Wine 0.9.44 Released

jshriverWVU writes to let us know about the release of Wine 0.9.44. Wine is a free implementation of Windows on Unix/Linux. New in this release are: better heuristics for making windows managed; automatic detection of timezone parameters; improvements to the built-in WordPad; better signatures support in crypt32; still more gdiplus functions; and of course lots of bug fixes.

Comments

useful yet?

[timmarhy]

Last time i tried wine, after hours of pain i got it to work, and it was totally useless. has this changed?

Re:useful yet?

[chaosite]

Yes, it has gotten way better.
It has support for Direct3D, tons of winapi functions, etc... It's pretty awesome at this stage, really.

Re:useful yet?

[QuantumG]

What were you trying to run?

Took me a while to get the last app I tried going too. One of the biggest problems was the lack of support for signatures in crypt32.. which co-incidentally this release fixes :)

I should write a tutorial or something.

Re:useful yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try getting it to run on Cygwin. That's lots of fun!

Re:useful yet?

[tom17]

I find it is pretty good at what it runs. The problem is that for me, the kind of things it runs are the things that I can get on Linux natively anyway.

The things it falls short on are things like the latest office products, latest adobe products and some of the games I like to play. It's helpful in places but does not yet close the gap for me.

Re:useful yet?

[someone1234]

If you got the source, you can do that yourself.
All you need is to comment out a few lines, you'll know which.

Re:useful yet?

[MadnessASAP]

Ha! try getting it to run Cygwin and then using it to run Qemu to run Windows XP to VMware to run Linux. When you have completed that young grasshopper then your training is complete.

Re:useful yet?

[Dystopian Rebel]

Wine is one of the most useful open source projects if you are a BSD or Linux user and there is at least one M-Windows application that you can't replace.

In my case, I run the Oxford English Dictionary under Wine.

Re:useful yet?

[ambrosen]

Never heard of coLinux, then? An excellent project for some things.

Re:useful yet?

[m50d]

It's good enough now that I've found a windows program (presumably written for ~win98) that will run under wine but not on windows 2000. Unfortunately I'm not willing to publicly admit to posessing the program in question, so you'll have to take my word for it.

Re:useful yet?

[AVryhof]

If you don't mind copying them over from a Windows installation, at least *some* Adobe apps run.

Photoshop CS2

I haven't tried this with CS3... but here is Dreamweaver 8

I was able to get the extension manager, fireworks, and flash working this way.... but not contribute.... but I'm still working on that since I think it uses the IE component, and I just have to install IE.

Seeing that they work under WINE... and quite well, it would be cool if they could work with Codeweavers like Google did to at least hit the Linux market.

Re:useful yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's good enough now that I've found a windows program (presumably written for ~win98) that will run under wine but not on windows 2000. Unfortunately I'm not willing to publicly admit to posessing the program in question, so you'll have to take my word for it.

About six months ago I was given the task of modifying an ancient program "designed for windows 95." The program installs and runs fine on Windows XP as long as you don't try to change anything. However, once you run the editor you quickly discover that it doesn't display or accept clicks for some of the dialog box buttons, so you have to guess the accelerator shortcuts.

I tried running it with Windows 95 compatibility mode. No luck. I was at my wits end, and then finally I remembered I had an old copy of Windows 95 on a hard disk in the closet, so I dug it out and tried to boot it on my 2.5GHz machine. CRASH! There's a documented bug in the NDIS driver for CPUs over 2.2 GHz. Safe mode didn't help.

I gave up on the project for a few months, until one day I was introduced to VMware by a friend. I tried running the program on Windows XP under VMware. No luck. Then I tried Windows 2000. No luck either. Finally I managed to scrape the install .CABs off of the Windows 95 hard disk. BINGO! The program runs correctly under Windows 95, but it's PAINFUL to use it under emulation (due to video related issues; the emulated CPU runs faster than the one that powered my fastest Windows 95 box).

If Wine will run the program correctly at close to native speed, I'd be willing to give it a try. By chance, is this mysterious program you mention also made by Borland?

Re:useful yet?

[babbling]

Getting programs to work using WINE can still be a pain. If you take a look at games like Command & Conquer 3 or Supreme Commander, there is a way to get them to work in WINE, but it's not as simple as running the installer and then running the game immediately after.

WINE has mostly likely improved a lot since you last used it, but these sorts of issues (apply this patch, download this dll, etc) will probably be around for a while to come. The important thing is that it's continually improving and will one day probably be quite good at running almost anything painlessly.

Re:useful yet?

[Vexorian]

Complaint to the guys that made the latest office products, adobe and games, because it turns out that the most frequent reason WINE can't run something is a copy protection...

Re:useful yet?

[Daimanta]

The important thing is that it's continually improving and will one day probably be quite good at running almost anything painlessly. Yes,but will it run Linux?

Re:useful yet?

[m50d]

No, the program I'm talking about was not made by borland; I can't promise anything from wine with your particular program, but it's probably worth a try (using winecfg to tell wine to emulate win95 rather than the default of winxp may help), depending of course on how much effort it would take you to use wine; on the speed front wine is more than capable of near-native (certainly better than 50%) speeds even with graphics-heavy programs.

Re:useful yet?

[kc2keo]

I agree... Its made lots of advancements over the years but does not close the gap for me. Some of my favorite games will not fully run. I also have a few mods I work on every so often. Wine does not work with the mod tools. Ultimately I boot to WinXPPro if I choose to play games or mod. Otherwise I stay in GNU/Linux. Also... Why call it wine? Why not beer?

Re:useful yet?

[Elektroschock]

Right, but the question for me is how it scales. How much money and time needs to be dumped on it?

How much does it cost to make a DLL that is currently 75% --> 100% ?

what Wine is really missing is a tool that documents all calls by programs, so you say: aha, this stub is needed by these applications, so let's implement it.

Or: this application sents these messages to the function.

control Spy as an interesting test tool
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=239

Re:useful yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I gave up on the project for a few months, until one day I was introduced to VMware by a friend. I tried running the program on Windows XP under VMware. No luck. Then I tried Windows 2000. No luck either. Finally I managed to scrape the install .CABs off of the Windows 95 hard disk. BINGO! The program runs correctly under Windows 95, but it's PAINFUL to use it under emulation (due to video related issues; the emulated CPU runs faster than the one that powered my fastest Windows 95 box).

Will it run in Windows 98? If so, create a Win98 vm in VMWare. I run a few apps that way and it works great. On modern hardware in a vm 98 is very fast. In VMWare it's usably stable, better than my experience using it on real hardware.

Re:useful yet?

[Mad Merlin]

How much does it cost to make a DLL that is currently 75% --> 100% ?

That's a question that probably only the original implementor(s) of the API could answer, however, it's normally not the question you need answered. The vast majority of apps don't need 100% of a DLL, they only use small subsets of it. The commonly used parts of most DLLs are already implemented, the real roadblock is finding the undocumented corner cases (and the expected behaviour), and ironing out any existing bugs.

what Wine is really missing is a tool that documents all calls by programs, so you say: aha, this stub is needed by these applications, so let's implement it.

Really, that tool already exists. Use WINEDEBUG=+relay and you'll see every function call made by the program as it makes it. Furthermore, stubs and functions that are known to be incomplete will print their own output (STUB or FIXME) if they're called.

Ultimately though, missing or stub functions aren't that big of a problem, it's usually fairly obvious if an app needs them, but they're missing. The real problem is the incomplete/missing/wrong Win32 API documentation on MSDN and everywhere else. The Win32 API documentation is sufficiently poor, that you really need to a) closely examine what an existing app expects of the API, and b) actually test the API yourself on all versions of Windows (they tend to differ on details). Often times, the best/only Win32 API documentation is the Wine source.

Re:useful yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wine has never been useful is never useful. I mean, what need is there for a Windoze compatability layer anyways? Generally FOSS/FLOSS is available on Windoze it is also available on Linux as well. Plus, if someone needs a closed source application for a specific job, chances are there is an open source alternative. Again, what need is there for WINE?

Re:useful yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed wine and xwine then tried running it, and that's about as far as I got. It crashed every time I tried to adjust the settings. :(

Re:useful yet?

[dascandy]

What office are you trying to run?

Re:useful yet?

[Rinkhals]

What were you trying to run?

A usable CAD app would be nice.

I'm still using XP because I need AutoCAD (or IntelliCAD, an AutoCAD Clone)

I should write a tutorial or something.

Well, yes, that would be useful.

Re:useful yet?

[m50d]

Shrug, guess it's no good then; sorry.

Re:useful yet?

[chaosite]

I've just checked, by attempting to install Half Life 2 under Wine.

It was actually really easy. The only problem was that I had to run Steam a couple times before it agreed to update itself...

Re:useful yet?

[Elektroschock]

Oh well, executing Winetest
http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/paulm/WRT/CrossBu ilt/winetest-latest.exe

I understand that your answer is the official party line. I think in 2001 it was the same response.

What I mean is not a per-application tool but a per-Wine tool with feedback of all used applications.

Currently I can't say: function x, it gets executed by Acrobat Reader 2.1, Firefox, fuzzycalc and Darly's Printshop. So the person who implements it can test it with these applications that make use of it.

I understand that a function does not need to be 100% implemented. But think about a sponsor who says: I want to sponsor dll x. Or: My program WAccounting uses these 5 API calls, I want this program to run perfect under Wine, what does it cost me?

What also motivates people is to see a kind of progress bar. I mean a automated script that indicates how much stubs and so on are in there.

I also would like to get informed how to debug an application with Wine. The documentation is heavily outdated and imcomplete here. WINEDEBUG=+relay is intresting, I tried it out. But the documentation is not very informative here.

My perception is that we will get
- almost perfect DirectX games support
- very good installer and crypto support.
because here it really does scale but wine development did not scale that much over the past years.

When most application run it is not to difficult to get people to resolve the remaining bugs. But areas where the wine support probability is low won't develop too fast. It is all about "islands" of supports that expand at the edges. The more applications get platinum the easier it expands,

One great issue these days is for instance that most users can easily get the latest version installed. So wine gets more testing. anyway I would really like to participate in a workshop on how to hack wine.

Re:useful yet?

[Mad Merlin]

It's not about repeating the "party line" (to be honest, I don't think there is one), I'm not really a Wine developer either (although I've had 2 small patches committed), I'm just presenting the situation the way I see it.

Currently I can't say: function x, it gets executed by Acrobat Reader 2.1, Firefox, fuzzycalc and Darly's Printshop. So the person who implements it can test it with these applications that make use of it.

Strictly speaking, you're right, but that data is fairly easily accessable. For example, here's a tiny script that'll give you said information (just feed it a +relay trace), I just wrote it in the span of a few minutes. It could be useful to integrate such data with the AppDB.

I understand that a function does not need to be 100% implemented. But think about a sponsor who says: I want to sponsor dll x. Or: My program WAccounting uses these 5 API calls, I want this program to run perfect under Wine, what does it cost me?

In general, people don't seem to care about how much of a DLL is implemented, they care about if their programs foo, baz and bar work. Most of the major investments into Wine have been to make a particular program (or set of programs) work, such as Google with Picasa (list of patches), or Corel with Wordperfect and CorelDRAW (until Microsoft threw a large chunk of money at them).

In a similar vein, Codeweavers offers porting services for Wine, ie, they'll make a particular application work, and they can give you an estimate of how much it'll cost, on a case by case basis.

What also motivates people is to see a kind of progress bar. I mean a automated script that indicates how much stubs and so on are in there.

I agree that people like progress bars (so do I), but they can be deceptive. For example, the Wine status pages have an automated script that guesses the completion status of all DLLs based on the contents of the .spec file for each DLL, but this isn't always accurate. For example, the .spec files don't seem to contain all functions for a given DLL, (I'd guess any COM functions aren't in there, as they're special, AFAIK), and while the automated tool thinks that d3d8 and d3d9 are 40% and 20% completed, respectively, the actual case is closer to 95% in both cases, based upon developer inspection.

I also would like to get informed how to debug an application with Wine. The documentation is heavily outdated and imcomplete here. WINEDEBUG=+relay is intresting, I tried it out. But the documentation is not very informative here.

Here's the complete list of WINEDEBUG channels, as well as some useful registry keys, and a debugging tutorial. Generally when you're debugging something, WINEDEBUG can be very useful with the right channels selected.

My perception is that we will get
- almost perfect DirectX games support
- very good installer and crypto support.
because here it really does scale but wine development did not scale that much over the past years.

Actually, as I menti

Re:useful yet?

[Elektroschock]

Very interesting. Wow. Very useful information. I was playing around with the relay setting yesterday. > The Wine project simply needs more manpower more than anything, help is most any area would be appreciated by many. Yeah, easier access to development. I know from my own project that you get your core team of brilliant and informed people that do 90% of the work but it is really necessary to spent at least 10% to reach out to the community and explain what you are doing and how to hack the code. Because otherwise your project does not scale.

Re:useful yet?

[Workaphobia]

But does directdraw work again? I had it before, then my harddrive crashed and I've never been able to match that configuration since then because they're always changing versions and implementations. I miss starcraft under linux. And yes, I enabled opengl rendering for all the good it does me.

Wine 1.0?

[lobiusmoop]

What ever happened to the impending release of Wine 1.0? I seem to remember it was coming very soon 6 months ago. It would be a great publicity boost for the software if it reached that point.

Re:Wine 1.0?

[alba7]

Imagine Duke Nukem Forever running under Wine 1.0 on GNU Hurd.

Re:Wine 1.0?

[Circlotron]

Wine 1.0 needs a working fusion reactor to operate it, hence it will always be 6 months away.

Re:Wine 1.0?

[SnoopJeDi]

Imagine a beowulf clus...oh screw it.

Re:Wine 1.0?

[shwouchk]

Well, they *are* implementing windows...

Re:Wine 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be the perfect launch title for the Phantom.

Re:Wine 1.0?

[onemorechip]

With this release, it seems we've only got 56 more minor release to go!

Re:Wine 1.0?

[contrapunctus]

Wine 1.0 is like Warp 10 (TNG definition)? We can only get closer to it...

Re:Wine 1.0?

[jayminer]

You would never believe that this joke still makes me laugh.

Re:Wine 1.0?

[smitty97]

Maybe its just 99.44% done.. That's good enough for other household products!

Yes

[PeterBrett]

Yes.

(If you want a useful answer, ask a meaningful question).

</trollfood>

How is this /.-worthy news?

[ketilwaa]

Wine releases every 14 days, see http://winehq.org/ Are we now going to see these kinds of news on /. every time there's a trivial update? I can think of a couple of apps and releases that are a little more important...

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[QuantumG]

The fact that they have 5 major improvements every 14 days is kinda impressive.

But yes, good point.

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[ketilwaa]

I'd like to see they fix the fact that Wine remains the only app that manages to raise my computers CPU-temperature 15 degrees C. Now, that would be newsworthy. Or maybe that's a fature?

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[QuantumG]

Wine isn't an app.

What are you running under Wine when this happens?

Have you filed a bug report?

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[zukinux]

I will have to agree on this one.
K.D.E/GNOME/GIMP/Distributions/Firefox/Thunderbird /...... got new versions all the time, we cannot insert them as a slashdot worthy news cause there will be a spam of news every day.

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[ketilwaa]

All right. It's not an app, it's not an emulator. Trouble is, I don't think I use many compatibility layers other than Wine.

Actually, I was imprecise. There looks to have been some progress on this (I update Wine every two weeks through apt), and things like ie6 dowsn't raise the temperature much. Installing stuff through Wine though, raises the temperature from ~50 to ~65 degrees.

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[robbak]

That is unsurprising. Windows installers have always been heavyweight. I don't think that this is wine's problem.
Indeed, wine has had a very hard time supporting Installshield, which seems like a very badly written application.

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[bcmm]

Wine Is Not an Emulator. (OK, so that's a backronym).

An emulator, for example a Gameboy emulator, has to translate machine instructions to simulate the behaviour of the target's processor. Wine simly allows execution of x86 code on an x86 processor. It implements the win32 API, and therefore lets you run code which expects to make calls to functions of that API. So Wine more or less does the same thing the official Windows API does: provides functions which win32 applications need. This is why it is a lot faster than any emulator.

When it is slow, it is because it's way of doing things is a bit slower than Windows's way (I haven't checked, but I suspect the drawing of windows is a bit slower), or because, SHOCKINGLY, many Windows applications are, in fact, amazingly slow.

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[fishbowl]

>All right. It's not an app, it's not an emulator.

No it isn't.

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[nomadic]

The fact that they have 5 major improvements every 14 days is kinda impressive.

WINE is racing towards completion; I mean, look how far they've come in a mere 14 years. Slow down, guys!

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[IamTheRealMike]

Badly written doesn't even begin to describe InstallShield. Where would I begin? Its 3 step install process that exists not because it makes sense, but because of InstallShield tortured history of an app? The amazing overhead it imposes on any app that uses it? Its custom programming language? Its heavy abuse of DCOM? The typos in its internal class names? The way it does an inter-thread RPC for every file copied (to update the label in the gui), meaning that if you want to install lots of small files most of the installers cpu time will be spent on RPC? As an ex-Wine developer, I spent many hours wrestling with this app. You haven't experienced true despair until you have encountered the hopeless, labrythine and worthless complexity of the InstallShield internals.

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[ketilwaa]

And, by saying this, you're telling me that it is:
NOT NOT an emulator?
Or: NOT NOT an app?

Wine Is Not an Emulator was sort of my point... It is valuable to READ what you're replying to beforehand, no?

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[techamed]

Sorry but I have to agree with this... They throw out releases (which is awesome) way to often to be announcing them on slashdot.

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[fishbowl]

>And, by saying this, you're telling me that it is:

I'm telling you that hitting the stop button less than 10ms after submit doesn't work.

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't experienced true despair until you have encountered the hopeless, labrythine and worthless complexity of the InstallShield internals.

On the Mac, I just copy the application to the Applications folder.

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[QuantumG]

To be fair, you can install all the apps that exist for the Mac in a day.

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[Dretep]

Not sure it's really news-worthy, as you pointed out, but I didn't know Wine was even still actively developed until I read this article. Is there even still a need for it??

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[Workaphobia]

And yet, none of these improvements brings me any closer to getting starcraft running at a reasonable speed. They kept messing with the directdraw implementation and now the common web information on it is too outdated to make sense of.

Keep in mind that every release requires you to upgrade if you want any help from the community, so there is in fact a limit on how fast is too fast, especially when you run gentoo.

WordPad?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure there are some great new features, but mentioning improvements to WordPad is some serious flamebait...

Re:WordPad?

[Anonymous Coward]

vi vs. emacs vs. WordPad?

Re:WordPad?

[Caesar Tjalbo]

Not if the Wine developers use it for programming Wine, "eat your own dog food". Although WINN, Wordpad Is Not Notepad, of course.

Does it run on (Net||Open)BSD or Solaris yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I say "run" I mean "work properly" not "it compiles. Ship it".

Btw, I'm aware that OpenBSD's port of WINE dates from 1999, just another sign that BSD is dying, I guess!

Re:Does it run on (Net||Open)BSD or Solaris yet?

[RAMMS EIN]

``Btw, I'm aware that OpenBSD's port of WINE dates from 1999, just another sign that BSD is dying, I guess!''

Or it could just mean that the demographic that runs OpenBSD (security conscious people, I'd imagine) isn't interested in running Windows apps.

Re:Does it run on (Net||Open)BSD or Solaris yet?

[JonJ]

Yeah none of those two users are running windows apps.

Re:Does it run on (Net||Open)BSD or Solaris yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't run on OpenBSD yet (I'm not sure about NetBSD or Solaris). OpenBSD porters continue to look at it, but it still has problems that are not easily solved (i.e. not a trivial port) and so they record their progress and move on to something more tractable. It will happen though. Neigh-sayers said OpenBSD would never crack the problems it had with Firefox or OpenOffice, or get native Java. It now has all of these, they are stable, and all up to date. In the meantime QEMU will run windows many Windows apps at a vaguely usable speed on OpenBSD ... just don't expect games or multimedia on Windows unless you dual-boot.

Re:Does it run on (Net||Open)BSD or Solaris yet?

[Liinux]

But I am running Windows apps! And where is that other guy you are talking about? We should ask him too, we are talking about a 50%-100% usage rate here.

Re:Does it run on (Net||Open)BSD or Solaris yet?

[DrSkwid]

No wine on my openbsd, there you go 50/50 split.

Re:Does it run on (Net||Open)BSD or Solaris yet?

[TheRaven64]

I don't use WINE on OpenBSD either, but since my OpenBSD system is PowerPC that's not entirely surprising. That said, the only legacy Windows apps I have these days are some oldish games, and since OpenBSD lacks DRI they probably wouldn't run well under WINE anyway.

Re:Does it run on (Net||Open)BSD or Solaris yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Neigh-sayers said OpenBSD would never crack the problems it had with Firefox or OpenOffice, or get native Java.

But who cares what horses think?

Re:Does it run on (Net||Open)BSD or Solaris yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that the lack of a newer WINE on OpenBSD is due to a lack of kernel threads. The OpenBSD implemention of kernel threads is 'rthreads' which doesn't seem to be ready yet.

Re:Does it run on (Net||Open)BSD or Solaris yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, yes, I guess your right ... but the nay-sayers said the same thing, so they were with the horses as well. To hell with the both I say...

Re:Does it run on (Net||Open)BSD or Solaris yet?

[neumayr]

insensitive clod...

CourtTV has Latest news on the diaper Astronut !!

[Anonymous Coward]

CourtTV has Latest news on the diaper Astronut !! Tune in !! Drop Out !! Turn on CourtTV !!

Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[baadger]

I've been thinking of starting to ./configure --prefix a Wine install into a subdirectory of my home directory and applying a script wrapper to the wine binary.

Pretty much every application or game I use under Wine requires either a patch against wine or some app specific hack to get it working properly, and often they don't work in the next Wine version.

Wine is great but setting up multiple apps or games to work under it is horrible.

Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[QuantumG]

So, err, just so I've got this right.. you're applying app specific patches to Wine to get it to work and then when you upgrade you're reapplying all those patches and finding that some of them don't apply anymore?

Ya know, Wine uses this revision control system that some Finnish guy wrote.. it's really good at helping you maintain a fork with your changes in it if that's what you want to do. I think it's called "git" or something. :)

Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[paskie]

Actually, this was my experience in the past as well, but during the 0.9 series this got a lot better for me and now for a long time already I didn't need to change any actual wine settings for specific application at all (and I'm messing with relatively wide variety of applications and games. At most I have to tweak (e.g. graphics) settings of the application itself. New versions don't break apps that previously were working that much either (though it happens sometimes; I still have bisecting what broke SC3000 in my long TODO list ;).

Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[praedictus]

I'm in agreement with paskie here, I haven't had to do any app-specific patching in a while. Sound seems to be the only thing that gives me any problems. Quite a few things that I hadn't expected to work, ran fine, for example some work specific software that I would expect had never been tested against wine. Some hoary old software like Fallout 2 now works as well as it did when I ran Windows, and all my Blizzard games are working as well. When the occasional app patch breaks things, a fix is usually available by the next release, and a workaround within a day or so. (Frex. the bizarre multiple library hack to get Eve Online running recently)

Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[NickFortune]

To be fair, Wine does suffer quite a lot from regressions. Don't take my word for it - look up a few of your favourite games on the AppDB and notice how the playability level varies from one release to the next.

That's not so likely to be a problem with the major apps. World of Warcraft and MS Office are likely to be rested between releases, so they tend to be fairly stable. On the other hand, it's pretty much a crap-shoot whether Deus Ex (my favourite use for Wine) will work with any particular release.

Don't get me wrong; I think Wine is a fantastic project, and the number of apps they can handle has risen steadily over the time I've been using it. But being realistic, the do have a problem with regressions. Once it gets out of beta, that will hopefully change.

Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[Shulai]

I think they should try to raise their profile between Windows developers, in order to encourage them to do some testing on Wine. I guess they already does testing on half a dozen Windows environments, they'll add Wine to the list if they think it's a viable platform and a part of their potential market.

Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[Alcoholic Synonymous]

Dune 2000, how I miss thee. Any Windows 95 or higher Westwood game actually doesn't seem to work anymore (and I have about all of them). Something about the way the game reads the disc for validation, Wine doesn't like it. It used to work, but now it doesn't and last I read Wine would "have to totally redo" the way it handles the disc access to get them to work.

Of all the apps I really could use Wine for, none work now, but used too. The lone exception is WoW which works great now, but I no longer use it.

Actually, even fully DX8 games I have don't work with Wines "fully implemented" DX8 api. I'm generally unimpressed with Wine so far.

Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[kwandar]

I have a couple of 95 Westwood games that don't run on Windows XP (Monopoly and some C&C versions?), the point being that this may not be a WINE issue, you're seeing.

Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[Alcoholic Synonymous]

My wife runs Monopoly on XP to this day, and I never had any problems running any of the C&C games. If I hit a bump, compatibility mode typically fixed it. The two Westwood games I really miss are Blade Runner and Dune 2000.

Westwood was a brilliant company.

Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[SL Baur]

The lone exception is WoW which works great now, That's wonderful news. I'm not much for graphical games besides QT Nethack, but I've got to have WoW.

Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[PastaLover]

The lone exception is WoW which works great now, but I no longer use it. It does not for me. There are some major sound issues, so unless I want to be playing without sound it doesn't really work. I've seen people claim everything works perfectly and I assume they're not lying but I'm sure there's some stuff there still needing to be worked out. My best bet is that those other people have way faster CPU's and run their sound emulated, thus skirting the problem. Apparently all this has been fixed in cedega but they're unwilling to fork over the patches as it makes them money being better at it then wine.

Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[Sunthalazar]

The primary sound issue that I found is that Wine runs using OSS. Which only allows 1 program to access the sound system.

So if I'm running Rhythmbox, or I have a web page showing a flash movie, then when I start WoW it will not have any sound.

If I close out of those first, and then start WoW, I get sound.

This page:
http://www.wowwiki.com/Linux/Wine#Voice_Chat

Talks about it a bit, and suggests possibly trying alsa-oss, which is a program which redirects the OSS calls into Alsa calls.

It isn't something I've tried yet, but it might be worthwhile.

Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[Laur]

Pretty much every application or game I use under Wine requires either a patch against wine or some app specific hack to get it working properly, and often they don't work in the next Wine version. Wine is great but setting up multiple apps or games to work under it is horrible.

This is a known problem, and the tools Wine-Doors and Winebot are working to address it. These tools make installing Windows software in Linux as easy as using a native package manager (apt, rpm, etc). They also track the specific hacks needed to make an application work, and provide an easy method for developers to test for regressions. Unfortunately, these tools are still in their infancy and so have a relatively small selection of supported aps, but they certainly bear watching.

An Important Announcement

[Kuku_monroe]

woooohoooo!!! WINE!

Slow news day?

[Klaidas]

A slow news day, eh? Is slashdot turning to digg, were every 0.0.0.1 wine release makes it to the front page because it's "so important"? Just saying...

Re:Slow news day?

[raventh1]

I haven't seen a wine update on /. in quite a while, what's the problem with the occasional update?
Sure there have been codeweavers and Transgaming updates, but this is the real deal, this is the project they forked from.

Wordpad is actually important...

[robbak]

Because parts of Wordpad are often used as a text editing component in other programs. In addition, Wordpad acts as a good test case for much of wine's infrastructure.

Re:Wordpad is actually important...

[Jugalator]

You mean the rich text box of it? Yes, it's a reusable component, but it's not clear to me that control was a problem before, although maybe you're right.

WordPad is also an MFC application, like many others, and in case there were something to fix there, that could be pretty important due to MFC's wide use.

Re:Wordpad is actually important...

[WWWWolf]

Actually, I think implementing Wordpad is much more important because some apps may use it. I was pretty amazed when I installed an application and I was guessing it'd get in serious trouble when it was going to display the readme - nope, a clone of Notepad starts up and everything is nice and clean. In similar vein, I'm guessing a lot of Windows app developers may think "I need to show this .rtf file to the user - I guess I'll just start up Wordpad to show it."

It's useful as a document viewer in a pinch, but not really that useful as an application. Everyone uses some other program anyway to write stuff. =)

Re:Wordpad is actually important...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah like write.exe

Now that's an improvement !

[nsebban]

I can finally use WordPad at its full potential !

securecrt in wine with correct screen size

[golemwashere]

BTW, Has anyone managed to run securecrt under wine getting right the terminal screen size inside the window?
I always get mangled output when I scroll after the first screen rows....
Thanks
g.

Re:securecrt in wine with correct screen size

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you run SecureCRT under Wine? At work I run a Linux box so that I don't have to run SecureCRT.

Re:securecrt in wine with correct screen size

[QuantumG]

If you want pointless, use PuTTY under Wine.

Re:securecrt in wine with correct screen size

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want pointless, use PuTTY under Wine to SSH to a Linux machine and then run PuTTY on the Linux machine to SSH to a Windows machine running Cygwin...

Re:securecrt in wine with correct screen size

[stevey]

Better yet:

apt-get install putty

Re:securecrt in wine with correct screen size

[fimbulvetr]

I don't know why all of those guys are recommending putty. It's a piece of shit. It requires mousing for _everything_ related to texting - copying, pasting, new window, etc. Not very unixy if you ask me.

If you want a good program that has a lot of securecrt's strengths, check out konsole - the default kde terminal. Sure you need to install the kdelibs, but it has tabs, arbitrary shortcut assignments, huge buffer configurations, etc.

Re:securecrt in wine with correct screen size

[golemwashere]

Agreed on putty,
I found http://www.mclean.net.nz/ruby/sshmenu/ to be a good start,but I still
miss SecureCRT ability to do a quick zmodem transfer over a chain of ssh sessions for example,
plus I'd like to show wine powers to the unbelievers in my office...
G.

Any chance of a merge?

[UED]

I know this is highly unlikely Is it possible in the future that the wine and Cedega projects merge to create a truly powerful tool for running windows games and applications on Linux? Something like point2run for everything. Or maybe someone can fork a new project based on CVS cedega with some added wine? Sorry if my questions sound noobish...

Re:Any chance of a merge?

[ozamosi]

Cedega is based of an old version of Wine, which was forked off and made proprietary. Since then, Wine changed it's license to make it impossible to do another Cedega-style fork.

So, to merge, we would have to either convince transgaming to make their code completely free and LGPL, or convince all Wine authors to make their code non-free and a part of transgamings commercial product. I don't think either of those two alternatives are very likely.

Re:Any chance of a merge?

[Jeek Elemental]

Theres http://www.wine-doors.org/ to help with installing, its at v0.1 but works great here.

Re:Any chance of a merge?

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't need Cedega anymore. I'm actually running some games under Wine and they perform as expected under Windows. Yes, even those fast 3D FPS.
Of course not all games are supported, but the list is growing; take a look at the App DB list.
Some of them install just fine, some others need a bunch of dlls copied here and there, but usually you have a working game in a matter of minutes.

And it's not just about games: Wine is getting mature to a point it can actually replace Windows even in a development environment. Need to test web pages with IE and have no disk space to waste for a Windows partition? Here's IE for Linux .
I've also succesfully installed and used different versions of Delphi (the best Windows RAD out there, don't even try to argue that:^) provided one doesn't try to use ActiveX components, something most non mcsd drones will see as an improvement rather than a setback.

Sorta reminds me of the old days when I used OS/2 as a multitasker for DOS programs. I needed a reliable way to test some client/server Clipper db apps I was writing and OS/2 was the only way to rapidly build and test on a single machine what had to work on several PCs in a netbios network.
Another funny thing is that the small fonts I used in those apps to gain maximum screen space worked perfectly under both native DOS and OS/2 VDMs (DOS boxes) but always crashed Windows 95 terminals.

To me it's history repeating again: looks like Windows is doomed to be beaten by something else even in its own field.

Re:Any chance of a merge?

[CyDharttha]

However, Transgaming is considering allowing wine versions to be installed via the Cedega UI; this is being voted on currently in the polls. The UI allows one to choose which version of Cedega will run the selected game. Adding the ability to do this with various wine versions could be very helpful in working around regressions, or tracking them down. Right now, I use a separate WINEPREFIX for any apps that I don't want to get screwed up in a default ~/.wine. I also have a wine with patches specifically for Joost that resides in /opt and won't be touched by wine upgrades. In response to the above, there is still a fair amount of code sharing going back and forth between the two projects. Some of the licensing restrictions in commercial Cedega are from the proprietary third-party CD Copy Protection code. I'm not saying the two projects could ever merge, but I am kind of glad to have them both around. Both dev teams are doing great work. :)

Re:Any chance of a merge?

[cerelib]

This could actually happen in an easy way. Cedega could regularly release source code snapshots of an older release of their product under an open source license. This would allow Cedega to stay ahead of the curve by not having open source versions of their newest release. WINE would get the advantage of being able to merge Cedega code into WINE and Cedega would probably get more business if people knew Cedega had a commitment to give code back to the community. That is just one possibility that I see of how a merge could happen.

Re:Any chance of a merge?

[bob.appleyard]

I've also succesfully installed and used different versions of Delphi (the best Windows RAD out there, don't even try to argue that:^)

Up to version 7, at least.

That's a sweet suite, that.

Re:Any chance of a merge?

[rvalles]

No need. Since wine got LGPL'd, it has gone through a deep redesign around the WinNT model instead of the win9x model. Also, when wine was just LGPL'd, it would need tons of DLLs from windows in order to do anything; nowadays, no windows DLLs are needed anymore, since almost everything has been implemented.

Cedega used to have an advantadge on games since Wine held on Direct3d while waiting for Cedega to release its implementation; it never happened. So Wine's Direct3d began late, but it's catching up.

Nowadays, Wine and Cedega are quite close in game compatibility, while wine is much better with non-gaming stuff. Cedega's "work it around so that the game works instead of properly implementing it" is reaching its limits, and wine will soon run Cedega's "supported games" better than Cedega itself, not to menction non-Cedega supported games :).

Re:Any chance of a merge?

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way, a question: when do you think there was more cooperation and code flowing both ways between the projects? Before the LGPL fork, or after it?

Re:Any chance of a merge?

[Mad Merlin]

At this point, Wine's D3D implementation is more mature than Cedega's. Wine introduced SM2/3 support months before Cedega, for example. On top of that, Wine has also completed a number of (painful) steps required to get a slew of copy protection methods working.

Besides that, Cedega contributes essentially no code back to Wine, although they do use a number of DLLs from Wine now. I don't really see the incentive on either side for a merge to happen now.

Re:Any chance of a merge?

[MoogMan]

Another post mentioned why they most likely will not merge, but Wine performance with DirectX games has improved drastically in the last couple of months - I seem to recall someone saying Wine has surpassed Cedegar in terms of performance, but I can't find a link to back that up.

Here is the last benchmarks that were done - http://wiki.winehq.org/BenchMark-0.9.5

Out of 148 tests:
Wine has the current lead on 67 tests
Wine has a lag between 0.1 and 10.0 percent on 14 tests
Wine has a lag between 10.1 and 20.0 percent on 9 tests
Wine has a lag between 20.1 and 50.0 percent on 19 tests
Wine has a lag of more than 50.1 percent on 21 tests
Wine or XP aborted on 18 tests

But face it

[Anonymous Coward]

the very existance of Wine is proof that Linux isn't able to exist without windows.

Re:But face it

[ozmanjusri]

the very existance of Wine is proof that Linux isn't able to exist without windows.

...and the very existence of SFU is proof that Windows isn't able to exist without Linux.

So let's all have a big group hug and make up. We need each other.

Re:But face it

[pakar]

Nope, but the existence of wine is proof that people don't like windows and want their apps running on gnu/linux systems..

Re:But face it

[larry bagina]

Wrong. It's called "Services For Unix", not "Services For Linux". And it doesn't provide Linux binary compatibility (like SCO, Solaris, and *BSD provide).

Re:But face it

[Xtifr]

> the very existance (sp) of Wine is proof that Linux isn't able to exist without windows.

Uh-huh. Offering an option proves that everybody needs that option. (Just for the record, I haven't had Wine installed since '01, and haven't used Windows since '98.)

Does the very existence of Viper mode prove that Emacs isn't able to exist without vi? Makes about as much sense.

Actually, what the existence of Wine proves is that some FLOSS developers are willing to try to provide a smoother migration path to those who are interested in exploring their options, but don't want to make a blind leap into the unknown.

Re:But face it

[Furry Ice]

It took me a while to get that TLA. I thought SFU was shorthand for STFU!

Finally!

[MarkByers]

improvements to the built-in WordPad

That's been one thing that really bugs me about Linux. I'm fed up of having to use horrible outdated editors like emacs and vi. Now finally I can use a decent editor without having to dual-boot.

Re:Finally!

[QuantumG]

hehe.. I have been known to use windows calculator under Wine.

Re:Finally!

[eneville]

hehe.. I have been known to use windows calculator under Wine. whats the point when bash/sh/ksh has it for you?
echo $(( ( 2**4 ) + 4 * 3 ))
if it's more advanced then using something like this might be better:
perl -e 'print 2**4 + (4*3.141592654)'
which is probably faster than trying to figure out why calc is not doing BODMAS

Re:Finally!

[QuantumG]

idk, cause I'm not a freakin' gray beard?

Re:Finally!

[EvilRyry]

qalculate is freaking awesome! I especially love the conversions so you can do stuff like 15m/s = x mph and it just works.

Re:Finally!

[DrSkwid]

pfft bash perl shit

man bc

Re:Finally!

[MikeBabcock]

I've been known to wish that 'dc' was available on Windows :-)

Sure I could install it on cygwin but I'm just saying I much prefer RPN to the Windows calculator app.

Re:Finally!

[Antique Geekmeister]

Mocking young programmers who haven't gotten their first facial hair yet would be harsh of me to do in a discussion group. But son, like building your own compiler, you don't want to go there without a bit more experience, or I'll be forced to write ASCII art of smiley faces with long gray beards.

Re:Finally!

[LiquidFire_HK]

To be fair, I've seen plenty of installers that launch their readme file with notepad or wordpad (rather than just using the default application for the file type).

Re:Finally!

[TheRaven64]

bc? Real men use reverse polish notation in dc.

Re:Finally!

[lamber45]

I used to use perl one-liners for simple arithmetic. Then I used bsh. Then I used JavaScript. Eventually I discovered that python had the least startup time and the easiest syntax in interactive mode. I do less simple arithmetic now that GNUcash supports expressions in numeric fields.

Speaking of Wine, I don't use it a lot. I have some Windows foreign-language-study programs that run just fine under it. Some Windows games run all right under it; the occasional crash is part of the fun :). The one application I'd like to see working better is Personal Ancestral File, but the Linux alternatives are competitive. I use OpenOffice or Koffice or emacs for office stuff, and write new software in perl or Java or C#, all of which are cross-platform.

Re:Finally!

[QuantumG]

Like every bouncer at a nightclub who asks to see my ID, sir, I could kiss you right now.

Office 2003

[E-Sabbath]

Has anyone ever managed to get Office 2003 fully working under WINE yet? I spent a week trying once. Never got it right. Probably something to do with the fact that it doesn't have the ability to run as a Win98 program.

Re:Office 2003

[deimios666]

There is no incentive for the wine team to let office 2003 run flawlessly in Wine since they sell Crossover Office(Wine that can run office 2003)

Re:Office 2003

[Tatsh]

And I bet Wine developers do not see a problem with using OpenOffice or KOffice or even just gedit or Kate. Better yet, nano. No, better yet, ed.

Re:Office 2003

[nurb432]

Since when is codeweavers the wine team? ( that may have happened, but last i heard they were separate entities )

Oh, and crossover doesnt run ALL of office 2003.

Re:Office 2003

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you can run Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But first you must install Office 2k3 on Windows, then do a registry import to Wine, and then google for msopa.

And yes, it does start and run faster on Linux than that OpenOffice stuff.

Don't know about Office 2k7, I think it's not better than 2k3

Re:Office 2003

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm running Office 2000 on this latest release, if that's any consolation. It looks pretty flawless so far - I can print to my CUPS printer just fine.

Re:Office 2003

[msh104]

but all the codeweavers code ends up in wine anyway, so perhaps it's just better that the other developers focus there strengh elsewhere. not to mention that many parts of office (DOM, etc) aren't much fun to get working properly anyway.

New wine project

[edxwelch]

I would love to use Wine, but unfortunately I don't have Linux. Are there any plans to port Wine to Windows?

Re:New wine project

[Anonymous Coward]

do not laugh to soon..

like dosbox, and I'm pretty sure that under Vista you *may* need wine to run some legacy windows softwares....

Re:New wine project

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/softgrid/def ault.mspx

Re:New wine project

[a strange guy]

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=6241&package_id=112520 have fun ;-)

Re:New wine project

[caluml]

Download Cygwin and try and compile it under that. Windows -> Cygwin -> Wine -> ..... VMWare? :)

Re:New wine project

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, but since MS isn't going to release DX10 on XP and Wine has already started implementing it, you might end up using Wine to run the new apps in a legacy OS.

Re:New wine project

[Linker3000]

My copy of Windows has a file called WOWEXEC (Wine on Windows?) - maybe it's been there all along?

Re:New wine project

[Anonymous Coward]

-> Profit?

Re:New wine project

[TCiecka]

Windows-On-Windows (WOW). Often paired with Virtual DOS Machine (NTVDM).

Is WOWEXEC an emulator or is it more comparable to WINE?

Re:New wine project

[freeweed]

We're already doing a proof of concept for softgrid, because we KNOW some of our mission-critical apps just won't go with Vista, ever.

And management has handed down the edict that we MUST be on Vista soon, so...

Re:New wine project

[makomk]

Of course there are. In fact, the previous release converted the DirectX support to be based on the Windows version of OpenGL for (partly) that reason...

Re:New wine project

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no trailing "s" for software!!!

Re:New wine project

[Linker3000]

I thought NTVDM was an NT-VMS Cross-development module?

Next you'll be telling me that SOL.EXE isn't a virtual Solaris environment.

Re:New wine project

[IvyKing]

like dosbox, and I'm pretty sure that under Vista you *may* need wine to run some legacy windows softwares....

Ain't that the truth - sigh...

With M$ EOL'ing XP in the near future, looks like the only way to run some of the older 'doze apps will be on Wine. My experience with Vista has been that the frustrations far outweigh the improvements over XP (on the kids' computers - my primary OS is Solaris 10).

Re:New wine project

[TheRaven64]

It's also likely to be used in virtualisation a lot in the future. Parallels, for example, uses WINE code to translate Direct3D calls into OpenGL commands, which are then passed through to the host OS. I wouldn't be surprised if someone uses the same solution in VirtualBox at some point.

Re:New wine project

[gringer]

That's in the FAQ:

http://www.winehq.org/site/docs/wine-faq/index#WIL L-THERE-BE-A-WINDOWS-VERSION-OF-WINE

Also in the FAQ:

The Windows version allows Wine developers to test out the completeness of Wine DLLs by replacing those on Windows. At least for now, this is mainly for developers. However, in the future once we finish our DirectX 10 implementation, we may be able to implement Direct3D 10 in Windows XP the same way it runs in Wine: by translating DirectX calls to OpenGL ones. Oh, and I noticed that someone mentioned DOSBOX.... It's in the App database, so someone has decided that it could be worthy of running under Wine, possibly for similar testing reasons:

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=885 3

Re:New wine project

[gringer]

Er, sorry. My quote was from the FAQ on the wiki:
http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ

Wine 1.0 would be a great mistake!

[z0M6]

At least at the moment. It would be like marking a half-built car (WARNING! car-analogy) as ready for use. I think it would be pointless to push such a product because it is simply not ready yet. Users would also have higher expectations of the product than what should be realistic. That said, Wine has come a long way. Playing opengl games works great. The same can't be said for directx. Some installers does not function at all. And there is a lot of other issues as well. Wine 9.64 seems more realistic than wine 1.0 at the moment.

Re:Wine 1.0 would be a great mistake!

[Enleth]

Can't be? Well, I've just finished the Age of Mythology campaign - in case you don't know, this is a Microsoft game, a close relative of the Age of Empires series, uses DirectX exclusively and works perfectly, including playing over DirectPlay with copies running natively on Windows. The only reason some games still don't work is that their programmers were trying to be too smart and invented things that work by chance alone even on Windows, due to some hard-to-mimic memory allocation behaviours, undocumented "features" that allowed them to get away with programming mistakes and such things. Sure, the implementation of Direct3D in Wine isn't complete, but every well-written game either works or gives a very clear indication of the lacking 3D features, as it would under Windows with bad video drivers.

Re:Wine 1.0 would be a great mistake!

[AJWM]

I think it would be pointless to push such a product because it is simply not ready yet. Users would also have higher expectations of the product than what should be realistic

You missed it. Think about it, this is a Windows (non-)emulator. Releasing a not quite ready for primetime version as 1.0 (or even 2.0) fits perfectly with providing the whole Windows experience.

Re:Wine 1.0 would be a great mistake!

[Anonymous Coward]

The 1.0 release won't mean that most Windows applications will install and run on Wine without tweaks (or at all). The point of achieving the 1.0 release is to stabilize the code base and significantly reduce regressions (which has been a problem in the past).

Re:Wine 1.0 would be a great mistake!

[empaler]

Can't be? Well, I've just finished the Age of Mythology campaign - in case you don't know, this is a Microsoft game, a close relative of the Age of Empires series, uses DirectX exclusively and works perfectly, including playing over DirectPlay with copies running natively on Windows. The only reason some games still don't work is that their programmers were trying to be too smart and invented things that work by chance alone even on Windows, due to some hard-to-mimic memory allocation behaviours, undocumented "features" that allowed them to get away with programming mistakes and such things. Sure, the implementation of Direct3D in Wine isn't complete, but every well-written game either works or gives a very clear indication of the lacking 3D features, as it would under Windows with bad video drivers. In extension to above, do you then indicate that MS' gaming dept. has made a well-written game? ;-)

Re:Wine 1.0 would be a great mistake!

[Anonymous Coward]

(and in the present).

Re:Wine 1.0 would be a great mistake!

[Hucko]

Hardware, games and other miscellaneous time wasters even Twitter may concede they do well. It is software to real work that is often frustrating. Not to mention their habit of screwing people/business over. oops.

Re:Wine 1.0 would be a great mistake!

[empaler]

Hardware, games and other miscellaneous time wasters even Twitter may concede they do well. It is software to real work that is often frustrating. Not to mention their habit of screwing people/business over. oops. I might concede that as well - though I haven't played an MS game since... AoE I? I just don't game much in the latter years. I have a wireless keyboard & mouse set that from them that I've grown to love which ironically works a lot better on a Mac than on my Windows PC. Also, when Vista first came, driver support for the set was horrid. (Don't actually know for a fact whether it's better now, seeing as I axed Vista again very fast, for reasons you've described above :-p )

Re:Wine 1.0 would be a great mistake!

[Hucko]

Ditto on the games... I love their hardware too. Works better in linux for me than it did in XP :s. I'm planning on getting Vista just to validate the stories... those accosting my 'sphere of influence' seem to be running away or sitting in despair (except my brother who loves Microsoft). Online it doesn't seem to be as bad as what it was believe d it was going to be. :)

Newer != Better

[omnirealm]

chaosite wrote:
> Yes, it has gotten way better.
> It has support for Direct3D, tons of winapi functions, etc... It's pretty awesome at this stage, really.

Oblivion, perhaps the most widely acclaimed game from last year, runs pretty well on Wine 0.9.38. Someone made changes to the DirectX thread-related code that causes Oblivion under Wine to crash for every version since. The lesson here is that the newest version of Wine is not necessarily the best one to use for any given application.

Re:Newer != Better

[chaosite]

As per the bug report, theres a workaround.

("OffscreenRenderingMode"="fbo")

Re:Newer != Better

[omnirealm]

> As per the bug report, theres a workaround.
>
> ("OffscreenRenderingMode"="fbo")

fbo gives you between a 30%-80% frame rate hit compared to pbuffer, depending on the complexity of what is being rendered at any point in the game. The best game play experience can be had on release 0.9.38 with pbuffer.

MSOffice Install and Run

[t35t0r]

Call me when I can Install and run at least MSOffice 2k3 using wine.

Re:MSOffice Install and Run

[tirnacopu]

Office XP runs fine in Wine and it's had three big bugfixes (service packs) that made it quite safe and stable. I have tried almost all Office versions (MSDN subscription) and when 2003 came around tried really hard to find the improvements. My 1024x768 laptop display suddenly was too small, its load time doubled for no apparent reason, all sorts of new bugs appeared, the second service pack REMOVED some features from it due to some lawsuit MS lost.. but it had a better spell-checker. If there was any way to install that on Off XP, I would have been the happiest man. Office 2007 though had quite a 'wow' factor when I installed it. Except Outlook 2007, which I swear is an exact copy of the one in 2003.

Re:MSOffice Install and Run

[oatworm]

One feature at least gives Outlook 2003 props over Outlook XP: RPC over HTTP. It's great if you have remote staff that needs full Exchange functionality and you don't want to deal with VPNs or torture them with OWA. Then again, Exchange 2007 actually has a pretty decent OWA package now, so there might be less of a need to deal with that.

Good going

[Anonymous Coward]

These guys work really hard to address Lunix's greatest deficiency: that it isn't Windows.

Re:Good going

[jombeewoof]

These guys work really hard to address Lunix's greatest deficiency: that it isn't Windows. These guys work really hard to address Linux's greatest deficiency: Vendor Support

There, fixed that for ya.

Re:Good going

[raventh1]

To correct you, that it doesn't have lots of AAA games.

Re:Good going

[stonedcat]

To correct you, that it doesn't have lots of AAA games. I was under the impression that AAA provided only roadside assistance/towing. I feel silly having missed their venture in to computer games.

What about 64 Bit?

[Krozy]

It seems like WINE has been around forever. And here there is this minor update, yippee! What annoys me is this lack of 64 bit support. Late last year I finally switched completely (for the most part) to Linux due to Window's lack of 64bit support. Mind you, I was shocked and stunned (or is it the other way around) that I was getting better hardware support under Linux then Windows. But what has been disappointing is a need for some applications that do not exist under Linux, and where no comparable alternatives exist (Photoshop, Microsoft Visio, etc. - and no, Gimp is not comparable. Its not even comparable to Paint Shop Pro). For my college classes, I sometimes need to access systems that are in effect DRMed and only work under IE (that whole invasive ActiveX, junk up your system crud). Their solution to accessing this under Linux is to use WINE. Which, seems to be only 32 bit. I could have swore I read something awhile back suggesting they were going to be doing a 64 bit version this year. I take it this hasn't happened yet. In light of this slashdot article post, I've once again looked into WINE. I have recently discovered WineOn64Bit article on the WINE Wiki. Will shoot for giving that a try in the next few days. Has anyone else done this successfully? Any caveats not mentioned in that article? Or does anyone know anything about some native 64 bit WINE?

Re:What about 64 Bit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most Windows apps are 32-bit, so a 64-bit version of Wine would be of limited use (especially if you couldn't install the 32-bit version next to it). The 32-bit version works fine on 64-bit distributions provided they have a few 32-bit libraries.

Re:What about 64 Bit?

[dbIII]

Not such a new thing. Back in the win 3.11 days I switched to linux so I could get better hardware support. In that case it was to run a 14,400bps modem at full speed instead of the software locked 9600bps with the Microsoft system.

Re:What about 64 Bit?

[flyingfsck]

Shocked about HW support? Linux runs on anything from itsy-bitsy ARM processors to massively parallel super computers and you are shocked about hardware support - sigh...

Well, dammit, it won't run on my abacus! Linoox sucks...

Re:What about 64 Bit?

[Mad Merlin]

A 64-bit Wine would only run 64-bit Windows applications (ie, nothing). You don't want a 64-bit Wine.

You can of course run 32-bit Wine on a 64-bit Linux install, I do exactly this without issue.

subpar Windows apps, the reasoning?

[icepick72]

You can find all that you need on Linux nowadays, even decent office products. If Wine keeps taking up your time to install/configure/troubleshoot then what is that time worth to you (classic cost vs time)? If you really need those Windows apps for some reason then push the money into a Windows license. Better yet get your business to buy it for you. If it's just for personal use then you really have to ask yourself what the hell you're doing.

Re:subpar Windows apps, the reasoning?

[LiquidFire_HK]

That Wine requires so much reconfiguration to run something is, in many cases, an overstatement. In a large amount of the software I've run under Wine, the most configuration I've had to do was change the Windows version that Wine reports. In fact, unless the application doesn't start at all or starts with some error and exits, it usually runs more or less flawlessly (ie, it's usually all or nothing). If you need to run something on Wine, you can always check Wine's app database, and you can see how it runs, and sometimes instructions on how to get it to work in case it doesn't.

Re:subpar Windows apps, the reasoning?

[Elektroschock]

Well, video editing and all the Adobe tools...

Re:subpar Windows apps, the reasoning?

[icepick72]

video editing on linux http://www.robfisher.net/video/

If Adobe and video editing companies have chosen not to jump on the Linux bandwagon yet, then why would you (or the proverbial "we") accept the pain for them? Grab a Windows license and be editing and using Adobe tools and whatever else in no time at all. Or grab MacOSX if Windows is not ideal. This isn't directed to you but in general I have a rant: people would often rather whine and complain than do something about it. When options exist to do something about it, whining and complaining doesn't make sense anymore.

Re:subpar Windows apps, the reasoning?

[Elektroschock]

I am looking for a video tool, I installed everything but it doesn't work as it should. Windows is no solution to the problem.

I am holding out for 0.9.97882.8

[gatkinso]

Well, ok fine, 0.9.97882.6.

Thank Microsoft...

[Danathar]

Funny thing is, the LOOOONG release time of WinXP has given the developers the time they need to get wine working really well.

Justification for Fistya ?

[Ex-MislTech]

Anyone want to tell my why management is craving Fistya ^H^H^H^H^H^H, I mean Vista ????

What can it really do that XP cannot ???

If you lock XP down, it does just fine, and runs all the Win32 apps now....

It's total bullshit if you ask me.

hmmm..

[SuperDre]

I still wonder if Wine is completely legal, as it must step on some patents owned by MS, also it's kinda reverse engineering, which is illegal in a lot of countries.. but other than that, it's great to have a good windows emulator..

Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why a Linux-tag? What does Wine have to do with Linux?

I understand that Wine is important to Linux community, but should all the software that run on Linux be tagged as Linux? Should all software that runs on operating systems X, Y and Z be tagged as X, Y and Z? What about the hardware platforms?

Which few lines?

[Anonymous Coward]

When *I* try to build under Cygwin, I get loads of errors related to the "hidden" attribute, as well as makefiles that lack some library include paths.
As I am not very bright, would you mind pointing me to the particular lines that I'd need to comment out to get Wine rocking in Cygwin?

Wordpad?

[Gothmolly]

Improvements to Wordpad? A milestone! Where can I download this masterpiece?

It's a 32-bit API, why do you need 64-bit support?

[AJWM]

64-bit support for Win32? What an odd concept.

Wine runs fine on my 64-bit Linux system as a 32-bit binary (AMD64). I haven't tried it, but now that you've got my curiosity up, I may try it on an IA-64 (Itanium) too, which also happily handles x86 32 bit apps in emulation.

Sure, these days Windows allegedly supports 64-bit platforms. Any idea how much of that is really running in 64 bit native mode vs 32 bit mode? (I have no idea, but I do recall the Win95 days when an allegedly 32-bit OS turned out to do an awful lot of thunking to 16 bits.)

Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

I just love the irony of people running Wine.

Wordpad?

[sproketboy]

LOL improvements to Wordpad? Thanks!

I hope I get to play Civilization II soon!

[Glowing Fish]

Last time I tried using Civ II under Wine, it crashed as soon as it was actually time to play.

Oh, and if you are about to mention FreeCiv, don't. You don't give a chocoholic carob.

Re:I hope I get to play Civilization II soon!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm running Civ4 and Warlords through wine (on a 64bit install no less ) right now with no major issues.

Re:I hope I get to play Civilization II soon!

[Glowing Fish]

hmmm...
From the wine logs, it looks like I am not the only one with this problem.
It might be that Civ4 runs fine, but Civ2 does not. Which would be ironic, but not unheard of.

Finding an Outlook replacement for mobile phone..

[cheros]

The only problem I have that keeps WIndows fragments alive is that all the phones I have require Outlook for diary and contact management. I hate Outlook as a mail client (I use Thunderbird) but it is still one of the few things where MS has at least got some integration right if you overlook problems such as timezones and other real life use.

I have a Motorola RAZR (V3i) and a Sony Ericsson phone, and I need these to have their contacts synched. I hope to have the remote sync working at some point so it synchronises with a server on the Net, but until then I'm stuck with having Outlook and the sync software on the machine.

For the rest I have not found a reason to hang on to Windows, and this box thus mostly runs Kubuntu (I use KDE because I also demonstrate this to others). If someone can come up with a solution for mobile phones that works or at least a single consistent interface/API to whatever program sits in the background it would help a lot. You need calendar, contacts, todo and probably email as well, and a really clever solution would NOT replicate addresses and appointment 20x because different phones refer to the same database. Mobile phone sync could be the killer app for Google, but presently it appears we'll have to rely on a 3rd party such as http://www.goosync.com/.

The rest (pictures, music etc) will probably work OK via it presenting itself as a USB memory stick..

Anyway, I'm planning to buy a Sony Ericsson P1i next month. I'll see how that interfaces. Probably no news there, but at least it has a more usable keyboard :-).

Wine Is Not an Emulator

[TheBlunderbuss]

Unlike Dosbox, Wine isn't an emulator. It isn't separate from the system, like a virtual machine. Instead, it's more like Cygwin, which provides a POSIX layer to run Unix programs on Windows

Wine : Linux :: Cygwin : Windows
if that helps.

areo

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, now Areo will finally work under Linux

Wine DOES have 64-bit mode.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you configure wine with --enable-win64 it will build as a win64 version. This version will not run 32-bit programs, however, and 64-bit windows programs are rare.