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Wine 1.2 Release Candidate Announced
An anonymous reader writes "After evolving over 15 years to get to 1.0, a mere 2 years later and Wine 1.2 is just about here. There have been many many improvements and plenty of new features added. Listing just a few (doing no justice to the complete change set):
many new toolbar icons; support for alpha blending in image lists; much more complete shader assembler; support for Arabic font shaping and joining, and a number of fixes for video rendering; font anti-aliasing configuration through fontconfig; and improved handling of desktop link files. Win64 support is the milestone that marks this release. Please test your favorite applications for problems and regressions and let the Wine team know so fixes can be made before the final release. Find the release candidate here."
It isn't that slow when the target keeps moving. 17 years ago, we weren't even using NT, some of us were still using DOS as being "good enough" and the rest of us were using Windows 3.x, now those goals have changed and WINE has to run 32 and 64 bit software written for Vista and Windows 7. 15 years would be a long time for a "dead" platform like the Atari 2600 or the SNES. But Windows is changing and what was "good enough" one year now needs major work to keep up with the programs.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It's a chicken and egg scenario.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I'm actually quite surprised with the more recent movement of Wine though. I remember assuming nothing was going to work. Now I can assume that it might work, which is a serious improvement, IMHO. Previously I never attempted to run something unless I looked it up in the App DB and now I just run the apps and see what happens.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Native software is fine, but a compatibility layer won't hurt. In fact, WINE is great for running legacy, closed-source software whose development is long dead with no native build going to be made.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Which is funny because one of the traditional perceived strengths of Windows is its backwards compatibility.
It doesn't emulate a platform API. It implements a platform API.
It's even funnier if you consider the option of running WINE on Windows: http://wiki.winehq.org/WineOnWindows
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Sadly, while isn't a fart in the wind like it was 17 years ago, Linux most definitely is not a major force in the desktop computing world. MOST of what people use Wine for is just that: desktop computing. Market share is a teensy blip for that type of Linux computing ... and the places where it IS much bigger tend to spend virtually nothing on commercial software.
All that forcing people to write natively to Linux instead of using Wine will do is starve those people of apps and slowly push them to Windows.
I'm in that boat. I spent nearly a decade doing technical marketing and sales engineer work for Linux products including desktop environments. Nowadays? I do that work for networking gadgets instead and have zero Linux systems active. I may have another one soon, but it will be in the form of a phone.
I'd LOVE it if Linux had made inroads, and I did my share on helping with that, but it didn't. And at some point you -do- need to find a system that will work in your corporate and social environments.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
About five years ago my employer introduced a web app for time sheets which would only work in IE. The new version works fine in generic web browsers and our thinking on this is that enough users wanted it on the mac that they were forced to fix their application.
A lot of development is now happening for iPhone and Android platforms which are sort of BSD and Linux respectively so I think Microsoft is losing slowly, but there is no one winner, which is probably good too.
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I remember 16 years ago on the Wine mailing list saying that spending time supporting Win16 was a total waste of time, and they need to concentrate on Win32 as by the time they supported either in a meaningfull wa, nobody would care about Win16 anymore.
Of course I was shouted down and flamed for my entirely accurate predicition. So of course huge amounts of time where wasted in the early days concentrating doing a really good Win16 emulation, that nobody could care less about for a decade now.
Does it run Linux?
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
Sometimes it sucks to be right.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Linux already extinguished mainstream BSD. It did as much to kill SCO as the lawsuit. It killed HURD. Face it: Linux got critical mass first, and wiped out a lot of the open-source competition. By Android, it's likely to kill a bunch of cellphone OSs, maybe even Palm, possibly even iPhoneOS.
Which is not, in fact, a bad thing. If anything, we need to unify Linux even more, so it can start killing some commercial systems. I'd love to see it wipe out the commercial Unices. Hell, I wouldn't cry over it killing OS X. And I've already planned the party for when it kills Windows.
Don't get too far ahead of yourself, the only ones dead so far are SCO and HURD.
#6495ED - cornflower blue
You can't (legally) run a Windows VM without paying Microsoft for the OS.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Believe it or not, WINE isn't meant for people who are using Windows... It's great that Windows suits your purposes, I'm happy that you are happy but otherwise don't give a damn. However, it is naive (and terribly offtopic) to suggest that nobody needs to run Windows applications on non-Windows platforms anymore.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Apps are faster in Wine than VMWare. I tested Eve Online in both and it was noticeably faster in WINE. Both paled in comparison to running natively under WinXP on the same platform however.
Even today, Windows 7 can run 16-bit code (scarily, 16-bit code can bypass security checks). You can turn off 16-bit support, if you research it.
The 64bit version of Vista and 7 cannot run 16bit code, actually. (Can't run the installer for Command & Conquer, for example) Wine now supports that part of the Windows legacy better than Windows itself.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
My god, Wine has no use whatsoever
Dude, Chibi Ace is almost as cute as Chibi Luffy. c|:0D
After all, I am strangely colored.
He's not. He's saying it's an extra cost to consider.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Don't get too far ahead of yourself, the only ones dead so far are SCO and HURD.
And IRIX and SVR4.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It doesn't emulate a platform API. It implements a platform API.
it's stateless?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The way things are going, Solaris will be dead soon too (especially if Oracle keeps doing what its been doing)
If it runs all the legacy stuff, why do you think it won't run the million viruses?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I care about Win16. The one thing I use Wine for is to run a 16-bit Windows application.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
One of the easiest ways to manage Wine versions and installing games: http://www.playonlinux.com/en/
Wine was testes for virus compability not so long ago. Turns out they use obscure APIs that Wine doesn't support yet, so most of them don't run. Of course, as Wine gets better, more will.
I would just disable the filetype association of .exe files with Wine, and run the necessary apps with a menu entry like "wine app.exe", so any virus those employees downloaded would simply sit there.
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By Android, it's likely to kill a bunch of cellphone OSs, maybe even Palm, possibly even iPhoneOS.
But under the hood, Palm WebOS is Linux. Mhhhm, perhaps it's just my deranged mind, but I can't help but wonder whether that would legally classify as suicide, fratricide or maybe even cannibalism...
15 years got them the ability to run most apps that required Windows 2000, quite a few that required XP, as well as apps using the old Win16 APIs. How long did it take Microsoft to get to the same place?
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It is an adaptor that makes one set of APIs (POSIX + X11) appear like another (Win32). In most of computer science, we call that an emulator. It is not a CPU emulator (which makes one CPU appear like another), or a full system emulator (which makes one complete set of hardware appear like another), but it is an emulator. Oh, and it doesn't just reimplement the APIs, it also provides a run time loader and ABI compatibility. *NIX systems can't natively load Windows PE files...
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Software cannot be implemented without adhering to a set of defined rules.
There are two sets of defined rules. One of them is the MSDN documentation for the Windows platform. Another less defined set is that a specific suite of programs, which by 1.0 included Office 2007 viewers, has substantially the same behavior on Wine as on Windows.
No, they are doing it because the 16-bit subsystem (NTVDM) uses the processor's virtual 8086 mode which is not available under x64. They would have to emulate the whole thing under x54, which is what Virtual PC does already.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.