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Apps That Officially Support Wine
David Gerard writes "Wine (the Windows not-an-emulator for Unix) runs Windows applications more often than not. (Certainly more often than Vista does.) Dan Kegel on the wine-users mailing list/forum has started gathering apps that declare Wine a supported platform. And there's now a Wine Support Honor Roll page on the Wine wiki. We need more apps that work with Wine stating that they consider it a supported platform. If you write Win32 open source or shareware, please open yourself to the wider market!"
I've got an "Officially Supported" section in Games That Work which includes Starport Galactic Empires and Soldat running under Wine. I tried to convince Reflexive (since my gal plays hundreds of their website's games) to let me test and certify games so that they could be marked as "Works with Wine 1.0" on the download site. I was snubbed.
Put identity in the browser.
WOOOOOSH. He meant Wine is more compatible with Windows apps than Windows Vista is. He wasn't comparing the installed user base of each. Now his statement was an hyperbole meant to poke fun of Windows Vista breaking many apps when it got released and so it's probably not very accurate. It was meant as a joke. Your response should've been : Haha, moving along...
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
What does the number of users have to do with it? He's talking about Windows apps that run on WINE but not on Vista. And there are a lot of those, if you count apps that with features that are broken under Vista, and don't count apps that will run on Vista if you upgrade to the latest and greatest version.
Even so, he's probably exaggerating and/or overestimating. But the fact remains that there's a nasty degree of API incompatibility between Vista and previous versions of Windows. For example, if you have any version of Adobe Acrobat except the latest, you get a file system error if you try to write certain modifications out to disk. Basic I/O operations broken! That's pretty bad.
That said, I'm less then impressed by the list of "works on WINE" apps. The link is to a forum that mentions precisely two of them. That motivated somebody to start a wiki page with a list. There are maybe 20 very obscure apps on this page, and I'd be surprised if they don't all have Linux native alternatives.
When a major software vendor starts talking about WINE support, then we have a real trend. Not before.
This game developer claims that making the game available on less-popular platforms increased his sales by over 122%, perhaps significantly over. This was due to getting a lot of exposure for his game on Mac and Linux sites, when the same game probably would have gotten a footnote on Windows' gaming sites.
Put identity in the browser.
Funny thing is, one of my favorite games, System Shock 2, works just fine (for me) in WINE, while it has very shoddy performance in 2K/XP.
As someone who runs Wine and Vista, I have had more problems getting things to run under Wine than Vista; but I have had more problems overall with Vista than with Wine.
I believe that subby was confused on these points.
http://www.dmng.ru/seisview/seisee.en.html
I think you'll find a lot of other scientific software is also designed to be cross platform in that way.
There is also some commerical software which is cross platform from dotnet to mono and has official linux support - but I can't give you an example which is paticularly stable on either platform. I really don't know if the blame can be laid on dotnet or the developers using it - and mono is playing catchup which adds in a few more quirks (libexif as a dependancy to run purely text based stuff?).
Um, WINEHQ has for a long time had a "Windows port". It's used mostly for testing since substituting the real system files is easier in the actual environment; and some other debugging is easier too. Since the new site layout however I've yet to find the correct link for it, otherwise I would post it.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
"Certainly more often than Vista does." This is what gives Slashdot a bad name: completely false (or exaggerated) negative statements in order to promote your own ideas.
The GP makes an incorrect claim of inaccuracy because he misunderstood the summary (it is talking about application compatibility not user numbers) and gets modded (currently) "3 insightful"
That is what gives Slashdot a bad name
I think you meant to link to: http://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?t=3375
Hopefully nobody, I'm really liking Deluge, myself. But the point is that uTorrent is hardly an obscure app.
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
Really? That's... more than a little surprising. On modern programs, Vista is far superior to Wine - blame it on .NET, DirectX, or whatever you want, but wine still struggles to run (and occasionally still fails to install) everything from games to web browsers. I've certainly seen a couple of recent apps - even games - that run truly perfectly in wine, but the most complex one I've seen is Battle for Wesnoth, which has a native Linux version anyhow.
As for older programs, the only ones I still run are games. Wine still fails to render Battle.Net correctly in StarCraft, and noticeably increases latency in LAN games. By comparison, Vista will, with almost no effort, run WarCraft: Orcs and Humans, a DOS-based game (in fairness, I believe wine will run programs *that* old just fine; my point is that in many cases, so will x86 Vista).
Use the tool appropriate to the task, of course, but damn near every program, no matter how old, that I've tried in 3 years of Vista (including betas) works fine. There are exceptions, of course, but claiming wine in more compatible in general is ludicrous. I would love for it to be true one day, but that day is still *very* far off.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
This is what gives Slashdot a bad name: completely false (or exaggerated) negative statements in order to promote your own ideas.
Yeah. I use WINE a lot, I've gotten very used to tweaks like switching windows versions, installing overrides, applying winetricks scripts, putting separate applications in their own WINEPREFIX with separate configuration, manually copying files, applying registry settings, even compiling a few custom versions of WINE and so on. Honestly, it's impressive what you can do with a lot of custom tweaks. But, if you think it's anything like running it on native Windows let me just take as an example of a game that works well BUT:
HOWTO
This is an attempt to summarize the steps needed to run World In Conflict and to compile a list of tweaks to make the game run as smootly as possible, if you have any additions, please make a reply with the subject "Extra tips for WiC!" and it will be tested, and if verified, added to this howto.
1. Read this before starting
Creating a seperate wine configuration directory for this game is recommended if you do not want to affect the environment of other applications/games that you run under Wine. This can be done for any of your other games, and it is an effective way to assure that your wine settings match those in this HowTo. It is however not strictly required.
World in Conflict should be run with Wine version 1.1.4 or later as it provides best performance, includes several bugs fixes relevant to the game, and support for copy protection.
2. Installing the game
Insert the disk, navigate to it's directory and enter this:
WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.wine-wic" wine Setup.exe
Observe that we set the variable WINEPREFIX at the beginning of the line. This will determine which directory Wine should work with. If the directory does not exist yet and/or has not been initialized by Wine, it will be automatically created and initialized before Setup.exe is run. If WINEPREFIX is not specified, your default Wine directory will be '$HOME/.wine/'.
Using the setup program, install the game to it's default directory and choose not to run the game after install - we're not done yet. In addition to the files copied automatically during installation, you'll have to copy over several files from the DVD to the directory the game was installed to. Usually, this should be 'drive_c/Program Files/Sierra Entertainment/World in Conflict' inside your Wine directory. The files to copy are:
binkw32.dll, dbghelp.dll, mss32.dll(From the 'bin' directory on the DVD)
wicloc11.sdf and wicloc12.sdf (From ldata/English, ldata/French, ldata/German, ldata/Italian, ldata/Spanish, or ldata/All depending on language)
Previously, it was necessary to install a crack for this game. Beginning with recent versions of Wine (~1.1 and later), this is no longer required. However, if we attempted to start the game now, it would crash right away. This is because World In Conflict comes with optional support for DirectX 10. As DirectX 10 is currently not supported in Wine, we need to disable it.
In addition, due to a few missing functions in Wine, the game would currently not be able to detect the hardware of your computer properly. Until these functions are supported in Wine, we will use Microsoft's original DLL to do the job for us. Therefore, get the file dxdiagn.dll from dlldump and save it to the 'drive_c/windows/system32' folder in your Wine directory:
www.dlldump.com/download-dll-files_new.php/dllfiles/D/dxdiagn.dll/5.03.2600.2180/download.html
Now let's instruct Wine about DirectX 10 and the dxdiagn.dll. Open a console and enter:
WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.wine-wic" winecfg
Click the Libraries tab, type in d3d10 under New override for library and click Add. You'll now see "d3d10 (native,builtin), hit Edit and select Disabled and hit OK. Then again under New override for library, type in dxdiagn and click Add. You'll now see "dxdiagn (native,builtin)" added to the
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Have you even used Vista? I have had ZERO problems with apps not being able to run, and I run some pretty obscure stuff.
And yes, I was serious. I know a lot of people who won't read Slashdot anymore for this very reason.
Either way you take the summary, it's a ridiculous exaggeration. There is no way Wine is more compatible with Windows apps than Vista.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com