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

Question

[MyLongNickName]

How many developers want to put in the extra effort for a 0.1% wider audience? And consider the Linux crowd has the "free (as in beer) software mentality".... so I figure an even less percentage sales increase.

(ducks and covers)

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:Question

[SanityInAnarchy]

How many developers want to put in the extra effort for a 0.1% wider audience?

Developers who find actual numbers, instead of pulling them out of their ass.

And that means doing a little market research. The market for your app may be biased one way or the other. For instance, if you're selling a text editor targeted at programmers -- or better yet, an SCM -- it's probably not too difficult to port, and you'll probably get quite a few grateful Linux users.

consider the Linux crowd has the "free (as in beer) software mentality"....

Can we get past this already? It seems the only Linux folk who have that mentality are complete strawmen created by people who've never actually met a Linux user.

I actually bought Windows XP, despite Linux being my primary OS. Most Windows users I know will pirate it if it didn't come with the machine.

There is one exception to that rule: On Windows, there are tons of little freeware (but closed source) utilities like IrfanView, WinRAR, etc. On Windows, and to a larger extent, OS X, there's even more -- a massive culture of shareware, where tiny cataloging utilities and file management utilities are selling for $10 to $20 each.

So, if your app is something truly useful, sure. I would love to see things like Photoshop support Wine officially (I'll use Gimp when I can, but it still hasn't caught up), and I love that WoW releases Wine-specific patches, and Eve uses Winelib.

But if you're trying to sell me a $15 version of diff or merge, it had better iron my socks, too.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought one of the premises of Slashdot is that it is unbiased when your news isn't. This kind of shit would be tolerable on Fox News, hopefully it never will be here.

Well, it's a kdawson post. He will post anything that sounds even a little bit sensationalist or bashes something that "true nerds" hate. Nobody knows why he is still /. staff.

Re:Inaccurate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, the number of users works the other way. As an app maker, I can guarantee you that I've received more complaints that my app doesn't work in Vista than complaints that my app doesn't work in Wine.

Re:Inaccurate?

[theheadlessrabbit]

from the perspective of a computer user (my sig should confirm that I am not a developer) perhaps this is because people expect windows apps to work in the windows world because, "we paid good money for this, it had better work"
while in the linux world, if an app doesn't work, i am not all that bothered by it, because its free, i paid nothing for it, i will forgive the occasional bug, and if it gets bad enough, there is an alternative out there that is also free.

In wine, having an app that was intended for an entirely different operating system actually work just blows my mind. i would never think to complain to the wine team that "x program won't work"

in windows, when an app fails, it is frustrating because I expect commercial software to be bug free.

(note to linux zealots: please don't mod this flamebait, did you notice how i said "IF a linux app fails" and "WHEN a windows app fails")

Re:Inaccurate?

[SleepingWaterBear]

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.

I'm not so sure he's overestimating! Given how many years Windows XP and Windows 98 were aroung for, it's a safe bet that there are hundreds of times more apps for those two platforms than for Vista. A rather large fraction of those work in Wine. If a decent fraction of them don't work in Vista (and my understanding is that they don't), then just by number of apps Wine probably runs a lot more windows apps than Vista does.

Of course, the vast majority of the apps Wine runs that Vista doesn't are outdated, or have been replaced by newer version that do run in Vista, but for sheer numbers, I think it's a safe bet that Wine wins!

Re:Inaccurate?

[Anonymous Coward]

/. needs a healthy does of text book logic lessons. Categorical statements such as this not only remove any credibility from the article, they set a tone on /. that encourages more such statements, and so on. This sort of sophomoric drivel in the comments is to be expected, but it has no place in the submissions (at least not those which get green-lighted).

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

Re:Inaccurate?

[daveime]

As Eddie so succinctly puts it ...

"You say baysil, we say basil ... and you say erbs, and we say herbs ... because there's a fucking 'H' in it."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hJQsvoY6VU