Wine Goes 64-Bit With Wine64

G3ckoG33k writes "Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a popular way to run Windows programs on Linux, and it has an impressive compatibility list. After 15 years of development it reached version 1.0 a few months ago. Now, Wine developer Maarten Lankhorst has succeeded in running 'Hello World' in 64-bit, natively! The 64-bit variety is unexpectedly named Wine64."

Comments

Re:LUK

[QuantumG]

Meh. You can use unmodified Windows libs in WINE too.. the point, that you obviously missed, is that you can run Windows apps without Windows libs (or Windows) using WINE.

impressive compatibility list

[theshowmecanuck]

impressive compatibility list

Not that impressive, unless all you want to do is game. If adding an application to its compatibility list is just a popularity contest, and it seems that is all that it is, of course the fan boys interested in games will vote the most. Others will just use the 'other' operating system to run applications that they need to use in order to make a living (since they won't be able to outvote fanatic gamers). Linux/Gnu has to relax more, not less, in order to allow people to NOT have to rely on some emulator or flaky reverse engineering to make business tools work. Relax on APIs so that it is easier to port business applications over to Linux. Until that time there will never be a 'year of the Linux desk top'. People just want to use their tools, not build them.

Re: impressive compatibility list

[KasperMeerts]

So you want to destroy the very mindset that created Linux in the first place? The kernel is released often and early.
And that's great! Because bugs are squashed so much faster and features are tested immediately. It's up to distributions to act like a "buffer" between this and the end users.

Besides, there are absolutely no ABI problems with open-source programs. And if you respond by saying that Linux needs this closed-source binaries then again, you would understand Linux wrong. We manage pretty good ourselves.

Re: impressive compatibility list

[Bert64]

Games are the most popular things for running in wine, because they are the biggest thing generally missing on the systems that run wine...
For most other types of app there are linux native versions which run better than alien binaries running under wine.

Who really uses it though ?

[billcopc]

Every time I read about Wine, I shrug and/or roll my eyes. I've tried many times to use it, but it simply does not work for the handful of Windows apps I actually need. I gave it another try just a few months ago, and I was again left high and dry, so I turned yet again to virtual machines. At this point, I have stopped caring about the project.

For the inevitable flamers among you, here's the short list of Windows apps I need, that Wine fails to support:

- Photoshop CS3
- Office 2007
- MSIE 6/7

IE6 runs, sure, but leaks memory like there's no tomorrow, so I have to kill -9 it after a few minutes lest I face a swap-spiral of doom. And don't try to tell me to use The Gimp and OO.o, I don't need "A photo editor" and "An office suite", I need those specific apps because those are the formats my peers and clients use. If it were just me in my little bubble, I'd be quite happy with unbranded alternatives, but my rent doesn't pay itself.

Now one would think that these major apps would be high on the priority list, as I'm hopefully not the only (commercial) web guy trying to use Linux as a serious desktop, and getting them to run perfectly would effectively make Windows redundant for a large number of people, not just web devs. I find it puzzling that Wine can run something like World of Warcraft, but not MS Outlook. Don't get me wrong, I loves me some Warcrack, but it doesn't pay my bills.

Re:Who really uses it though ?

[Quarters]

Maybe in your haste to spew out your idiotic response you missed the part where the poster logically mentioned that he does not work alone. Have you ever tried to open a 16bbp, LAB color, layered, Photoshop CS3 document in GIMP? The second the poster gets a PSD file from a client or a coworker he's screwed if WINE can't load the correct version of Photoshop. Before you come back and say "Well he should just teach his clients and coworkers to use a more open format" please provide a list of open formats that store layers, adjustments, filters, etc.. - all of the tweakable settings you would need to properly adjust source art. A collapsed PNG is great for final delivery, but it sucks as a source art storage/collaboration format.

Re:bad move

[Mr Z]

I don't agree w/ Eric on this one. The shift from 32-bit to 64-bit systems has been darn near seamless as compared to previous transitions. That's a far cry from the 8-to-16 jump or the 16-to-32 jump.

Honestly, most people can't tell that they've shifted from 32-bit to 64-bit. If there wasn't a dialog box or a sticker that told them they'd switched, they wouldn't know.

Now this wouldn't be /. without a bad car analogy. Going from 8-bit to 16-bit was like going from horse-drawn buggies to the early Model Ts--a big change. Going from 16-bit to 32-bit was like going from these early, slow cars to the more recognizable cars of the 30s onward. Cars that actually had starters and drove at reasonable speeds. Each step provided a noticeable difference in the travel experience and it brought with it a whole new round of infrastructure requirements.

Going from 32-bit to 64-bit is like going from a gasoline engine to a hybrid. Sure, it's a change in the underlying mechanism, but it doesn't fundamentally change the driving experience all that much.

Kudos

[gatkinso]

For asking about something which you are unfamiliar.

Such an attitude is refreshing, usually you just run into folks like the AC below who are a-holes.

However the link provided down below in this thread is a great place to start reading. Have fun!