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!"

Comments

Re:Inaccurate?

[RedK]

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...

Re:Inaccurate?

[fm6]

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.

Re:Question

[Daengbo]

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.

Re:Inaccurate?

[bigjarom]

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.

Re:Inaccurate?

[Inner_Child]

Hopefully nobody, I'm really liking Deluge, myself. But the point is that uTorrent is hardly an obscure app.

Re:Inaccurate?

[Kjella]

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