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Jeremy White on WINE Installer Challenge
polar_bear` writes "Last week, CodeWeavers issued a "Installer Challenge" to improve Wine "until it can run nearly every Windows program." Linux Magazine interviewed CodeWeavers Founder and CEO Jeremy White about the challenge, Wine on OS X on Intel, the Linux desktop and what is ahead for CodeWeavers. White has some pretty interesting answers."
There are plenty of people who play new games like World of Warcraft and Half Life 2 under Wine without speed issues, so I'm not sure exactly where your claims are coming from.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
If you're looking for more information about this, Wine Weekly News for last week has two writeups on the issue. Basically the last of some very ugly and gritty DCOM work and related items has been finished in Wine. Installers are notorious for using these sorts of features and hence have generally been hit or miss in the past. This is a big step forward for Wine, sometime in the near future the vast majority of installers should work properly (hence the challenge).
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
That's surprising. I'll have to give it a try. However, fairly simple apps like DC++ (because Valknut still kinda sucks) are sluggish and buggy if you can get them to run at all.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
He must have been hard at work. Just not sure if it was sexy or not.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Even Windows has problems with that task.
That, too, I believe, is being worked on, with all the dialog and wm rewrites.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
Is he on drugs, or what? He can barely string together a coherent sentence, let alone manage to simplify a project like Wine.... From the article: What we're doing right now, is we've spent a great deal of energy over the last year, sort of a lot of unsexy, dirty, nasty, grinding work that has the very sexy, exciting work that has the result that we believe many applications will install, and we believe that those that won't install will be very easy to get install. We're very hopeful that with this, if we can get some community participation and community help that we can go from right now, where you have a 50-50 chance having an app install, maybe a bit less than that, to you're pretty sure that your app will install.
If anyone out there can decipher what he's on about, please help !!
because Valknut still kinda sucks) I hear this on hubs all the time. Just out of curiousity, what's wrong with Valknut? I haven't gotten a straight answer from anybody yet, other than the fact that its interface is not like DC++'s. I've gotten really comfortable with it and have worked out the little kinks, and I must say, I absolutely love it. I've booted into Windows once in a while and revved up DC++, and I can't find anything so great about it. Sure, the interface is different. but I'd go as far as saying that Valknut might even be more functional.
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
Maybe it's just the bad aftertaste left by that unbelievably ugly Qt theme they use instead of the default. The first time I used Valknut (back when it was dcgui-qt or whatever), I abandoned it in disgust because it was so ugly. It looks worse than the default GTK1 theme. It took me a while to figure out that you could change the theme and font sizes. Is it so strange that I might want my Qt apps to use the FREAKING KDE DEFAULTS? Argh.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
I don't think that having a bunch of people try their favorite app in WINE only to have it install but not run will do much to grow the WINE community. What does he expect these people to do, wait around patiently, every few months running the installer again, and thinking, "Gee, that's cool, it installs. This WINE thing is awesome!"?
I would think that if someone tries their app in wine just to have install but then crash they'll just go back to running it on Windows and not give WINE a second (or third) thought.
He's talking about developers dipshit. You know, those hard working people you mooch off and then go on to give shit to.
How we know is more important than what we know.
My problem with Wine is that what little does install doesn't run. I've tried several packages and haven't found anything yet that works well enough to want to use it. I don't want to do anything too fancy. If I could get Quickbooks running then I'd be happy.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
If it wasn't for you, your gutter language, bad attitude, and your omniscient understanding of the sublimininal messages buried deep inside of that article where would I be?
Using proprietary software.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'd be apt to agree...
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
"His experience with the project was bad! And he dares ask if any improvement has been made in the area he had problems with!! He's a TROLL!"
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
If what you say is true, I may try it again at some point. (currently I do not have Linux running on my primary system). But last time I tried WINE, people had told me the same things: "No really! It's fast! 90% as fast! Some benchmarks even show WINE as running _FASTER_ than windows!"
And so of course I tried it, and about ten minutes later when a (main, as opposed to loading screen)window had finally displayed I tried hitting a key and watched nothing happen for another minute or two. Though it actually recognized some hardware that I couldnt even get to work correctly in Native linux, it was still completely unusable as far as speed was concerned.
So, that's the only place my claims are coming from: based on my own experiences. Unless there's a default "really really slow" mode I need to turn off that nobody has told me about, it's just really really slow.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
But everyone else's experience is the exact opposite to yours.. are you so far up your own ass that you can't recognise you might be doing something wrong and ask in the correct forum for help?
How we know is more important than what we know.
For people to adopt something, it must be EASIER.
Now as far as games go - how many home computers have you seen, that didn't have a game or two installed on it? Not many probably, because the gaming market is that big.
Anyway, I actually bought Codeweavers -it's very good. I also bought the Transgaming software, and it's pretty good too, but requires some work. I am optimistic that Codeweaver will introduce an excellent product.
..........FULL STOP.
Aww...I'm disappointed now. I thought they were finally gonna make it easy to install WINE itself under Linux... Maybe they'll put it out as an autopackage? But then again, it probably needs system integration :/ When a new Linux user can click an icon or something that says "install wine" and then it's ready to use without jumping through hoops, Just Works[tm] style...that's when Wine will be actually worth while.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
If you were trying to run a 3D game or something, you may not have had the proper drivers installed to run it well. The only open source drivers for nVidia and ATI cards are pretty poor in the 3D dept, and these are the only ones that come with most distros by default. You'll have to use the proprietary drivers for decent performance.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
That's the attitude that keeps most non-Linux users from ever switching. Thanks a lot for helping the cause Ass...
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
You may have to buy a copy of Crossover Office. It's basically the pay version of wine, but luckily you get tech support to help you get it actually running ;)
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
It's been a while since I've used it, but I remember that file lists with certain characters would just not load. I had to figure out which one of its numbered lists was the one I wanted, edit it to remove the offending character, and try again.
Then again, downloading from multiple sources is always fun, which neither DC++ nor i2hub can do, as far as I know.
This sig is only here so people stop skipping the last lines of my posts.
While I'm not aware of any open source 3D accelerated drivers for NVidia cards, there are the DRI drivers for Radeon cards 9200/9250 and under which are very good. I'm using them on my Radeon Mobility 7500 card and after enabling S3TC, speeds are very impressive, probably about equal to that of the Windows drivers. S3TC isn't enabled by default because of potential IP issues, but even without it, the drivers are still quite fast.
There currently is an active project to get the DRI drivers working on the R300 series of Radeons (ie, the rest of them), but I'm not aware of anyone who has tried them, and I don't have the hardware necessary to try them myself. The page itself strongly suggests that these drivers are not finished or stable at the moment however, so try at your own risk.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
I don't pretend to speak for developers everywhere (ok, so I do) but if we have to put up with whining cheapskates who want to turn developers into slaves to their every whim I say let em stay on their proprietary platform.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I realize this is Slashdot, but perhaps consider something along the lines of "Last time I tried Wine with (program) it had some pretty serious issues in terms of speed, hardware was definitely not the issue either. Has anyone tried (program) since? I didn't spend much time fiddling with it because it isn't really a big deal to me, but it'd be cool if it worked. Do all applications suffer from such a speed hit in Wine, I've been told that they don't but haven't seen any evidence of such. Can anyone suggest an alternative to (program) if it isn't likely to work in Wine?" next time, if you really are looking for information.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
It's called an "Installer Challenge" because the goal is to run all the installers, soon. Not all windows programs, soon.
Not going to happen in the 'soon' time frame, or likely even the 'not too long' time frame. Wine is still horribly unstable, unless you're using one of the programs that the developers of wine uses it to run. ANd there's far more than just MS based installers, even though MS has supplied an installer for many years now, there's tons of developers who seem to refuse to use it.
And, whenever wine gets an MS installer working 100%, of course, the installer gets changed.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I've been playing through Baldur's Gate 2 (and it's expansion) on my Pentium M 1Ghz laptop for a while using a CVS snapshot and no special configuration. Works well enough for me.
They've concentrated on Office and gotten that running. I would think a better next step would be to focus on another class of applications and get all of the programs in that set working. Like, for instance, get all Windows personal finance software working, then move on to graphic apps, or sound apps, etc... To me that would be a more logical progression than the shotgun approach they want to take.
You search for the file you want, sort by filesize, start one file downloading. It's better to wait until after you are getting that file (i.e. after you've retrieved the other user's share list and the transfer begins) to try add other sources.
Now, go back to the tab with the search results, it's an option on a right click menu which should let you add the other sources to the running download.
Not only can you get multiple sources, you can do this for the same file in multiple hubs, providing they match up in terms of file size.
And after you've got all your sources running, you may find that you are being throttled, or your speed is slowing. Close the connection to the first user you were connecting to, and the download should re-establish itself by connecting to the next user you added to the list of sources.
As it's Direct Connect, these downloads will run as long as DC++ is left on, even if you are no longer connected to the hub where you originally found the sources. Obviously, without the hub you can't close and re-open the connection though.
DC++ is sort of like a DIY BitTorrent I guess.
"He says his personal user experience was poor! I _DEMAND_ Documented proof! How dare he question the greatness of the project based only on his own experiences!"
/does not run any better now/.
I _DID_ spend time fiddling, and _EVERY_ program ran like SHIT (oh no! He said "SHIT"! He's definatly a troll now! Nobody uses that word just because it's suitable!)
Whenever I try wine, it's always because someone has said "It's better now!". Then I try it and it's _not_. Do I have Evidence? No, of course not. Do you have evidence that your experience with wine is good? Of course you dont have that either. We're talking about opinions. My opinion is "ten minutes to launch notepad(for fucking example, don't say "Oh, well notepad is a poor performer try program X") followed by slower performance than I can get from typing in the binary manually, that's just too slow. Do I have evidence? No. Do I need evidence? I'm talking about my own personal experience. NO, I do not need evidence.
I dont ask you for evidence that wine is suddenly going to wrun better on my computer, I ask only "does it run better now?" and see only replies of "Yes, it has always run well, you must be a liar and a troll." meaning: oh, if it's always run well to you, I guess it
If you saw "OMFG WINE SUX0RSSS!!111111" and nothing else, you're just a moron. Do not reply.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
omfggeniusINeverThoughtOfThat!!!!
"My wine runs slow, what's wrong?"
"WINE IS NOT SLOW. YOU ARE A TROLL."
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I never dared try anything which would normally be CPU-intensive (other than one hour where I tried Photoshop- got as far as the open file dialog!)
Just running the most basic programs, trying to see if I could find anything at all that would run at a useable speed. Found nothing, tried a few things, nothing helped, asked around, was told "well of course it's not going to be as fast as native windows", and figured that meant "people who use wine don't mind how horribly slow it is"
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Agreed... he's trying to make installers work so you don't have to "bootstrap" off a Windows installation to get programs installed, and people complain anyway. It's like "Geez, the Linux kernel sucks--I heard they're adding $REALLY_COOL_FEATURE but it sux because my $CRAPPY_WINDOWS_ONLY_HARDWARE doesn't work." Be happy for what they are doing. It'd be great if "Full Windows Compatibility" or close to it could be a selling point of e.g., Ubuntu. Then you can say to someone: "You can buy Windows for $200, or you can buy Ubuntu for $5 (media cost)--Ubuntu is cheaper, better, and it runs Windows programs too!
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
It doesn't matter what everyone else's experience is. This person is trying WINE and it's not working for him. He can run both Linux and Windows successfully. He can't run WINE. Ergo, there's a problem. Hint: the problem is not with the user.
Are you associated with WINE development? If you are, they should throw you out on your ear. You are hurting uptake of their project.
Interestingly enough, Minitab works better in Wine than in QEmu/Win98 or QEmu/Win2k, in some specific situations (triggered by things I was required to do for assignments) Minitab would crash under QEmu, and I was unable to find a workaround, but trying the same thing in Minitab under Wine produces no crash, so in the end it wasn't an issue for me.
But the fact that you have failed to mention even a single program that you had issues with, or even tried for that matter suggests to me that you either 1) Haven't bothered to try Wine recently enough to remember why you were trying it at all, or 2) Haven't tried Wine at all. Saying that "everything" you tried with Wine ran "slower than a Pentium 75" on your 3.2 Ghz machine seems dubious at best. Even an actual emulator will run things considerably faster than that, and Wine is considerably faster than an emulator. Add together an inflammatory attitude, baseless (rarely heard) complaints and a total lack of willingness to back up said complaints and I'm not at all surprised to see you get modded down, you shouldn't be either.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Installers were the next app to focus. If you can't install it you can't run it. They could work on one more hack for each app to make it install, but in the long run that just makes for ugly code, and it costs more. Most of the hard code that installers need is also needed by some other app, so by doing this work now they not only get installers to work for all the future apps they focus on, but they eliminate one area where they would have to create some hack to get that other app to work. (and good luck not breaking everything else with that hack)
Focusing on one app at a time might be the right way to go. However installers are an app too, and they are rather fundamental to Windows.
Wine is a breeze to install compared to Cygwin. Cygwin uses a webinstaller to download packages from mirroring sites, but keeps the folders for those sites separate. Cygwin works well with dependencies, but I think it wants to download too much. What if I just want one program? Wine is great despite Microsoft holding back information about how the system works. If users can administrate Linux, they can work with Wine.