Wine 1.0 — Uncorked After 15 Years

pshuke writes "After 15 years of development, Wine version 1.0 has been released. Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix. While perfect windows compatibility has not yet been achieved, full support for Photoshop CS2, Excel Viewer 2003, Word Viewer 2003 and PowerPoint Viewer 2003 have been among the goals prior to the release. For further information about supported applications, head over to the appdb. Get it (source) while it's hot."

Comments

Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[Ash-Fox]

By deleting the incomplete msxml dlls and setting winecfg's settings to use the native versions, then installing microsoft xml..

You can install and run Microsoft Office 2007.

I do find it a little disappointing that Wine didn't set getting Office 2007 working out of the box as a goal for 1.0, as it really currently just relies upon finishing two DLLs.

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[Ultra64]

That is a bug in X windows, it will be fixed in an upcoming release

Re:Perfect windows compatibility?

[Ash-Fox]

Microsoft Office 2003, XP should install and run out of the box in Wine 1.0. Office 2007 requires a few tweaks before you can install it though.

Don't forget the main commercial sponsor

[cerberusss]

Don't forget the main commercial sponsor CodeWeavers. Alexandre Julliard, one of the leading developers of Wine, now works for them. Their main product is CrossoverOffice, which regularly snapshots the Wine branch and then does bugfixing on it. Then they charge $40 for a solid and stable version, and include a GUI to make installing IE and other applications a cinch.

It's a small shop and very sympathetic. They also read Slashdot. Jeremy, the CEO, is active here as user jeremy_white. Befriend him to let his comments show up as +5.

Disclaimer: I'm just a happy customer since version 4 (about 5 years ago).

Re:I would really like to try this out

[Bob-taro]

Anybody know where I can get the Win32 binaries?

There actually is a win32 binary version of wine that runs in cygwin. They say it was created as an additional test of the code's portability, and for some other reasons that I can't remember right now. Funny but TRUE!

Re:What will interest me is

[PRMan]

But Wine and Mono don't require a commercial license and virtualization does. So while it may "seem" the same while running the application, there is a cost difference (unless you are pirating Windows).

Re:What will interest me is

[SanityInAnarchy]

There's a cost difference with virtualization. There's also a difference in boot times (2-5 seconds with Wine vs a whole XP boot with virtualization), in performance (wrapped FS API is very likely faster than virtual hard disk on top of a real FS, for instance), and in RAM usage (duh).

Vista API technologies are not even on the radar, and have the potential to shake up the next generation of application development. (Search Channel9 on WPF .NET 3.5 SP1 for some interesting demos of how far WPF has already gone in just a year.) If WPF .NET is the future, Mono is already on that job -- and Mono can, in theory, be better than Wine, as .NET was at least half-assedly designed to be portable.

Keep in mind, also, that there's a whole class of people who only need one or two killer apps to work. Sometimes it's something recent (Photoshop); often it's something like an old version of QuickBooks, or some obscure app that no one makes anymore. So if Wine runs legacy apps well, that's a very good start.

Re:Not really

[linuxrocks123]

Actually, the original purpose was dual: they wanted to provide a way to natively run Windows binaries, and also provide a method for porting Win32 applications to Linux. Both efforts are still ongoing, but there's never been much uptake for the porting approach. WordPerfect 2000 for Linux was the flagship success of the porting project, and it was years ago (and the native WordPerfect 8.x was better anyway). I think it's fair to say that the main goal of Wine at this point is to provide a method to run Win32 applications natively in Linux, and that a secondary goal is to provide a porting library.

Re:I would really like to try this out

[Doug Neal]

Remote desktop is kind of a joke in comparison.

Remote desktop is just better. Vastly more usable on low-bandwidth (or high latency) links and when your session drops out for some reason you can reconnect and not have lost everything you were working on.

If you haven't already, I recommend taking a look at NX (proprietary with free edition) or FreeNX (GPL). RDP/VNC style remote access to Unix and Linux servers, but actually better and faster than both, especially on lower quality links. It uses a combination of SSH tunneling and X11 protocol compression. Very easy to set up and use, too.

Re:I would really like to try this out

[pato101]

X is the worst way imaginable to do graphics (a giant frame buffer). Stop trolling about what you don't know about!.
X is not a giant frame buffer. It has vector operations, combined with raster operations.
X11 is a wrong option over high latency links because it is designed to provide a very high performance at low latency ones.
For high latency links, use NX which is much faster than VNC + compression (being VNC a giant frame buffer, is faster than X11 because the latency issues).
NX does compression, but most importantly solves the latency issues by cumulating requests avoiding roundtrips.

Re:FINALLY!

[dtremenak]

Have you considered using a distribution-neutral package format like autopackage? There are solutions written specifically for developers in your situation. Not everyone needs to build packages in native formats; really those are mostly for central repositories. If you're not distributing your app through a central repository, there's no reason not to use something like autopackage.

Re:What will interest me is

[bberens]

I can name 1 app that advertises that it runs under wine. It's called Picasa, and that's produced by one of the largest firms in the industry. Thanks for playing though.

Re:1.0 premature, Wine does not work well

[Ash-Fox]

I use Windows firefox because I am on FreeBSD and there is no flash player for FreeBSD.

Why don't you enable the Linux ELF compatibility support in FreeBSD, install Linux Firefox with Linux flash plugin?

I suspect the Wine issues you are suffering might be due to Wine issues with the FreeBSD specific port. I do recall listening to a podcast on BSDtalk where Jeremy White said the Wine support shouldn't even be considered beta on the BSDs. In theory you could run the Linux version through the Linux ELF binary support - but I haven't tried that myself, but I doubt there should be any issues.

I have used Firefox through the Linux ELF binary support though.

I was talking about the AOL online service client, not AOL instant messager. That is AOL 9.0.
http://daol.aol.com/software/90vr

Okay... I'm not touching that with a ten foot pole.