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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."
...how many applications will state "Designed for Windows XP, Vista, and Wine 1.0" as a supported platform. That will be the metre stick for success IMHO.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Excellent news for those of us (like me) who would like to run Windows apps without having to run an entire machine in VMware, Qemu, Parallels, or a similar program. Of course, nobody is paying attention right now because they're all busy downloading Firefox 3 to create a new Guinness world record for most software downloads in one day. (This story is being posted almost at the instant that Firefox 3 is being made available; not-so-great timing on /.'s part!) Nonetheless, I'm going to download Wine 1.0 right now.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Even Microsoft cant do that between versions.
Not slighting them in the least as they have done a Herculean task to get to this point, but i do wish they had made the actual MS office suite a requirement for 1.0, not just the viewers.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The next step is to encourage the makers of UMPCs to ship Wine with their units. Then users can run some of their legacy apps on the sub-$500 machines.
Personally, I get at least as good stability, and usually better performance, running (supported) Windows apps using CrossoverOffice, the commercial version of Wine. The two main Windows apps I use are MS Word and World of Warcraft. Word seems more stable, and I get better fps in WoW, running in Linux rather than Windows.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
I find it a little disappointing that they couldn't fix bug #6971. That's a vast quantity of games that are unplayable because they won't warp the mouse from one side of the screen to another when it hits the edge. They won't even mark it as a high severity bug, even though it meets the qualifications (makes many applications unusable), it's one of the most duplicated bugs, and it's one of the most highly voted bugs.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This is funny and true. As a desktop admin, there is nothing harder than
getting someone to take the time to learn a new application. Even worse
is asking someone to relearn the same application that they have been using
for over a decade. 2007 completely changes the user interface, which
is not a good thing for the target audience: people that use computers for
document editing. All I hear is people wishing for the "old toolbars" back.
music lover since 1969
The meme is dead, long live the meme!
And of course such a program would be pointless anyway. If 'Designed For Windows' apps don't work under Wine then Wine itself has failed its objective.
IIRC, Wine's objective is to give software vendors a set of libraries to compile their Windows software against so that it will run under Linux, not necessarily run all windows software natively in Linux. The idea is that if it is so simple to do, people like Adobe will release a Linux version of Photoshop compiled against Wine.So actually, getting products to say that they are "compatible with Wine 1.0" is the goal. That is also the reason that they are releasing: it gives vendors a stable branch to work with.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Actually, I've used Wine to gimmick ancient 16-bit installers into proceeding under XP64 and Vista64.
Sorry, compadre. In heterogeneous environments which are a lot more commonplace these days, Office is prohibitively expensive. You either need Terminal Servers, or Parallels plus a windows license, or I can hand out OOo to everyone, not worry about file formats, and get on with my life.
I switched another office that had already bought copies of Office 2008 for Mac, but the spreadsheets from Office 2003 never translated quite right. So they converted everything to OOo instead of wasting another couple of thousand dollars upgrading to office 2007.
Access and Infopath are dead because of web services. Graphic guys are going to buy Adobe anyway. That leaves Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Which are handily beat by OOo 3.0, which works all the time, every time, on Linux, Windows, and Mac.
I see that WINE supports some of the Steam games. That's great! I can't even get Portals to work on my Windows PC. The box says my system is compatable but alas it is not. Their wonderful online help has a list of several hundred things to try if their game does not work on your system. One of them says if the game will not run on your system you should upgrade your system. That's very helpful. So in order to run a $20 program you need to spend several hundred dollars to upgrade your system. The easiest way to make sure their software is compatable with your system is not to buy it.
Isn't it a bit of conflict of interests?
The lead developer also happens to make money on the working branch of the program. What happened to all the hippie good feel? And the fix to get current version to work with 2007; http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=586545&cid=23825339 requires people to remove a couple of file and install the right ones, bit convenient they left that thing out?
Not necessarily. It could also mean that only 1 user in 100 will have a problem with it. I've been running Open Office for well over a year without encountering any problems (in Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD) that prevented me from getting my work done.
And as someone else already pointed out, even MS products don't accomplish 100% compatibility. I've had more problems with moving files between different versions of Microsoft Office than between Microsoft Office and Open Office (or different versions of Open Office).
Although of course, your mileage may vary.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.
VMware player and workstation now have experimental 3d acceleration support. I have a Windows XP player running Google Sketchup in accelerated mode currently. Works great.
http://www.easyvmx.com/blog/?q=vmware_with_3d_acceleration
I've seen reports that it can run many older DX8 type games. Of course wine runs most of those just fine so why bother with a VM.
I am aware that X doesn't give you any information on mouse motion when it hits the edge of the screen. That shouldn't stop them from using the kernel driver. Sure it's not portable, but it would fix the issue for >90% of wine users.
That said, how do you know this is fixed in an upcoming release (release of X or wine?). Do you have a change log, bug report, or mailing list posting you could refer me to? I'd like to be hopeful for progress again.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I dont see why they chose this time to release 1.0. Still, a large number of software programs dont run on Wine. One that would not run at all is acrobat. Firefox crashes constantly. I could not get AOL online service client to run. Office XP doesnt run. Its pathetic. Wine is nowhere near 1.0 status. Its misleading since the software does not fully emulate windows, even reasonably well. Release 1.0 when you finally get everything working right.
I don't think you understand the reality of WINE, especially to Microsoft!
With WINE, Microsoft officially loses control over their Windows API. It's like IBM with the ISA vs. MCA architectures around the 286 era. Microsoft desperately wants to move to something else, ANYTHING else, so that they can maintain control of their API, so that developers have to write to the Microsoft API, and so that customers still have to buy Windows.
But if there is a WINE that is reasonably stable, that's no longer the case. Case in point: I develop a cross-platform application with PHP-GTK, which has been ported over using the Win32 API. I can write software that's immediately usable on Windows, Macintosh, and *nix. But I haven't released an actual installer for *nix, simply because nobody's asked for one. And if I decide that I want to support *nix, I have to go with at least one of two options:
1) Pick a distro or five and build packages for each every time I issue a new release. (as often as weekly!) This is pretty much a guaranteed FAIL since everybody has their own fav distro...
2) Release a Windows installer and test it against WINE to ensure reasonable compatibility.
I'm going with option 2 for now. Note that I prefer this even when using a toolkit that's natively a *nix toolkit. It's not because I don't love *nix, it's because I have no desire whatsoever to deal with customers who are often barely competent to turn their computer(s) on and try to get them to recompile ANYTHING.
Win WINE, the most successful development platform in existence becomes an open-source platform, and will quickly deflate the Microsoft monopoly. Microsoft has no choice, simply because the very thing that's kept them in the business (the massive base of WinXX applications) now becomes the very thing that they cannot abandon.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I think that the point that you make is very important. I've filed a bug at Ubuntu on the subject of collaborating the different package managers:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/240770
Please add your thoughts as a developer to the bug. Thanks.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Seconded. I have an Ericsson MC218 PDA (a re-badged Psion Series 5mx). Psion, to their great credit, have a free emulator that runs under Windows - and amazingly, it runs using Wine as well. I was very impressed, and swapping data back and forward using a CF card is seamless.
.vsd files, or Visio could run with Wine, many people would be very happy.
Unfortunately, Visio doesn't (yet) play nicely with Wine (or vice versa). As no GPL/Linux application can read Visio files, many LAN/networking professionals are stuck with staying on Windows, as Viso is the de facto industry standard for producing pretty pictures of networks. If Dia, or OpenOffice.org Draw could read
Get it before Microsoft sues.
Too true. But one nice thing...
If Microsoft is shutting down distribution of XP they're going to have a difficult time showing financial losses on a product they don't sell any more. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There is a very serious need for such an emulator, and Microsoft has provided three of them: one is an actual emulator (Virtual PC), the other two are delivered in the installation kit and are called WOW (Windows on Windows), one for 32-16 bit compatibility, the other one for 64-32. To be complete, there is also a fourth one, for MS-DOS legacy applications, NTVDM (Virtual DOS Machine). Neither of the above does a splendid job, but they do exist and are useful in a number of cases.
Joking aside Wine, Ndiswrapper, and the like are a step backwards for Linux in some respect. I use Linux, Windows, and OSX and honestly the majority of problems with Windows (2000-Vista) are caused by crappy drivers and even crappier applications. Whats the point of getting everyone to switch to Linux if we are still going to have to deal with all the crappy applications written in 1993.
I understand some hardware doesn't have drivers and some applications don't have Linux versions and people want to use their hardware and programs but where is the incentive for the producers of these products to support Linux if the open source community "makes it work" for them for free?
There are probably MILLIONS of programs written for Windows. Maybe a slight exageration, but maybe not. WINE is extremely useful to me for old, but still useful programs, that may have been written in VB6 or whatever. I personnaly have 4 such apps that will only run under Windows (or emulation), or WINE.
I use WINE whenever I can, it's easier and cleaner for me than emulation.
Just my 2c
I certainly was not joking. But I am not referring to the legacy software that is already out there, rather, I want to see developers write _new_ applications for Linux. We don't need Photoshop 7 on Linux, we need Photoshop CS4 (whenever that will be) on Linux.It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
And in the home users case it is always those damned cheapy Lexmark/HP/etc "Winprinters" or even worse the ever popular all-in one Winprinter/scanner/fax that is pointless to even try to convert. If there was a Ndiswrapper equivalent for printers there would be a huge amount of home users that I could easily convert to Linux. Most of these simply check email,surf,print their pictures,etc and would be perfect candidates for Linux,but those damned Winprinters get you every time.
IMHO the easier we make it for users to have their "must have" apps and hardware the better it will be for us all. The Linux market will grow larger, we will get more and more machines like the EEE with Linux preinstalled,and most importantly,the hardware and software manufacturers might actually start paying attention and make native solutions so in the future we won't HAVE to have things like Wine and Ndiswrapper. But that is my 02c from down here in consumer land,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Yeah, I bought "Civilization, Call To Power" from Loki, the version specifically for linux. I still like to crank it up once in awhile to relax with, but it doesn't run on most current linux distros. I suppose I could google around and find a fix of some kind, but it still runs on slackware, so I haven't bothered.
This is an example of a commercial application on linux, so one doesn't have open source that can be upgraded. I suppose if I'd purchased a windows version of the game, I'd be running all fine and dandy now under wine.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Well, you sure as hell won't sell a lot of Office suits or network tools for Linux.
But there is room for commercial software, even on Linux. Commercial software has one advantage, usually, and that's development speed. Wine took 15 years, and it's a good example of the development cycle of FOSS. FOSS takes time. Lots of it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.