people, backward compatibility is absolutely essential.

Re:Will WINE be relevant?

[Mad Merlin]

That depends on who you're talking about, to the typical Emailer/web surfer, Wine is already irrelevant. They can already Email people and surf the web just fine with any number of native Linux programs.

At the other end of the spectrum though, you will have large companies that have a pile of internal applications that run exclusively on Win32, making a move to Linux extremely difficult or largely pointless if they needed to use QEmu/VMWare on every PC just to run their internal applications. This is where Wine really shines, for applications that are needed, but have a low chance of being ported to Linux, and for which no native application exists. In the future they may decide to rewrite the applications to be native to Linux, but the chances of doing that as a part of the initial transion are low, as the time required to develop and test such applications is generally non-trivial.

I think in general, Wine is one of the catalysts for Linux adoption, which, ironically, will at the same time will cause it's own irrelevance at an accelerated rate. Without Wine, Linux adoption would be much slower than it is right now, even if only initially, people like to stick with what they're familiar with. Every person I know who has tried out Linux (including myself), has attempted to run the programs they used to use under Wine. I can also point out that they usually find native applications that replace the functionality of the programs they were running under Wine. I certainly did, and I no longer have a use for Wine, I've been running Linux exclusively for about 2 years now.

The one sticking point for a lot of users is still games however. Few Win32 games will ever be ported to Linux, and finding native games that can act as a replacement can be very difficult except for some of the most popular games, for example, the Civilization series => FreeCiv. Not to say that there aren't any games available for Linux, but if there was no Wine, the list would be significantly shortened, and many of the games that people want to play have no equivalant.

I don't think Wine will ever be completely irrelevant, but as it gets better, it will drive itself that way.

Re:Will WINE be relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

How much longer will it be before many programs are released for Windows and Linux?

The "many programs" is not the problem. Usually it is one or two programs that run only on Windows and you can't replace them and you can't even make a replacement software because of closed specifications. I would be very happy to get a working wine, that would allow me to switch one office from Windows to Linux.

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[TeknoHog]

If you think that Wine is not an emulator, can you please give one example of software that IS an emulator?

BTW, Lame Ain't Mp3 Encoder, but it is, my head explodes!-)

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[m50d]

It emulates (imitates) the windows API. Something which emulates is an emulator.

Yep...

[Illissius]

...so ironically enough, people will move to Linux+wine instead as the path of least resistance :).

Which would be the case if the new APIs mattered at all to existing applications, which they don't -- they will continue working just as well as they always have with the existing ones. Microsoft is quite anal about this. So no need to emulate Longhorn until apps actually depend on it, which won't be till some time after it's released, I think.

A.V.O.A.T.

[glamslam]

Check out the group photo

Which, iconically, is the same group photo displayed on the website for A.V.O.A.T. (the Association of Virgins Over the Age of 20)...

directx 9

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is no one talking about this.

http://www.linux-gamers.net/modules/news/article.p hp?storyid=793

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[m50d]

I know that's true theory. But playing games on wine it's patently not the case. Hopefully it's just a lack of optimization because the wine team are still busy implementing more API, but the slowdown is definitely there.

Perhaps...

[Fished]

Perhaps those that can't work the Wine team should put in "not supported" messages for? That way, folks wouldn't tend to blame WINE, but the application.

Wine has definitely matured in the last year or so

[Anonymous Coward]

Last year around this time, only a few apps I ran were running bug-free, and it still had a clunky config. Now, most of the apps I have tested run nearly flawlessly, and at full speed, in fact, running the sega genesis emulator, gens, runs faster than the linux native version (the linux native port is half-assed IMHO) and I no longer get sound clipping issues.

if you run ubuntu, check their downloads page for an up to date repository.
I'm currently seeing if GunBound will run on wine, so far so good, it installs well, and is now downloading the game data files and updates.
I have to see if the game itself will run well, I doubt it due to my hardware limitations (yes, my computer is old, 1998/1999 old. I need an up to date setup, or at least a new FPGA board with a 1 ghz PIII on it and a 32 mb PCI vga card)
anyway, the fact it installs flawlessly is a good sign, and the release released in february ran photoshop without a hitch.
Win is looking good, may eventually be worthy of supplying a windows compatibility layer within desktop linux distributions. (microsoft will pitch a fit, little they can do since it's a free implementation using free code, installing directX stuff and so on can be added later)
Then again, if microsoft is wise, they'll support wine on linux, because hey, another platform to push their products on, such as MS office, yes, despite OpenOffice, there are still people who prefer msoffice. I'm not one though.

Wine is now looking very good and promising, I was very impressed with the latest release.
The bridge between windows and linux is almost complete.

Re:There are too many incompatible versions of WIN

[vinn]

I think there's three reasons, two of which are undeniable. First, there's a lot of legacy apps out there that are unsupported and won't be updated because the vendor went out of business. Personally I support 3 applications like that. So it becomes a matter of finding a native replacement which may not exist or be worth switching too if works with Wine. Second, there's a phenomenal amount of software that's been created for Windows. All kinds of odd little apps for doing things like interior design and such that don't exist on Linux. Finally, and this is the item a lot of people will disagree with, many commercial applications are just plain better on Windows. More effort has been put into designing UI's and such. (For the record, I personally use free software always as my first choice based on the principle of free, as in libre, software.)

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

UAE - emulator
Basilisk - emulator
CherryOS - stolen emulator

Wine - API implementation
OpenGL - API implementation

Demand and such

[ewisnor]

All the money being put into wine should be spent on giving linux the push it needs to entice corporations to look past their assholes when it comes to viewing market demand.
Just because there are significantly less Linux users than Windows and Mac users does not mean that there isn't a viable demand for a native port. Also at that, it would give people looking at Linux as a primary OS the final reason to make the switch.
I guess I'm still bitter about Disney funding Wine to get Photoshop to run.

Re:Demand and such

[Mad Merlin]

Arguably, there are significantly more Linux users than there are Mac users, although unfortunately I can't say the same for Windows, yet.

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[Dr. Evil]

I think the distinction made more sense 10 years ago when Wine was held alongside stuff like SoftPC, BOCHS and stuff like that.

The distinction was that the emulators were designed to emulate the CPU's instruction set, which resulted in dramatically worse performance, whereas Wine was restricted to the Intel architecture and just implemented the Win16/Win32s/Win32 API.

I don't think the distinction is all that meaningful anymore.

Wine perpetually several years behind...

[mi]

As it is finally shaping up for the 32-bit world, both Windows and Unixes are moving into 64-bit.

Will Wine be able to run 64-bit Windows programs on FreeBSD or Linux amd64? Not any time soon...

Running 32-bit Windows programs on a 64-bit Unix? Forget it...

Re:Wine perpetually several years behind...

[haeger]

...Unixes are moving into 64-bit...

What? I don't mean to nitpick but I do believe that Unixes have been 64bit for quite some time. SGI/SUN/Tru64/AIX.... are all 64bit and have been for about 10 years or more. I wouldn't call that "moving into", I'd call that "well established".

Unix is not only (sort of)GNU/Linux or BSD. There are other machines out there other than your precious x86.

.haeger

Re:Wine perpetually several years behind...

[mi]

Unix is not only (sort of)GNU/Linux or BSD. There are other machines out there other than your precious x86.

True, but only x86 makes sense, when the discussion is about WINE.

Re:Wine perpetually several years behind...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually running 32-bit Windows apps on 64-bit Linux works fine. In fact, I'm doing that right now. What was your point? That it couldn't happen or that it wasn't a good idea?

Re:Wine perpetually several years behind...

[Papineau]

Running 32-bit Windows programs on a 64-bit Unix? Forget it...

32 bit Wine (and Win32 apps) runs today on a AMD64 running a 64 bit distro if you have installed the 32 bit libs for your distro.

It's not 100% native, but then running any Win32 program on a 64 bit OS isn't either...

Re:Wine perpetually several years behind...

[mi]

32 bit Wine (and Win32 apps) runs today on a AMD64 running a 64 bit distro if you have installed the 32 bit libs for your distro.

Really? Khmm... Someone ought to fix the FreeBSD port of WINE. It is currently marked i386-only... Thanks.

Re:Wine perpetually several years behind...

[Papineau]

The FreeBSD port (maintained by Gerald Pfeiffer) has been know to be broken in the past year, sometimes for a couple of months. Not necessarily Gerald's fault, sometimes there were new features introduced which just didn't work on FreeBSD until somebody took some time to port it (or FreeBSD supported something Wine began relying on). But when there are no Wine developers besides the FreeBSD port maintainer who uses it, it can take some time to implement those.

Also, I don't know what's the status of FreeBSD on AMD64, ie if the kernel lets you use 32 bit code easily or not. If you can't drop a "normal" 32 bit app/libs and have it work, tough luck.

Anyway, the proper way to get it fixed is a note to the maintainer, not on slashdot.

Re:Wine perpetually several years behind...

[mi]

Also, I don't know what's the status of FreeBSD on AMD64, ie if the kernel lets you use 32 bit code easily or not. If you can't drop a "normal" 32 bit app/libs and have it work, tough luck.

It can run FreeBSD/i386 binaries and Linux/i386 binaries.

I'm more interested in Windows/64 binaries -- there is no real reason, WINE should not be able to run them (the Word-viewer is a particularly useful "little" utility), but I'm sure, it will not for a long time...

Re:Wine perpetually several years behind...

[Papineau]

I'm more interested in Windows/64 binaries

Don't expect this next week. Some parts of the needed work are there, but there's not a big enough push for it right now, so nobody really works on it.

Re:Wine perpetually several years behind...

[mi]

Exactly. Hence the Subject of this whole thread :-)

Re:There are too many incompatible versions of WIN

[TeknoHog]

I agree with your general idea. However, the grandparent was specifically about "getting into Linux music". If that is the goal, I think it is sensible to get rid of Windows apps.

What a sausagefest.

[Anonymous Coward]

D-oh, what a bunch of *kh*-osers.

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[samjam]

It implements the API (API = interface), it may imitiate or emulate what goes on behind the interface.

Sam

Interesting People

[clintcan]

Hmm... I noticed Andrew Tridgell as one of the wine developers in the picture. Isn't he the SAMBA guy who made that BK interoperability hack?

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[Koiu Lpoi]

You know, a CPU is basically just a bunch of transistors.

The photo

[Anonymous Coward]

take a moment looking at the photo to realise that these guys are in a way the entire microsoft multi-billion dollar corporation.

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[Papineau]

Tridge isn't listed in the AUTHORS file, nor in the Changelog file. He works on Samba.

And for the emulator part, Wine is actually another implementation of a standard (the Win32 API), along with various parts regarding the ABI.

You don't call a Yamah CD player an emulator either, right? After all, it's only an implementation of a Phillips/Sony standard, and for the disk, it's the same thing...

Re:There are too many incompatible versions of WIN

[Lost Found]

I've had the opposite experience. About the only app on Windows that has been better than its Linux counterpart is Office, and that's a general statement because there are some things I've found OpenOffice to do better.

On Windows, though, up until recently you had to pay for a ZIP file program (or suffer through a nag screen to use one)... add to that FTP, a general purpose text editor, a graphics package, CD/DVD burner, etc. That means that when the free ones offer enough similar (or better) functionality, I consider them "better".

I'm quite happy with my linux alternatives. However, I will agree with you that we need some serious work in terms of UI usability. KDE seems to be doing a decent job in general, but there is still more work to be done there and tons more work to be done elsewhere.

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

Far as Win32 goes, it implements the API, it does not act as a translation layer. A x86 PE apps runs just as "natively" on WINE as it does on windows. It doesn't emulate windows, since it doesn't load Windows device drivers ... though the Direct3D stuff is looking a lot like emulation to me, however. Filesystem is in some sense emulated as well.

So parts of it are emulation I suppose.

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[Papineau]

Did it ever occured to you that it might be the fault of an underlying driver (ATI, NVIDIA) if you're seeing slowdowns?

I don't say that it is actually the case, just a possibility. Along with the fact that OpenGL will do things in software if the hardware can't, instead of not listing the possibility to the program as DirectX on Windows does.

It could also be things related to thread priorities (Windows and Linux don't have the same rules to determine which thread will be the next to run on the CPU, so some games don't get their optimal rotation around threads). Or because of some unoptimized codepath.

To correctly determine if/where is a slowdown, we need to run benchmarks on both Windows and Wine, on the same hardware. Even then, things like drivers can change the results, on no fault from Wine. Ideally each benchmark (at least in the beginning) would exercise a single aspect of the system, to more easily pinpoint where work is needed for more performance.

Linux desktop apps don't match Windows apps

[isdnip]

Depends a whole lot on your applications. I couldn't possibly switch my day-to-day desktop to Linux because the apps just don't cut it for me. The idea of a Windows server makes me cringe, but for me the Linux desktop is a spare-time toy.

Top of the list is email! There's nothing on Linux like Eudora, which some people may have kind of gotten working under WINE, but it beats me how. (Of course getting anything working under WINE is a challenge, given the "programmer's toy" setup. I am not a programmer or a Unix wizard.) Nothing on Linux supports POP3 like Eudora for multiple-client users (delete mail from server after x days, mark individual messages or selection-ranges for deletion from server, to get spam off while leaving the mail on).

Then there's Access, a perfectly straigtforward MS hack GUI front end for its mediocre Jet db engine. Linux has lots of programmer's databases, but nothing as easy to use (for fairly elaborate multi-table queries) as Access, and -- more importantly -- nothing that can read MDB databases. Since there are plenty of mission-critical applications written in Access (remember, IANAP so I don't write 'em, I just use 'em), this gap is serious. Maybe Crossover can handle it by now, but that's proof of why WINE is still needed, but not yet adequately stable.

I also use MapInfo, a commercial GIS program. Sure, Linux supports GRASS, but that's a different type of GIS, an older-style command-line system that is quite hard to learn and which doesn't support the same set of commercial databases that MapInfo does -- quite a bit of vertical application files, to be sure. (The FCC uses MapInfo and posts quite a few nice free files.) I don't recall how close WINE came to supporting this; it wasn't 100%, but if it were, it would again fill in a real gap.

Those are just three examples of Windows apps that I use very frequently. Yes, Linux comes with a lot. I generally use "Old Man Driva", installation of which is like a trip to a software store with somebody else's credit card. And the Debian repositories used by many systems are likewise rich. But there's a lot of repetitive software in the (virtual) box (lookie! I am 1337 h4X0r! I can code the same function in *that* language!), a lot of developer's tools, and a lot of special-purpose little programs. Since nobody really owns it, nobody's paying to fill in the holes. Praise be to Sun for giving us OpenOffice. Praise be to Mozilla for its fine work. But the bulk of the world's desktop developers are still coding for Windows.

September 30th?

[fuzza]

Does that mean we can celebrate Serenity's release with two sets of Wine?

(Actually no, here in Oz we probably won't get it by then :( )

RTFA

[bluGill]

If you had Read The Fine Article. You would have known that the WINE people invited the SAMBA people to their conference (and the two groups worked to plan their conferences one week apart in nearby locations) because there are things both projects need to do, so they may as well do them in compatible ways.

Both products need to emulate case insensitive names on a case sensitive filesystem. Both projects need to support Windows style file locks, which do not have a good Unix equivalent. They may as well do these the same, otherwise it will confuse everyone. (In the latter case it can result in corrupt files if they don't work together!)

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it emulates various Microsoft implementations of the Win32 API. Bug-compatible is the goal.

LinWin

[sn0wflake]

What I'd like to see is a Linux distribution centered around Wine so we all get the best of two worlds for gratis.

Very

[hayden]

I really wonder how much longer the concept of running Windows applications on Linux will be relevant?

It'll be very relevent for older windows apps that don't run on recent windows versions. For me it's specifically old games that I occasionally like to play (such as Fallout).

[OT] About the virginity myths (was:A.V.O.A.T.)

[Sun]

It's really interesting how such myths spread. I think the most interesting things are just how much computer geeks are NOT foreign to sex.

Now, some of the new people I'm not sure about. If you take the intersection of the people from this year's photo and last year's photo, you'll have a hard time finding a wine hacker appearing in both that is not either married, or has had a GF for over half a year (You will find me in the bottom row in the new picture. Personally, I more or less belong in both categories, having been married + now having a GF for over half a year).

As for the general myth - I took an online "sex quize" a few months ago. One of the questions was, unsuprisingly, "are you a virgin?". Another question was "are you a trecky". At the end, they showed some statistics.

• Over 40,000 people took the quiz at the time I took it.
• The percentage of virgins among the treckies was lower than the percentage of virgins in the general population.

In other words, being a trecky makes you MORE likely to have sex, not less.

Just some points to think about.

Shachar

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[FooBarWidget]

zsnes is an emulator. wine isn't.

Re:There are too many incompatible versions of WIN

[Bert64]

Well getting stuck with unsupported applications is one of the biggest dangers of using propriatory software.
You also can't guarantee that these apps will continue working on newer versions of windows nor can you guarantee that older versions of windows will run on newer hardware, meaning you'l need to continue using old versions on old hardware which will become increasingly dangerous (no security patches) and difficult (no support for new protocols such as ipv6) to use in a networked environment.

Re:There are too many incompatible versions of WIN

[joebutton]

>> I've been getting into Linux music lately

>So why use Windows tools any more?

The poster's talking about VST plugins. Many Mac / Windows musicians are addicted to these. Linux tools like Ardour will bring a lot more musicians to Linux if they support the plugins people are used to.

CodeWeavers is awesome-

[gatzke]

For $40 you can easily deal with MS office documents and other legacy issues. I have used it for years and I have been quite happy. Well worth the money!

Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator

[m50d]

It's the same hardware and I'm using the nvidia binary drivers on linux, which are supposed to be pretty good. I know unreal tournament on linux native performs just as well as on windows on this system, wheras some programs, I'm thinking in particular C&C series, definitely run slower on wine. I suppose benchmarking UT native linux and windows version running under wine might be a good way to compare.

The fiscal Wine's enemy is QEMU.

[Anonymous Coward]

If Wine-0.9 is dead then QEMU-Accelerator-0.7 is live!.

Imagine running QEMU-Accelerator-0.7 with Windows 95 OSR 2.5 inside of Pentium-4 3.6 GHz.

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