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."

Comments

Yes but...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

...does Ron Jeremy have to say about it?

hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Lord Bitman]

Last I tried it on my 3.2ghz with 2gb of ddr ram, everything ran slow enough to not be usable. Yeah, I know an emulator will always be slower than the real thing, but shouldnt it at least perform as well as my 75mhz running windows 95?

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Mad Merlin]

I doubt you're serious, but to those reading this, Wine is quite fast regardless of whether or not you consider it an emulator or not (it is not). It isn't subject to the same kind of performance hit that an emulator like QEmu/VMWare/VirtualPC faces because Wine does not emulate hardware. I can for example play Diablo II under Wine at roughly 90% native speed, some applications are faster than this, some aren't quite as fast. Here's a few benchmarks if you don't believe me.

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.

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Nasarius]

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.

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[rincebrain]

That, too, I believe, is being worked on, with all the dialog and wm rewrites.

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[someguy456]

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.

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Nasarius]

It's nothing specific, I suppose. It just seems a little disorganized and annoying (like the multi-download prompts).

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.

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Lord Bitman]

"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!"

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Lord Bitman]

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.

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[QuantumG]

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?

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[ZephyrXero]

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.

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[ZephyrXero]

That's the attitude that keeps most non-Linux users from ever switching. Thanks a lot for helping the cause Ass...

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Reorax]

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.

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Mad Merlin]

That's not entirely true.

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.

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[QuantumG]

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.

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Mad Merlin]

You'd be amazed the difference in response you'd get if you were even somewhat polite rather than hostile or mocking, especially when you present no more solid evidence than "OMFG WINE SUX0RSSS!!111111".

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.

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Lukey Boy]

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.

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

DC++ can do the multiple sources thing, definitely 0.401 and later (and last I checked it was past 0.6xx stable releases).

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.

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Lord Bitman]

"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!"

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 /does not run any better now/.

If you saw "OMFG WINE SUX0RSSS!!111111" and nothing else, you're just a moron. Do not reply.

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Lord Bitman]

omfggeniusINeverThoughtOfThat!!!!

"My wine runs slow, what's wrong?"
"WINE IS NOT SLOW. YOU ARE A TROLL."

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Lord Bitman]

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"

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[ThinkingInBinary]

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!

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Malor]

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.

Re:hey.. is wine usable yet?

[Mad Merlin]

Well Wine certainly is moving forward in leaps and bounds, I'm not aware of any specific speed gains, the focus is usually on completeness and compatibility first, but then again I've never had speed issues with Wine, quite the opposite if anything. The one example you cite (notepad) launches in under a second on my relatively modest laptop with Wine. I can tell you about the Windows programs that I've run without issue (speed or otherwise) in Wine before, programs including Diablo II, Xnews, WinPar, Winamp, and Minitab for varying reasons, but I guess you're not interested in hearing about that. What I can repeat is that I've never had speed issues with Wine, it's more an issue of compatibility than anything, if something works, it works pretty quickly.

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.

A lot of this was covered in WWN

[Mad Merlin]

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).

Hard work done

[SpaceLifeForm]

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.

He must have been hard at work. Just not sure if it was sexy or not.

Re:Hard work done

[jd]

Well, apparently the work was unsexy, but the work that the work had to do was. Now, if work is doing work independent of the work, they have either invented a functioning AI or they are stuck in a recursive call.

Re:Hard work done

[Anonymous Coward]

>inventory

>take tea and no tea

>show both to door

Good Luck

[BinaryLobster]

Even Windows has problems with that task.

This Jeremy guy cracks me up...

[fodi]

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 !!

Re:This Jeremy guy cracks me up...

[Richard Dick Head]

Dammit Jim, he's a engineer not a politician!

In any case, have you ever been interviewed? Were you perfectly coherent throughout? Say no.

Well, now that I think of it, there was one interview that went perfectly...the one that got me a summer stock job.

Manager: Are you willing to throw around 20-80 lb boxes for 35 hours a week?

Me: Yeah

Manager: Can you come in at 4 AM?

Me: Yeah Manager: Alright, if your ok with $7.50/hr you're hired.

Me: OK

Re:This Jeremy guy cracks me up...

[indifferent children]

Is he on drugs, or what? He can barely string together a coherent sentence, let alone manage to simplify a project like Wine

Yeah, that's going to be a real handicap seeing as how Wine is written in 'English' (the developers just wouldn't go for English++, dammit). You should see their codebase, it looks like James Joyce and ee cummings got into a pie-throwing contest, but with words.

Re:This Jeremy guy cracks me up...

[Markus_UW]

Hahaha good one. English ++ haha...

Ohh, my app installs, I'll join the community! Not

[Quarters]

We're not making promises yet around your app working, okay? Let me be clear, it's not as wonderful a thing as it sounds. But this is sort of step one, once we get everything to install, then hopefully the community of people who try Wine or try CrossOver will grow dramatically because suddenly the experience when you go to run an application is "Oh hey! It installs." You can get in the game at least.

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.

Re:Ohh, my app installs, I'll join the community!

[QuantumG]

He's talking about developers dipshit. You know, those hard working people you mooch off and then go on to give shit to.

Re:Ohh, my app installs, I'll join the community!

[toddbu]

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.

Re:Ohh, my app installs, I'll join the community!

[Quarters]

Wow, thanks for your civil answer. It should have been extremely clear to me that he meant developers when he used phrases like, "community of people who try Wine", and "the experience when you go to run an application is 'Oh hey! It installs.'" How dumb of me not to interpret those phrase as "community of developers" and "the experience when developers to to try an application is 'Oh hey, I have some work to do."

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?

Re:Ohh, my app installs, I'll join the community!

[QuantumG]

Using proprietary software.

A price quote from TFA...

[Mad Merlin]

"Sometimes what we do is really a dirty job. We let people run IE on Linux, and that's just sick and wrong..."

I'd be apt to agree...

Re:A price quote from TFA...

[KiloByte]

apt-able IE? That's scary.

Game support and ease of use

[spineboy]

These will be the 2 key issues to get morepeople to use this and Linux. My Mom and Dad wil NOT /can not be bothered to look around the internet for various dependencies to make a program to work. Why? - cause with Windows all you need to do usually - is just click on the install button, and occasionally automagically update one's drivers.

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.

Re:Game support and ease of use

[Samrobb]

For people to adopt something, it must be EASIER.

I have to respectfully disagree. I've seen data that indicates people are extremely unlikely to change their habits for only a perceived marginal improvement.

In other words - making it "easier" won't get people to adopt it. It has to be obviously, noticably, incredibly, "Wow! I've gotta get me some of that!" easier before people will even start to THINK of adopting it.

What about Linux Installation?

[ZephyrXero]

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.

Re:What about Linux Installation?

[IamTheRealMike]

You know, that's one of the key selling points of CrossOver - it comes in a Loki setup. Why no autopackage? Well, I guess Mike is just a slacker ;)

Re:What about Linux Installation?

[Mad Merlin]

Any distro that includes Wine on the CDs or in it's repository (which I'd imagine is at least 95% of them) already does this. Open up your package manager, search for Wine and install it. How is that more difficult than searching on Google for Wine, downloading an installer and running it?

I think the real problem here is that people are stuck in the mindset of "must go download an installer and install it manually" rather than "let the package manager do the work for me". The reason for this of course is that Windows has no package management, so most people are used to doing things the painful and manual way, which is "easy". Using a package manager to install and manage your packages is exponentially easier and less headache inducing than the mess of installers and uninstallers that you face on Windows. The day there is an equivalent to "emerge --sync; emerge -uD world" for Windows is the day it might be worth the hassle of messing with the absolutely braindead method of installing and uninstalling software in Windows.

Re:What about Linux Installation?

[IamTheRealMike]

It's more difficult because broken, out of date or non-exsistant Wine packages are very common. For instance, where is the Wine package in Fedora? Why did Debian release a update fixing a non-existant security bug in Wine? Why did the official Wine Red Hat packager have to rewrite the Gentoo ebuilds for them as they were so broken?

Re:What about Linux Installation?

[Mad Merlin]

You're probably right, but I think the blame lies in the fact that Wine is still alpha software. The roughly monthly "releases" are just a snapshot of CVS, I'm relatively sure they're not tested beyond that, certainly not with the rigor you would expect for a 1.0 release or even a beta release, because they're not really a release at all. The fact that Wine is a rapidly moving target also doesn't help matters.

As to Fedora packages, there are RH7.3 through FC3 packages here, as well as numerous other binary packages. I won't claim I've used them as I haven't, but they do appear to be there. With regards to Mandrake and Gentoo packages (which I have used), they have nearly all worked quite well (the exception being one which had some issues with regards to wineserver, but I don't think the blame there lies in the packaging). Considering that Wine is still alpha software, I think it works pretty well the majority of the time, that or I've been very lucky. If you're looking for something that isn't quite as alpha, you should probably look at Crossover Office.

Re:What about Linux Installation?

[ZephyrXero]

Well, on my Gentoo machine after i did an "emerge wine" there were no signs of it even being there. There were no desktop additions; I stick in a Windows CD and it still doesn't recognize what an .exe is. Even typing "wine" at the command line gives no result. Should I look up some tutorials and stuff on this? Yeah...probably so. Should I have to? No. And that's my point ;)

Re:What about Linux Installation?

[ZephyrXero]

Heh...your boss might not be too happy with you if you did anyway ;) If wine was easy for the average person to setup, Code Weavers probably wouldn't be selling as many copies of CO...

Re:What about Linux Installation?

[Mad Merlin]

Which ebuild did you use? I'm using wine-20050111-r1, and while yes there is no desktop or K menu item added for Wine, it certainly is there at the command prompt. Unless you took /usr/bin out of your $PATH for some reason, I'm not sure why it wouldn't be there. What does

find / -name wine 2>/dev/null | grep "wine$"

or

locate wine | grep "wine$"

give you?

Re:What about Linux Installation?

[ZephyrXero]

it was about 6 months ago. Thanks for the help and all, but I'll look up some how-to's or something when I feel like messing with it again. ;)

Re:Ohh, my app installs, I'll join the community!

[ZephyrXero]

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 ;)

wow the main article is off a bit.

[XO]

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.

Re:wow the main article is off a bit.

[Mad Merlin]

Installshield is the other main suspect in terms of Windows installers, and it was also specifically targeted in the new/fixed support for Wine. The fact that Wine would actually run a lot of programs, but couldn't install them properly without sometimes cryptic workarounds was a huge thorn in its side, and getting the installer out of the way is a huge step forward. Despite your pessimism about Wine, (Codeweavers) has spent roughly the last 9 months specifically developing all of the necessary components to make installers work (COM/OLE/etc). Often times these things aren't used at all in the programs themselves, hence them working before -- if you could get them installed.

This isn't a random publicity stunt, this is a genuine effort to get every installer working properly, and they have the right ammunition to back it up. The point is to shake out any bugs that may be present in their implementation, and the end result is (hopefully) the majority of Windows installers to work in Wine.

Re:Ohh, my app installs, I'll join the community!

[Quarters]

I agree with you. I think the idea of having everyone try to install every program they can get their hands on is misguided in the extreme. At the end of that endeavor all they will have accomplished is ensuring WINE is compatible with a handful of installer utilities.

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.

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Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Ohh, my app installs, I'll join the community!

[bluGill]

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.

Cygwin installer challenge

[fsuarez2005]

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.