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Wine vs Windows Benchmarks
PeterBrett writes "Tom Wickline recently posted to the Wine development list announcing that he'd done some benchmarks comparing Windows XP to Wine. They should be taken with the requisite dose of salt, but Wine has certainly come a long way."
I've quite impressed with the performance of WINE, however these stats can be a little deceiving. These stats are based on a game that works. Getting the game to work in the first place can be quite a challenge. But for the part-time gamer that doesn't wanna be chained to Windows, this is a great alternative indeed!
http://religiousfreaks.com/I know this is repeat info for most people, but for the newbies...
There's actually an online application database where people have submitted their experiences/successes in getting Windows apps to run under Wine. If you want to see how well Office 2k3 works under Wine, this'd be the first place to look. Conversely, if you have success running a given Windows app, be sure to submit your experiences. Feedback to the App DB not only helps other Wine users, but is helpful feedback for Wine developers on outstanding compatibility issues.
The URL is: http://appdb.winehq.org/
*shrug* same site it was two years ago. Yes, Gentoo is swarming with clueless n00bies; I was a clueless n00bie once and so was everybody else. If it gives them something to play with, keeps their interests, and gets them learning about Linux, it's worth having to deal with "why doesn't -Os -f-unroll-loops work?" when I talk to one (and I try to help them, because plenty of people helped me back in the day -- that's the whole spirit of GNU, right?).
Seriously, what should n00bies do, then? Gentoo is a largely user-configured operating system with unbelievably simple and hand-holding documentations. Yes, #gentoo is always full of n00bs asking why they can't boot now that they disabled all block devices in their kernel. But then again, that means it's full of n00bs who have configured and compiled a kernel; other distros I've seen say "WARNING WARNING ELITE USERS ONLY" about that. Why? People point out (rightly) that you can install Gentoo and still be an ignoramus. However, if you're actually interested in learning, you can also learn from the installation procedure the commands for fdisk, the options to hdparm, how chroot works, what /etc/resolv.conf is, blah, blah, blah.
funroll-loops is half-right. Gentoo is not simply a ricer distribution; it's a hobbyist distribution. It's the kit-car of distros. There are plenty of people who are doing the software equivalent of bolting a huge spoiler on their Civic. But there are plenty of us who are just having fun. And, anyways, the point of free software is that we're free to do what we want with it, even if that means being a moronic jackass.
All's true that is mistrusted
Not only are the marks of less than 1% thrown into the green category, so are the 0 difference marks. That's right, Wine is marked as a winner if they perform exactly the same.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Wine is most certainly a reverse engineering effort. The problem is that you don't fully understand what reverse engineering includes.
Reverse engineering also includes the following process:
This is black box reverse engineering. You treat some piece of software as a block box, write tests for it, figure out what the "box" is doing, and recreate that behavior. No decompilation required, no source code required, just lots of tests and ingenuity. This has the benefit that no copyright violations are required (since you never decompile the original program). This process is also used in clean room design, except step 3 is replaced with a documentation step -- instead of code being the result of the process a specification is the result. Compaq did this to reverse-engineer the IBM PC BIOS.
Wine is most certainly doing this, as it's the only way to determine undocumented connections between various APIs. Mono certainly does this ("what's this member supposed to do, and is Mono's version following that behavior properly?"). Another way to think of this is for bugs -- does this Mono code do what the .NET equivalent code does? If not, we'll get a bugzilla entry for it, and (eventually) fix it. This bug-report/fix cycle can also be considered as black box reverse engineering, since the bug-report is itself a test, through which we can determine what the actual functionality should be.
Decompilation is generally not legal, since it can lead to copyright violations. Black box reverse engineering is legal, and any attempt to limit black box reverse engineering would kill the interoperability market, since no compatible hardware/software could ever be created unless the original manufacturer permitted it.