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Jeremy White on WINE Installer Challenge

Posted by timothy on from the assimilation dept.

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."

11 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Re:hey.. is wine usable yet? by Mad+Merlin · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.

    --
    Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
  2. A lot of this was covered in WWN by Mad+Merlin · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!
  3. Good Luck by BinaryLobster · · Score: 2, Funny

    Even Windows has problems with that task.

  4. This Jeremy guy cracks me up... by fodi · · Score: 2, Funny

    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 !!

  5. Re:hey.. is wine usable yet? by someguy456 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.
  6. A price quote from TFA... by Mad+Merlin · · Score: 3, Funny
    "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...

    --
    Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
  7. Re:What about Linux Installation? by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 ;)

  8. Re:hey.. is wine usable yet? by Mad+Merlin · · Score: 2, Insightful
    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.

    --
    Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
  9. Re:hey.. is wine usable yet? by Lukey+Boy · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  10. Re:What about Linux Installation? by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 2, Informative

    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?

  11. Re:hey.. is wine usable yet? by Malor · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.