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Wine 0.9.44 Released

Posted by kdawson on from the in-old-bottles dept.

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.

28 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Wine 1.0? by lobiusmoop · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    "I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
    1. Re:Wine 1.0? by alba7 · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      --
      Post tenebras lux. Post fenestras tux.
    2. Re:Wine 1.0? by Circlotron · · Score: 3, Funny

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

  2. Re:useful yet? by chaosite · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  3. How is this /.-worthy news? by ketilwaa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:How is this /.-worthy news? by QuantumG · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

      But yes, good point.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
    2. Re:How is this /.-worthy news? by robbak · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
    3. Re:How is this /.-worthy news? by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  4. Re:useful yet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

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

  5. Re:useful yet? by tom17 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot. by baadger · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot. by QuantumG · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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. :)

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
    2. Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot. by paskie · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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 ;).

      --
      It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
    3. Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot. by NickFortune · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
  7. Re:WordPad? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    vi vs. emacs vs. WordPad?

  8. Wordpad is actually important... by robbak · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
  9. Re:useful yet? by MadnessASAP · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    --
    I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
  10. Re:Any chance of a merge? by ozamosi · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  11. Finally! by MarkByers · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
    I'll probably be modded down for this...
  12. Re:But face it by ozmanjusri · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    --
    "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
  13. Re:But face it by pakar · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  14. New wine project by edxwelch · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    1. Re:New wine project by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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....

    2. Re:New wine project by a+strange+guy · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    3. Re:New wine project by caluml · · Score: 3, Funny

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

      --
      Get your own free personal location tracker
    4. Re:New wine project by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  15. Re:Does it run on (Net||Open)BSD or Solaris yet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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?
  16. Re:Any chance of a merge? by rvalles · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 :).