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First Release Candidate of Wine 1.0 Released
moronikos writes to mention that the first release candidate of Wine 1.0 was announced and released into the wild today. This new version includes only bug fixes as the team is in a code freeze while pushing for the full 1.0 release.
does it run linux?
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
I'll drink to that!!!
(seriously though...hooray WINE!)
I was always under the impression that WINE, based on how it is designed, would never be finished, or even close to a finished release point. I mean, yeah, I know 1.0 doesn't mean it's done, just that it hit a specific milestone, but even so, WINE, being considered a ⥠1.0 version seems to me like it shouldn't happen until it can at least come close to running most everything thrown at it.
Just my non-developer, non-programer, former WINE-user $.02.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Because Wine is not an emulator, it is faster and uses less memory than emulators.
How well do 3d games work with emulators?
If you run Windows on a virtual machine, you will still need Windows for that. With wine you don't.
But obviously you are free to use what ever you like and what works best for you. As wine is not ready, it is not a perfect solution, even it does have some advantages for the applications that work with it.
Because WINE can run "Lander on the moon" from Windows 3.11 and Windows XP/later cannot.
I mean, I've been running Windows software under WINE for *years*. What's their definition of "1.0"? Does it really mean anything, or will we be getting 1.0.1, 1.0.2, etc monthly afterwards anyway just like before? Or is 1.0 some "complete feature set" release, suggesting that I can now run any windows software (I doubt that's true, considering that even MS Office is still a bit shaky).
http://www.winehq.org/?announce=1.0-rc1 pretty much has a list of bugfixes&features, just like any other release. Where's the beef in "1.0"?
"Why would I want to use Wine when I can just run windows in a virtual machine?"
:)
You don't have a lot of spare RAM? (e.g. using VirtualBox requires enough RAM for the host OS + the RAM for the virtualized OS + the RAM for the app running in it; with Wine you eliminate the need for the virtualized OS)
You don't want to buy a Windows license/pirate Windows for a single app? (or more generally, you don't want Microsoft code on your system if you can help it?
.. before it is usable? :)
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
I think this is great Wine is finally reaching "1.0". I am hoping this version will be treated as a longer lived, stable, supported branch. This way developers might seriously target Wine as a platform or at least consider it a real "Microsoft Windows Compatible" target (Yea, it would be better if ports of apps were targeted to be Linux or Mac OS X native)
Sure it won't run all Windows apps perfectly - but then again, neither does Windows! There are lots of apps out there that have various bad code that often shouldn't even run at all but somehow gets away with working under a generic Windows XP install. Then they crash under Wine, Windows Vista, or even XP under odd configurations. And then there are the ones that do things different under different versions of Windows to get around bugs or varying behavior in Windows.
Also having a longer lived "1.0" branch would mean tips and tricks to getting individual programs to run would not become obsolete quite as quickly, and a Wine "1.0" users would not have to worry as much about apps breaking every few weeks.
At any rate, Wine has come a very long way - I remember when it was just trying to be a Windows 3.1 clone!
When I switched from Windows to Linux, it turned out that I was able to function without specific applications, there are Linux equivalents for pretty much everything.
Deleted
So, this would be Release Candidate version 0.01 right? ;-)
Because you do not want to support Microsoft by purchasing Windows? Besides, these days MS will not even sell you a version of Windows that runs best under a VM (XP for newest x86 computers, 98 for the rest).
.Net/Mono may be a better solution for a lot of developers.
I see a business model of developing programs for the dominant desktop platform but also certifying them to run properly under Wine for Linux users. If the application is explicitly Wine-aware, it shouldn't be that hard to get it Gtk+/Qt themed, use UNIX-styled file dialogs or call native libraries for Linux-specific functionality. Of course
On a pc or mac?
You will be eaten by a grue.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
Version number schemes vary between different software, and you'll have to ask WineHQ specifically what they mean to be at 1.0.
In the FOSS world, though, usually version 1.0 is a pretty big milestone showing that the software is complete, with few bugs known and little or no features missing. Some projects gone on for years in the 0.x numbers before ever getting to 1.0 (if ever). Wine itself started just naming it on the date (eg, Wine 20020314), but a couple years ago or so they started calling it 0.9.0 and so on.
Usually the big number in a version number represents important steps, though this can of course vary. For example, OpenBSD doesn't bother with making a fuss about what the number on the left means and they just increment by 0.1 always (after 3.9 came 4.0, and so on). GNU Emacs decided a long time ago that no complete rewrite would ever happen, and so they constantly increment the big number for large changes (they're at version 22.0 now). Hell, Netscape even decided to skip an entire number (4.7 -> 6.0) after the original company died and the new versions were based on the Mozilla project.
Actually they do say, what's their target for wine 1.0:
http://wiki.winehq.org/WineReleaseCriteria
"doesn't wine still require windows files to run things like d3d? so to run it legally you still need to purchase windows anyway?"
No.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Just look at the list of applications supported by Wine and you'll understand why I say that. Basically, if I can run Civ IV, Heroes IV and other strategy games on Linux, and with Matlab having a Linux version, there's very little to justify my using Windows. OK, there's Fruityloops, but that's it!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The long answer is that not all of the DirectX features are quite there, I don't know if it's current but there's an overview here. The result is that some games won't play without native DLLs. Doing that requires the Windows files and adding an override in winecfg. This was a much larger issue before than it is now and it keeps getting fewer that need these overrides.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Before Duke Nukem?
But you can download the direct3d runtime from microsoft without having to buy windows...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Really? I'm looking at that page and don't you know, it seems that Direct3D v9 is 95% supported...
Nice to see Wine going 1.0. Does anyone know how much this impacts ReactOS?
The beef is described at
http://wiki.winehq.org/WineReleaseCriteria
In essence, 1.0 is just another release,
but with more stability (e.g. a month's
codefreeze and only very careful bugfixes)
and a few longstanding bugs
(e.g. serial I/O, dos apps) fixed not because
lots of people need them, but because it just
seemed wrong to reach 1.0 without fixing them.
Dan Kegel
Wine 1.0 Release Manager
Does this mean they'll start releasing binaries for OS X soon? I've compiled it a couple of times, but it's a lot of effort (you need to check out things from two separate svn repositories, run a script, hunt bugs, then compile for every version), and since they claim in the first paragraph of the front page to support OS X I'd really expect them to have regular binary builds.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If you read http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html#id247954 you will much better understand why they are pushing for a 'clean' 1.0 release. Its 'now or never' ...
:(
Personally I 'need' support for Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, not for myself, but for my girlfriend. It is the single showstopper for her linux experience, and until it is fixed, I'll never hear the end of it
I'd like the opportunity to thank all of you who have been working hard on Wine all these years.
Recently Wine has saved my butt at work when my Windows machine auto-upgraded me to IE 7 (even though I have auto updates turned off). I was hard-pressed, then, to be able to reproduce a JavaScript bug that apparently was only present on IE 6 (and not 7, nor FF or Opera).
Being able to install IE 6 on my Ubuntu box was a godsend, and it worked well enough that I was able to reproduce the bug and fix it.
Kudos to you guys for your fabulous work, and thank you!
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
- ...don't have a copy of Windows to install and don't want to buy one.
- ...want the application window to use your normal X11 window manager rather than having to have an entire Windows environment with start menu and everything.
- ...don't want to wait for Windows to boot every time you want to run the application.
- ...want to run an application using 3D.
- ...don't have VMX hardware and don't want to shell out money for VMware.
- ...don't want the overhead of emulating the entire hardware.
I won't argue the reason that you don't want to run proprietary software, because if you're running Windows applications, that's probably not your problem. However, even so, I would feel it would be nice to be able to run e.g. a game without necessarily making my system a nest of evil. I've always felt that I don't mind games being proprietary -- they're a bit like movies or books in the way that it is the content, and not the code, that actually matters.That said, there are obviously lots of reasons for wanting to use Wine.
I used it to play games in 1998. 2004? Big deal. I've got cheese older than that.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
If I am going to make an application Wine-aware, why use the cruddy old Win32 API or (barf) MFC when I can use a true cross-platform API such as Qtk+/Qt as you mentioned but natively, not emulated? I see no reason to use OS-specific code for any newly-developed application anymore. All of my application coding is done in Java, or C++ with either Gtk+ or Qt. I want my crap to run natively everywhere, and with minimal effort.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
You ask why one would want to use WINE instead of a virtual machine (like VirtualBox or VMWare). Here are a few reasons that pop in my mind without thinking about it forever:
1) You don't want to buy an MS-Windows license
2) You don't want to support Microsoft
3) You don't want to waste multiple gigabytes of hard drive space for a virtual drive
4) You want to be able to browse and manipulate the MS-Win files under Linux
5) You want native Linux file permissions
6) You want higher possible performance
7) You don't want to waste many hundreds of megabytes of RAM
8) You want to be able to use thin client to display the resulting program
9) You don't want to have to install, configure, and maintain another whole OS
10) You don't want to fight possible viruses, auto updates that break things, Windows Genuine, etc, etc
11) You want each program to appear as a real process
12) You want to be able to compile a program to run cross-platform
13) You want native Linux filesystem access while in the MS-Win application
14) You want native CUPS/printing access while in the MS-Win application
There are LOTS of reasons for WINE to exist despite virtual machines. That is not to say that virtual machines are not useful, just different.
Now I'll have to find something else in pre 1.0 to use and childly complain about...
^[:wq!
Another reason you're forgetting, and I know at least this applied in the earlier days of Wine, but I've not verified it recently... if you're a developer (developer developer... etc) the wine libraries can also be used to compile linux native binaries from windows based source. It's not the ideal way to port software, but it works for a quick and dirty compile. The plus side is, while Wine is constrained to a single architecture for the purpose of executing windows binaries compiled for that architecture, the code could be compiled for any architecture or OS that wine runs under.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
The problem with wine has always been the moving target that is Windows. That's how Microsoft keeps itself relevant. Using its monopoly position to keep everyone on the upgrade treadmill.
With Vista so terrible and, really, only new machines going vista and old machines staying as they are on XP, the XP level of the Win32 API has remained fairly stable for a good number of years. In fact, it may be unlikely that Microsoft will ever be able to unify the user base on a new version of the API again.
(And yes I know that there are still users of 3.1, W95,W98,W98SE, etc. but these are static installations that typically don't buy new software.)
Wine, moving forward, has a very good chance of capturing a usable market because ISVs are reluctant to abandon XP in any meaningful way.
95% supported - is that sort of like 95% pregnant?
Technically VMWare is a visualizer because it executes the hardware instructions naively(except privileged instructions which require special handling). This makes VMware faster than emulators such as Bochs but virtualizers only provide virtual hardware that is roughly the same type as the host system. VirtualPC is an example of a product that is both. Virtual PC on Windows is a virtualizer. VirtualPC on the PPC Mac is an emulator. QEmu support virtualization but I think it also supports emulation as well for emulating say an ARM system on x86 hardware.
We know those stats aren't quite accurate. Here's basically how we generate them: we ask the various subsystems maintainers, "How close to complete do you think this is?" and then we munge in some true numbers on actual function calls (API's) exported by DLL's and the number we've implemented (and in and of themselves each API might not be 100% complete.)
So take those numbers with a grain of salt. In some cases, it's completely possible a DLL will be nearly 100% functional with not many of the API's implemented at all. Microsoft has invented thousands of API's over the years and some have been dead on arrival - no one has ever used them. Even Microsoft doesn't use all of their API's. That's why within Wine development there's an often cited development method of, "Show me an app that actually uses that."
Finally, Tom hasn't updated those stats in almost a year and we've done a lot of work since then. (Big kudos to Tom Wickline for tackling that stuff.)
So what Wine really aims for is to take the most common few thousand API's and try to do them really well. Then we flesh out some bits around that. Then we stub out things around that and finally there's bits we just haven't even started.
----- obSig
If wine were to be integrated in some of the larger distros I am convinced the larger exposure will speed along development, and speed the acceptance of Linux in the workplace.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Windows programs have the nasty habit of installing to C:\Program Files, a directory that normal users don't have write permissions on.
This also means that you need write permissions to it to update it.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Alright guys, this release is 15 years in coming. I'm not aware of any other free software project that's taken 15 years to get to 1.0.
We know we've got some core architecture just right. That's taken a long time to get there. Now we have a lot of bug squashing to do and in many cases it's pretty amazing how quickly regressions can be found, bugs tracked, etc if we just have a few more eyes on this release.
So we put together a list of things you can do to help us out - check it out here:
1.0 regression hunting. And hey! We're giving out t-shirts to the folks who help us out the most.
Notice we didn't say anything about jumping in and writing code? You're certainly welcome to, and in some cases there might even be some low hanging fruit. However, without development experience on Wine's codebase your valuable time might best be spent regression testing your favorite game!
As always, thanks for all the support!
----- obSig
Well the exact term on the page is "95% complete", and if the 5% that isn't implemented is just never used by game creators, it won't be missed.
DX8 support in wine has been solid for a while now, and it's listed as "95% complete" as well, for what it's worth.
With regards to the "windows is a moving target" discussion that always comes up with WINE, the "but specific versions, particularly legacy ones, aren't." answer sufficiently addresses the platform's past. In fact, I strongly suspect that WINE on *nix could be a serious contender when certain cranky legacy systems have to be replaced. What I've seen less about is the future. The new .net stuff is probably mono's department; but loads of common windows stuff is still win32. There the moving target problem still exists.
It would make the future very much easier if the case could be made to software vendors that the *nix market is, or might soon be, of value. They would then have an incentive to keep WINE in mind while developing. The changes wouldn't need to be immediate or radical, just trying to keep out of ill-supported areas of win32, where possible, and bringing things that they run into to the WINE team's attention.
Obviously, some vendors would not, for technical or business reasons, be willing or able to do this(Office, some games, etc.); but those that can would be useful. In particular, this might be really helpful to address the class of critical but unsexy apps that *nix is often weak on. Bookkeeping, inventory, payroll, various other stuff in the category of boring but common business niche software.
"Still...it's hard for me to be enthusiastic when the only piece of software that I"
Maybe you could be enthusiastic for what it means to other people.