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

What will interest me is

[Toreo asesino]

...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.

Re:What will interest me is

[SirMeliot]

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.

Re:What will interest me is

[The MAZZTer]

uTorrent already does, last time I checked.

I was debugging a Half-Life crash once and I noticed it checks the registry for Wine keys while starting up, probably for compatibility hacks.

Re:What will interest me is

[QBasicer]

uTorrent does, and lists Wine first.

Re:What will interest me is

[TheNetAvenger]

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

Quite a few in the non-commerical areana already do list Wine/XP/Vista etc...

However,Wine may be a little late to the game. Virtualization will give us all the features we once needed Wine for if done properly.

The other problem with Wine is the evolution of the Win32/64 API, and how it is slowly being replaced. 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.)

Microsoft sees a movement away from Win32 before too long, and even current applciations a lot of developers are working on projects that stretch from generic Win32 to fully hybrind Win32/WPF/DirectX all in one application.

If Virtualiation doesn't solve the divide, we still have Wine and Mono, and for any future, some of the backend of the current Linux kernel will need to extend to handle hardware with the same levels of abstraction, or shoving DX to OpenGL will not be enough when some of the core aspects of WPF is based around 3D UI that uses aspects of the OS to schedule and manage the 3D aspects so that two applications don't fight for 3D GPU resources, and currently only Vista's design allows for this.

(Didn't mean for this post to go negative, as there is a congrats to the Wine peeps in order, and even if Wine translation doesn't last forever is meeting a lot of people's needs now.)

Re:What will interest me is

[MighMoS]

Wine doesn't have a logo? I'd send you a link, but the website is down. Oh wait! All I had to do was scroll up to see it ON SLASHDOT!

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:What will interest me is

[mdielmann]

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.

I disagree. What that would mean is that software producers have tested against the platform, and certified it as a working alternative. That would be a level of awareness that has yet to be seen. It's also no different than having both XP and Vista, or only one, listed on the box. And that's besides the publicity that Wine would get.

Re:What will interest me is

[Hyppy]

Let me summarize the last few posts in line-by-line format for you.

How about NONE? Perhaps not commercial applications, yet, but many open source and freely distributed applications do. Case in point: uTorrent.

Wine doesn't have a "logo" Did you miss the Wine logo on its front page? Or on the top of the story?

nor a certification program. Wine's AppDB begs to differ

Being 1.0 release as well means it would be premature Over a decade of development, and its premature?

for a developer to market towards it (thus accepting liability for what could be shortcomings in the WINE system itself) Like that stopped developers or even hardware vendors from marketing for WindowsME.

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.

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.

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

Some would consider not running Office 2007 to be a feature.

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[Nursie]

Oh, so it's about not workoing for brainless, intolerant morons?

I can handle that.

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot of us out there who really dislike Office 2007, that doesn't mean that we're promoting OpenOffice, it may mean that Office 2003 is the better product.

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[Hatta]

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.

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[Aphoxema]

Your logic is ridiculous, at 99% compatibility for Open Office, it outdoes Microsoft Office's general compatibility with itself.

The situation you provided is very exclusive to a boss who is intelligent enough to realize the difference between MS Office and Open Office and having to work 100% of the year long.

In a normal business year, 99% compatibility is much closer to 1 day something going wrong, assuming your claimed statistics are even worth arguing.

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[djdavetrouble]

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.

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[iroll]

Send "presentation important" documents as PDFs. Always. Even if you're going from MS Office to MS Office.

Problem solved!

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not necessarily the toolbars we document processors/writers/editors miss in 2007--it's the hot keys and the functions usable from the keyboard through drop down menus. In spite of MS's assurances that those haven't been changed, many many have been. Not to mention the whole thing works damned inconsistently from the keyboard.

In this end of things typing speeds above 75 wpm are a matter of course; at that speed, taking your hands off the keyboard to use a mouse is a big productivity hit. Taking that hit plus the hit necessary to relearn an interface? Sorry, but I have deadlines to meet.

The most galling thing about it is MS's hubris (yes, I know, par for the course). They could have at least put in the ability to switch between the old and new interfaces to ease the transition and allow user choice. So confident were they that the new interface was better, that they forced us to make an either/or choice. If I had both, I could use the old interface when I had to and spend some time every day learning the new one. Instead it decreased our productivity.

Thanks guys...this is the worst call since they changed the help system to an online web-imitative help system.

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[maxume]

Recognition is the first step.

The next step is to eat some pudding, it will make you feel better.

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[damn_registrars]

having 99% compatability means 3 days a year where that is a problem
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.

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:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[iroll]

Where I work (public high school district), completely computer illiterate people (teachers) are required to Telnet into a VAX to input attendance and grades.

Telnet. Into a VAX.

They are shown how to do this on their first day. Their coworkers can show them how if they forget. The IT guy will come hold their hands ONE MORE TIME if they still can't handle it. And if all that fails, guess what? Find another job.

If your workplace says "save it as a PDF," your workers will learn to put it in a fucking PDF, even if they whine for the first week. The slowest and stupidest of them will eventually have the steps "save as... PDF!" on a sticky on their monitor and it will get done. It only takes one boss to get 'er done.

For your stupidest customers, guess what you can do? EMBED THE FUCKIN PDF IN A DOC, LOL!!!!!!!!!!! Yes, I recently received a contract from a residential contractor in this exact manner.

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[tkw954]

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.

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6971

Apparently, the bug is "Can't connect to local MySQL server"

Perfect windows compatibility?

[nurb432]

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.

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.

Next step is to ship this with Linux UMPCs

[Animats]

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.

Bah! I'll wait for version 3

[thomasdz]

As I've learned well in the Microsoft world... always wait for the THIRD version.
I've marked my calendar for June 2038...

Should have delayed the release slightly.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Obviously, sooner is better for actual use; but releasing it on June 30th would have been more amusing.

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).

Great, something to download

[mgiuca]

while I wait for you bastards to stop hammering poor mozilla.com.

Get it while it's hot?

[JKFLBOB]

I dunno...Personally, I like my wine at room temperature.

Duke Nukem Forever!

[Anonymous Coward]

I do find it a little disappointing that Wine didn't set getting Duke Nukem Forever working out of the box as a goal for 1.0!

I predict a multitude of such responses- "Wine 1.0 shouldn't have been released until it could run..."

It would be interesting to know what factors determined that it was ready for 1.0 release. Personally, I suspect it was a rounding error (perhaps they were using Excel in Wine 0.91 and it accidentally rounded up to version 1.0).

Re:FINALLY!

[mrsteveman1]

It goes great with vintage Windows apps.

Oh, and bread.

I would really like to try this out

[an.echte.trilingue]

I would really like to try out Wine, but I couldn't find the WinXP version on the site, which is strange because usually open source apps get ported over really quickly. I tried installing the source tarball in CYGWIN, but no avail. Anybody know where I can get the Win32 binaries?

Re:I would really like to try this out

[jonasj]

I tried installing the source tarball in CYGWIN, but no avail. I know you're joking, but might wine-under-cygwin actually be a solution to Vista's incompability with some software written for older versions of windows?

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:I would really like to try this out

[drsmithy]

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.

Re:I would really like to try this out

[lbgator]

Pay no attention to that "whoosh" sound. It'll pass in a second.

Re:I would really like to try this out

[Toll_Free]

After spending the better part of a couple days attempting to fool C & C Gold under Vista X64, I think I found my solution.

16 bit and 64 bit = bloods n crips.

--Toll_Free

Re:I would really like to try this out

[Anpheus]

Oh god! Watch out there's a huge arrow approaching your head!

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

[Anpheus]

A lot of old compatibility fixes are actually problems with the game itself, especially because you mention pre-2000 as the release date. I'm reminded of the Sim City example. Source: http://ianmurdock.com/2007/01/14/on-the-importance-of-backward-compatibility/

Raymond Chen is a developer on the Windows team at Microsoft. He's been there since 1992, and his weblog The Old New Thing is chock-full of detailed technical stories about why certain things are the way they are in Windows, even silly things, which turn out to have very good reasons.

The most impressive things to read on Raymond's weblog are the stories of the incredible efforts the Windows team has made over the years to support backwards compatibility: "Look at the scenario from the customer's standpoint. You bought programs X, Y and Z. You then upgraded to Windows XP. Your computer now crashes randomly, and program Z doesn't work at all. You're going to tell your friends, 'Don't upgrade to Windows XP. It crashes randomly, and it's not compatible with program Z.' Are you going to debug your system to determine that program X is causing the crashes, and that program Z doesn't work because it is using undocumented window messages? Of course not. You're going to return the Windows XP box for a refund. (You bought programs X, Y, and Z some months ago. The 30-day return policy no longer applies to them. The only thing you can return is Windows XP.)"

I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.

This was not an unusual case. The Windows testing team is huge and one of their most important responsibilities is guaranteeing that everyone can safely upgrade their operating system, no matter what applications they have installed, and those applications will continue to run, even if those applications do bad things or use undocumented functions or rely on buggy behavior that happens to be buggy in Windows n but is no longer buggy in Windows n+1...

A lot of developers and engineers don't agree with this way of working. If the application did something bad, or relied on some undocumented behavior, they think, it should just break when the OS gets upgraded. The developers of the Macintosh OS at Apple have always been in this camp. It's why so few applications from the early days of the Macintosh still work...

To contrast, I've got DOS applications that I wrote in 1983 for the very original IBM PC that still run flawlessly, thanks to the Raymond Chen Camp at Microsoft.

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!

[mrsteveman1]

Sure, you can sue anything with nipples

winehq slashdotted

[damn_registrars]

Hmm, their webserver appears to be having trouble keeping up with the traffic.

I wonder if they were running IIS through wine to serve the page?

Not really

[an.echte.trilingue]

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.

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:Let me be the first to say....

[SwordsmanLuke]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I'm pretty sure you're not the first to say "Holy Shit!" I mean, there's even an album.
If you wanted to be truly the first to say, you should have tried something more like: "Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers."

reference

Re:FINALLY!

[turgid]

It goes great with vintage Windows apps.

Many a true word was said in jest. Back in 1998 I wrote a small Windows program at work (~3000 lines of Turbo Pascal 7.0, Win 3.1) and tested it at home on Wine on Slackware. It worked fine.

Wine is an astonishing project. It deserves a lot of credit.

Re:FINALLY!

[KillerBob]

wine sucks.... never worked 100% and never will

the same can be said of Windows....

Re:FINALLY!

[dotancohen]

Using wine is a stop-gap measure for running Windows apps on Linux. All users of wine (and I am one) should write to their applications' developers and let them know that they would like native Linux support. I have a list of tens of software house and their contact info, for writing to software developers. Please, if you use wine, at least write to the application developers and let them know that there is demand for their products on Linux. Whether the apps work in wine or not.

Re:FINALLY!

[tehbunneh]

And there is a fatal flaw in your pointing out that he has a fatal flaw in his last argument, namely - Wine is not an emulator

Take it step by step

[Opportunist]

At the very least, write to them if it doesn't run in Wine.

Porting a software project can be a very nontrivial task, taking many manyears of work to complete. Few companies are willing to invest this kind of work (and money) for what seems to be a rather small customer base. They could, though, be willing to invest in a few tweaks to make it run on an emulator that would accomplish, from their point of view, the same thing: Letting Linux users use their software.

Companies are usually reluctant to develop for a platform with a small customer base. They do, though, accept making a few tweaks to get a foot into the market.

Currently, the only argument for people to keep using Windows is that Wine can't handle EVERY SINGLE Windows application. When there is no important application left that doesn't run well on Wine, people will more readily switch (Linux+Wine == Windows, from a user's point of view, but about 100-300 bucks cheaper).

And THEN it's time to ask software companies to develop for Linux, with it being the bigger market.

Re:Take it step by step

[zacronos]

When there is no important application left that doesn't run well on Wine, people will more readily switch (Linux+Wine == Windows, from a user's point of view, but about 100-300 bucks cheaper). And THEN it's time to ask software companies to develop for Linux, with it being the bigger market. I think you're confusing two sides of the issue.

At the point in time you describe, it will be easy for Windows users to switch to Linux, and there will be incentive for them to do so since it is generally cheaper and they would have more apps available (all Linux apps plus Windows apps under Wine) -- that much I agree with. However, one could argue that developing for the Windows API would still be the bigger market, since developing for Windows would give you an application which would work on Windows or Linux-with-Wine. Until the size of the Windows-only customer base is smaller than the Linux-only-and-I-won't-or-can't-use-Wine customer base, there will still be incentive to develop for Windows. There may be other reasons to develop for Linux instead (ease of development, more plentiful developers, etc), but a bigger market is not one of them as long as you continue to account for Wine.

On the other hand, having an easy-to-use and easy-on-developers Linux API available on Windows does the opposite -- software companies could develop for Linux and get apps that target both the Linux and Windows markets, thus targeting a bigger market than just Windows.

Re:FINALLY!

[mcrbids]

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.

Re:FINALLY!

[BillGod]

I never use anything 1.0.. Will wait for 2.0 before I upgrade!!!!

Re:FINALLY!

[SBrach]

Dear software dev,
I am writing you to inform you that even though you only write Windows apps, I (somewhat) successfully managed to get it to run on my Linux operating system. Please start making a Linux version of this application post haste so you can not gain a customer (I have already hacked your app to run in linux) and increase your development costs. An added perk is the fact that you will be required to support the Linux version rather than just telling me to "run it in Windows" when I call. The extra staff you hire for your support center should help the unemployment rate.

Thanks Again,
A Wine User

Re:FINALLY!

[dotancohen]

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.

Re:FINALLY!

[dotancohen]

Dear software dev, That's a good start. The rest could use some work, though.

Re:FINALLY!

[DaveV1.0]

The fanboy response:

But, but, but, choice is good! And, the more choices the better! It can't possibly hurt the community to have to choose from 15 different possibilities! That's just crazy talk!

Re:1.0 premature, Wine does not work well

[Ash-Fox]

One that would not run at all is acrobat.

I used to run Acrobat 7 a while back under Wine. But I found most of the pdf software on Linux was good enough to replace it.

Firefox crashes constantly.

Why don't you run the native version for Linux?

I could not get AOL online service client to run.

I cannot find "AOL online service client" on Google, so I assumed you meant AOL Instant Messenger, which works fine.

Office XP doesnt run.

Yes it does and you can run different versions of Office simultaneously if you know how to use the wineprefix parameter.

Its misleading since the software does not fully emulate windows

Wine is not a emulator, it simply implements the Windows API on top of a unix-like environment.

even reasonably well.

I beg to differ. I find that some of my games tend to run faster under Wine (compared to running them under Windows XP/Vista on the same hardware), I also use it to run older software that does not run under Windows XP SP2, Vista etc.

Release 1.0 when you finally get everything working right.

Feel free to contribute.

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:FINALLY!

[drsmithy]

If that were true, the default permission level would not be Administrator unless you go out of your way to reconfigure it.

You are conflating two very different things. The permissions in the system and privilege level of the user.

The default permission level for new users in Vista is still Administrator: Not sane.

This is simply confirming your ignorance. An "Administrator" in Vista is simply someone who is allowed to elevate their privilege level. It is loosely equivalent to the "admin" group in OS X or the "wheel" group in UNIX.

Re:FINALLY!

[cheater512]

You can leave Portage out of it.

Its a very nice niche PM.
It will never really hit mainstream thus wont do any damage.

RPM does need to die 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.