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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.
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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?
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
He's not. He's saying it's an extra cost to consider.
After all, I am strangely colored.
The way things are going, Solaris will be dead soon too (especially if Oracle keeps doing what its been doing)