Wine 1.4 Released

vinn writes "Wine 1.4 was released today and includes support for a wide range of applications, including Office 2010. There are some major architectural changes, including a built-in DIB engine for better graphics display and a new audio stack designed around the newer Vista / Win 7 system and integrated into the native audio system. Almost every other subsystem received substantial updates, including Direct3D, the Gecko-based web browsing components, and better internationalization. The release notes contain more detail and you can download the source code now, or wait for packages to appear soon."

Comments

First Wine Post

[GameboyRMH]

Full bodied with a distinct Windowsy flavor.

Re:First Wine Post

[ByOhTek]

You mean it tastes like glass? But I don't want to have my throat sliced up by broken glass!

That being said, anything that can keep me in FreeBSD more, and Windows 7 less, without losing the programs I like, is a good thing.

Re:First Wine Post

[sconeu]

An impertinent little release, with a bold, fruity taste.

Re:First Wine Post

[Anonymous Coward]

It's made in San Francisco?

Re:First Wine Post

[Nutria]

But I don't want to have my throat sliced up by broken glass!

Wah, wah! Baby wants a Zima!

Re:First Wine Post

[hairyfeet]

What's wrong with Win 7? While I can't stand Metro, thought Vista was too damned buggy, and hated the Fisher Price UI of WinXP I'd have to say I find Win 7 to be VERY nice, right up there with my beloved XP X64 and Win2K. How we lived without breadcrumbs and jumplists is beyond me, going back to any previous version now feels like going back to Win9x as losing those features really sucks.

Speaking of Win9X are they still working on a Windows version? I heard rumors a couple of years back and the one thing I miss about XP was its great Win9X support for old games. How good is Wine on its DirectX 6/7/8 support? Can it run the more PITA games like Mechwarrior 3 and i76? I really miss those games but I always end up with the "jumping bug" on MW3 and i76 has some serious timing issues if you aren't running a single core or running below 2GHz. Has anyone cooked up a "Wine in a box" LiveCD for gaming so one doesn't have to install a whole OS just to run it? How good is its hardware acceleration? I haven't had a chance to run it since I sold my dual boot XP/Xandros laptop in 09 so I'm a little behind here. Is its support for the older stuff better than XP?

Re:First Wine Post

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with Win 7?

You have to click on something to scroll it, no always on top menu item (even though th OS supports it), no tabbed file browsing, window title text looks terrible, the list goes on. basically a whole host of minor annoyances that really add up

Re:First Wine Post

[nschubach]

I just need to put something out here:

I freaking hate breadcrumbs ... I enjoyed how the old Explorer used to automatically open the tree folders to the current folder (and now that's a half implemented option... and there are no more tree lines!) As a programmer, I find myself frequently in the depths of large trees of code and it's nice to be able to simply copy/paste between working branches and trunks for code when needed. Without the tree view auto-navigating and the lines it makes finding the appropriate folder at a glance a royal PITA. The only thing breadcrumbs would help(if I could call it that) in those cases would be switching between branches, but then I'd still have to navigate back down into the children to get the folder I needed, every time. I could keep two windows open, but that's just not needed if the tree view functionality wasn't astronomically gimped in native Windows 7. I also enjoyed being able to just double click on a path in the address bar and get a quick copy of the folder name I clicked on. Now you have to CTR-L to get the raw address instead of the stupid breadcrumb... (luckily ClassicShell came along and reverted some of this cruft for me.)

Ugh, I don't know how anyone can work with breadcrumbs. Sorry.

Re:First Wine Post

[pnutjam]

I agree, breadcrumbs suck!

Re:First Wine Post

[GameboyRMH]

Aw damn I was hoping to go back and play MW3 and i76 on my Win7 gaming PC. I have an old XP computer converted to a VM that I can run OpenGL games on.

If the problem with i76 is similar to the problem with WipeoutXL and Shipwreckers, it's tied to the CPU speed and the only thing that can help is a CPU slowdown utility.

Re:First Wine Post

[redneckmother]

You mean it tastes like glass? But I don't want to have my throat sliced up by broken glass!

That being said, anything that can keep me in FreeBSD more, and Windows 7 less, without losing the programs I like, is a good thing.

s/gl//

:-)

Re:First Wine Post

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh. Quick overview of what's sort of a Catch22 collection for circa 2000+ classic gaming.

W98 is pretty frigging awesome for AGP board support. These are the last vidcards with support - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_6_Series, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R420 . After that, the 'wall' with 98 is memory management. 98 can handle more than 2 gigs, but will seldom access it. Much worse, management is /horrible/ so your game gets awful lags while 98 stumbles to clear the big RAM you're using for your big-map game. 98 will play a lot of great games, but later ones with lots of extras that it should be able to, no.

So fine, you go to XP for what's essentially a stable 98 with great memory management, and even later vid card support. Except XP has that 'phone home' install problem to combat piracy. It also gets in the way every time you upgrade the box. XP is dead; it's not an OS you can keep going forever on old hardware, unless you've got basically your first XP computer still, and it's already got awesome specs, and it is immortal. XP was the first "subscription" Windows, and it's over.

So, Win7, right? Nope. Haven't got backward compatibility. Not for what's wanted to play here.

Then your idea: let's get a compatible going on Linux. Ha. Linux has /never/ had the 3d vid driver support even 98 did. Worse, as the kernel moves on, the drivers are updated, and more legacy cards stop working. So you go back to trying Win. Start at the top to proceed with this loop.

There's more to it and other people keep trying to figure a few ways to worm around to skin this cat with some success, but that's an overview you should be aware of.

Re:First Wine Post

[Tyrannosaur]

What's wrong with Win 7?

It can't run on Linux

Re:First Wine Post

[Tyrannosaur]

EDIT: It can't run on *my* Linux. I'm still on a Pentium 4 :'(

Re:First Wine Post

[Anonymous Coward]

So use some 3rd party software to fix it.

Re:First Wine Post

[dudpixel]

What's wrong with Win 7?

I could list a bunch of complaints, but I thought I'd answer you by telling you what my wife says about windows 7.

She's not a technical user, and she complains about how slow it is. Everything is slow. Linux took under a minute to start up on the same machine (to a usable gui), yet win7 takes over 2 minutes, probably more. Its probably an extra minute until you can actually click or do anything in the GUI.

I dont use windows much so I cant really say much more than that - other than its still a mess the way programs and data are organised and it still requires a reinstall every 6-12 months in order to stay running well, otherwise you have a machine like mine that takes forever to do anything.

Incidently, we use windows 7 because of a linux bug (in the evdev mouse driver) that only seems to affect my logitech mice (a specific model) - where it wont detect clicks properly unless I restart X before logging in. That bug made linux so irritating to use that we started booting into win7 instead.

So while I'm a fan of Linux - I do accept that all OS's have their failings. I can deal with linux but wouldn't wish it on anyone who didn't have a good deal of patience.

Re:First Wine Post

[dudpixel]

get KatMouse - it fixes the scrolling issue :) awesome little tool (and no its not mine).

Re:First Wine Post

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...you DO know that pretty much anything and everything is infinitely tweakable on Windows, yes? it has this thing called a "registry" that makes passing tweaks between folks beyond simple and easy, and there are even several tools called...get this..."tweakers" that are designed to do just that, tweak Windows!

Now the one you'll want to try is called "Ultimate Windows Tweaker" as that's pretty much what it is, a HUGE collection of tweaks so if any of the defaults don't butter your bread? just tweak them. although you DO know you can just right click anywhere in the breadcrumb and get the EXACT path copied as text, yes? its just THAT simple. I use it all the time to tell clients whom I don't have the time (or they don't have a decent connection) where to find something. Otherwise i just remote in which is like a Godsend let me tell you! With Remote Assistance and EasyConnect any of my customers can call or pop up a chat window and say "Help me!" and BAM! There I am, i can walk a grandma through giving me full control in less than 5 minutes flat. they are more than happy to pay my $35 fee for having a magical "Tech in a box" that can do anything from set up their new printer to decrapify that new netbook their BF got them as a gift and set up Homegroup so they can share and print everywhere.

So if you don't like it? Then change it! I guarantee you that anything that could possibly bug you has already been run into by someone else and they have a tweak that changes it, easy peasy. Even Linux isn't as easy to tweak as Windows simply because what works on Ubuntu may not work on say PC Linux OS whereas most Windows tweaks can be done by anybody with that version, hell many work across multiple versions like the weird occasional "no sound device" bug you come across with certain funky chipsets that I can fix in seconds with a simple reg file that works on any NT based Windows from 2K to Win 7 X64. Hell if you don't like the GUI you can even rip out the DE for AstonShell (not free but worth the $30) that'll give you tons of choices in shells, you can even have it like a MAc or KDE if that's what melts your butter! So if breadcrumbs ain't your thing just change it friend, 30 seconds in Google and you'll never have to mess with that anymore.

Re:First Wine Post

[hairyfeet]

Hell you may have luck, a few chips such as the Pentium Ds and early Core chips don't seem to have the trouble playing them. This is why I think to have patents and copyrights on software you should be required to put the source code in escrow and then if the company refuses to support their customers with patches to allow the games to play the code should be released as we are losing a LOT of Win9x era games to the ravages of time, software too. There was just so many hacks and tricks they could do then because you could basically shove Win9X out of the way and access the hardware directly that trying to get these games running now is an exercise in futility.

While we have DOSBox for the DOS games nothing seems to be able to fill that role for Win9X era games and even heavily modified version (like the GOG i76 release which I have) sadly can only do so much without the source code. I had hoped when I saw how well they had Redneck Rampage running (runs beautifully on Win 7 X64 BTW, and a real hoot, you should give it and Blood a spin if you haven't because they are both a blast and run great!) that they could pull off a similar miracle with i76 but it was not to be. you might have luck with MW3 since i haven't tried it since i couldn't get it to run even on XP (the infamous bouncing bug) but I wouldn't get my hopes up.

But while others may bitch about Windows backwards compatibility frankly i love it and believe its one of Windows great strengths because i'm constantly amazed by how many games WILL run without hoop jumping, such as a couple of my favorite guilty pleasures No One Lives Forever I&II and Soldier Of Fortune I&II which run beautifully, along with my old Medal Of Honor games like Allied and Breakthrough, even the older cheese fests like Postal II, Judge Dread, and Rogue Trooper. all run happily even though when they came out there was no such thing as 64 bit X86 and machines with 6 cores and 8Gb of RAM (not to mention a half a Gb on the card) would have been a supercomputer. So give them a try friend, worse that will happen is they won't go but other than those two most of my old games have run without a hitch.

Re:First Wine Post

[hairyfeet]

Normally I don't respond to ACs but i just thought I'd point out an error, as while the Geforce did abandon AGP at the 7 series (not 6 as i actually have a 7600GS AGP in the closet) the Radeon cards went on MUCH longer, finally ended with the HD 3xxx series. the largest AGP card you can buy is I believe the HD3650 AGP, which isn't easy to find but the HD2xxx cards are quite plentiful. There are also Win98 drivers out there for both cards so both can make great classic gaming boxes. I actually have a Radeon X1950 along with a P4 3.6Ghz with HT and an old Intel board one these days i'll turn into a Win9x box as sadly that is one thing you ARE correct on, some of those games are so tied to Win9x you'll never get them to run anywhere else. Peace.

Re:First Wine Post

[hairyfeet]

Well you didn't hear this from me but you CAN run Win 7 on a P4, in fact I've run it on as low as a Sempron 1.8GHz with 1.5Gb of RAM. What you'll want is a copy of "Windows 7 Tiny Edition" which is a hacked gamer edition that has incredibly low system requirements. Slap any Win 7 compatible AGP card (The Geforce 7 series is plentiful and cheap, as is the Radeon HD24xx cards) and you have a pretty decent little Win 7 box. the only thing you really need to change is to set up a normal limited user (since its a gamer version it defaults to admin like XP) but other than that its really sweet. why MSFT doesn't hire the tiny guy I'll never know as frankly he kicks both the embedded and WinFLP editions right in the ass while having better app compatibility than either of those.

BTW just out of curiosity...why are you still on Pentium 4? you can pick up a bottom of the line E350 board for less than $80, slap a $20 RAM stick and you have a system that'll run rings around any Pentium 4 while only sucking 16w under load. Unless you are getting your electricity for free the switch will pay for itself quite quickly and the built in HD6310 GPU is great for video and can even do some gaming. I've built several office machines with them and even sold my full size laptop for an E350 netbook, it really is a sweet chip and you can't beat a dual core with 4gb of RAM for less than $100. There is even OOTB support in Linux from Ubuntu or mint from version 10.04 and up. give it a try, i bet you'll like it.

Re:First Wine Post

[whoisrich]

This might be handy for any W7 users reading this.

- To get the current address on the breadcrumbs, you can right click on any crumb and choose copy address.

- If you click the icon left of the breadcrumbs ( or white space on the right ) it will reveal the folder path and highlight it ready for copying.

- There is a folder tree view in explorer if you expand the 'Computer' section in the left pane. To have it always expand to the folder being viewed: Tools, Folder Options, General Tab, Tick 'Automatically expand to current folder'.

Re:First Wine Post

[ByOhTek]

The window borders are too large, (from vista, but still in 7) the input field color cant be set different from the window background color. The window borders and buttons are ugly and distracting.

Re:First Wine Post

[ByOhTek]

Oh, and replacing text with buttons in the file browsing location bar is extremely irritating, I know it only takes half a second or so to get it to show text, but it's each time you access it, and that gets annoying quick.

Re:First Wine Post

[ByOhTek]

Direct X support, maybe not - but for 3D with OpenGL, with an nVidia card, FreeBSD does amazingly well (at least on par with XP ~2-3 years ago). Given that Linux support is usually better than FreeBSD support for 3D, I'd have to say, you might want to step away from the LSD.

Re:First Wine Post

[ByOhTek]

How old is the machine? I have a circa-vista Core2 Duo, and it loads up Windows 7 really fast (definitely faster than Linux did, when I was experimenting with it), and performs quite smoothly.

I haven't had to frequently reinstall windows since Windows 2000. What do you do to your boxes?

Re:First Wine Post

[GameboyRMH]

So fine, you go to XP for what's essentially a stable 98 with great memory management, and even later vid card support. Except XP has that 'phone home' install problem to combat piracy. It also gets in the way every time you upgrade the box. XP is dead; it's not an OS you can keep going forever on old hardware, unless you've got basically your first XP computer still, and it's already got awesome specs, and it is immortal. XP was the first "subscription" Windows, and it's over.

Crack + Autopatcher, and ideally you should keep these old computers airgapped.

Re:First Wine Post

[nschubach]

But if you want a particular folder name, it's much more involved than it used to be. Previously, just double clicking the folder name would select it. Now it changes to that folder.

Clicking on the icon or CTRL-L... both are an extra step in trying to reveal the real address so you can select part of it. I don't feel the breadcrumbs offer that much more usability to warrant the extra step.

The folder view doesn't have relationship lines so when you are in a deep nest of source files, it's hard to correlate which parent or sibling you are dealing with.

Re:First Wine Post

[nschubach]

Yeah, because registry tweaks are the first thing I want to do when sitting down at another computer to use it. And I'm sure the person's computer it is will enjoy it too.

Re:First Wine Post

[Anonymous Coward]

Normally I don't respond to ACs

I knew it!!! I'll be sure to call you a fagot more often now that I know you still read ACs. Fagot!

Go ahead and waste your mod points on this post. That way people who make valid counter points to your bullshit can actually get a word in. Suck it Balmer Ball Licker! Don't forget to take your BP meds!

Re:First Wine Post

[hairyfeet]

If you are using other people's computers (which it certainly didn't sound like when you first posted which sounds like you are just looking for excuses now) then I'd suggest one of the bazillion free file managers that can be run completely from USB. There are several but Xplorer II Lite sounds like it would be right up your alley, it uses a classic two pane that has been around since the days of Norton commander.

Again there is absolutely NO REASON to "put up" with anything in windows, as it literally takes seconds to change and is much faster and more consistent to change than any *NIX. So the only excuse you have is 1.-you are lazy or 2.-You are just looking for something to complain about . i have a feeling its the latter myself.

Re:First Wine Post

[Anonymous Coward]

For the longest time after I first saw a Zima commercial, I thought it was a brand of bottled water. >.>

Re:First Wine Post

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to break it to you, but I have an 4000-series Radeon from XFX that has an AGP 8x interface.

Re:First Wine Post

[graphius]

You have to click on something to scroll it

This single pain gets me every time I have to use any MS system...
As mentioned below, KatMouse is a great utility that fixes this, except you have to turn it off for certain programs (like Photoshop) to get proper functionality of the scroll back (zooming). Even then it is a bit hit and miss.

Re:First Wine Post

[dudpixel]

I have a quad-core AMD machine, 4GB RAM, 2TB disk.

I dont know what it is except that its windows and over time it slows down. I haven't reinstalled it since about 12 months ago, and that wasn't for performance reasons.

I'm not sure what the problem is, and I really dont have enough patience with windows to bother finding out. Its just slow. Linux has always been faster in daily use in my experience, but then I use linux daily and I use windows for letting my kids watch DVDs occasionally (I dont have a tv, strange i know - but its a small house and it makes sense to use the PC for everything).

other than the slowness, I admit win7 is pretty good.

I bought a mac recently too, and sold it 3 weeks later. OSX is crap - sure its all pretty but its too "minimalist" for me. Windows 7 supports a hell of a lot more features, as does linux. OSX is kind of "just enough to do what you need, and no more". I think if you started with it and learnt that first, it'd be fine. But its too difficult to change one's workflow and I felt that I was giving up too much stuff from linux and windows...and after a while I just wanted my features back. I use KDE after all.

Re:First Wine Post

[dave87656]

What's wrong with Win 7?

I think it has it's strengths. I have one laptop with it and one with Ubuntu. I noticed in your post that you only compared it to other Windows OS's and I think that when you are using other OS's, which also have their issues, that you'll see some of the limitations in the Windows world. The main thing I think is wrong with Windows in general and this includes Windows 7 is that it is sluggish compared to Ubuntu, Linux Mint, FreeBSD and so on. I used to dual-boot my Windows laptop and I always felt like something was wrong when it was running Windows. It was so crisp and responsive under Ubuntu but when Windows was running it was slow and sluggish. And I'm running almost nothing in the background. Of course, Windows Vista was even slower to the point of being unusable.

Re:First Wine Post

[dave87656]

"registry" that makes passing tweaks between folks beyond simple and easy

Did I read that right? "Simple and Easy??? -- I mean you can completely ruin your machine if you screw up an registry entry and it's not exactly intuitive. Window advocates complain about the user-unfriendliness of config files in Linux but they are a dream compared to the Windows registry and are much better documented.

Re:First Wine Post

[ByOhTek]

o.O Core 2 Duo + 2GB mem + 320GB disk here...

Heh, that's my experience with a Mac, that's why I hackintoshed a computer - I don't pay the overhead, but I can familiarize myself with the OS.

Re:First Wine Post

[JohnnyBGod]

I'm pretty sure i76 is on GoG. Check that out, if you want to.

Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3

[G3ckoG33k]

Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3 - http://www.winehq.org/download/debian

Still, thank you all for the fantastic project called Wine!

Re:Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed - although it has to be said that wine is particularly easy to build from source, even for ubunt^M^M not-so-savy tech users :-)

Re:Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3

[Maquis196]

A good way to use wine is to build from source and build into /usr/local/wine-$winever-vanilla, point a symlink from /usr/local/wine/ to whatever version you want and add /usr/local/wine/bin to your path.

Very very good for hunting down regressions and not worrying about your package manager, also don't forget to build wine with ccache! ("CC=ccache gcc") to really help with build times, especially if you want to use a patch.

Re:Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3

[impaledsunset]

Debian hasn't packaged 1.2 yet, these are third-party packages.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=585409

Apparently one of the issues why the newer versions can't be packaged is that the maintainer wants to package and upload all versions between the last one and 1.4 in order. Since nobody has the time to do so, there isn't any progress towards packaging the newer ones.

Re:Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3

[CubicleZombie]

Indeed - although it has to be said that wine is particularly easy to build from source, even for ubunt^M^M not-so-savy tech users :-)

I've been using Linux for 14 years, professionally for 12, and I now refuse to build anything from source. It was fun at the beginning, but now I need things to just work.

Re:Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3

[Ranguvar]

It's been less than two hours since 1.4.

Give them time!

Re:Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3

[G3ckoG33k]

This is why I linked to Kai's page, as he is the one who has been the reliable source for Wine.

Re:Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed - although it has to be said that wine is particularly easy to build from source, even for ubunt^M^M not-so-savy tech users :-)

I've been using Linux for 14 years, professionally for 12, and I now refuse to build anything from source. It was fun at the beginning, but now I need things to just work.

Oddly enough "needing things to work" is why I compile something from source on an almost daily basis... If you are going to be working anywhere even within walking distance of the bleeding edge you will be needing (and possibly developing) the latest tools and drivers. You will not find them in the "stable" binary repository.

Re:Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3

[Anonymous Coward]

For my line of work related to Linux, there is no fucking way I can get away with not building things from source...

I used to use debian, which is still good, but I finally went over to arch because it gives me personally just the right sweet spot of build it yourself easily and integrate it in the system and "batteries included".. You can always make your own debs (and I have quite a bit), but debian is not quite architected for this style of use.

Regardless of what distro, getting things to work involves packages outside of the standard binary mirrors... and if you are counting 3rd party binaries as the same as distro bins, I think you are overcosting the impact of occassional automated or tool-driven build from source.

I'd much rather wait a few minutes for a PKGBUILD and a makepkg than fuck around with some hair-brained random ass rpm or deb or binary tarball that comes of the net. It is precisely about needing things to work...

Re:Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3

[NotBorg]

I consider Arch to be fairly bleeding edge, at least more so than most other distributions. I don't have to build much unless I want something off of AUR. Even then it's really easy to build that stuff (often very quick too). Someone else has worked out all the details and you just untar, type makepkg, wait a minute or two and be done.

It's close enough to the edge but not so close you risk falling. You can get even closer for the things that really interest you but stay reasonably stable but fresh for everything else. It's just a fun spot to be.

While GP might not find building things "fun", in my experience it's only a hassle if you're distribution has a bad habit of being distant from its upstream (distant because it's several versions old, distant because they patched it 30 times, etc). If you stay reasonably current and vanilla things work together better with greater flexibility. I can understand the bad taste in his mouth. Some distributions make it a real chore to build things. (I'm not going to name names--it just leads to fanboy butthurt--but if you find it hard to build stuff on your distribution they're doing it wrong.)

Re:Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3

[Anonymous Coward]

I consider Arch to be fairly bleeding edge, at least more so than most other distributions. I don't have to build much unless I want something off of AUR. Even then it's really easy to build that stuff (often very quick too). Someone else has worked out all the details and you just untar, type makepkg, wait a minute or two and be done.

Why are you doing it the hard way, install yaourt (from the AUR, natch) and let that handle downloading the PKGBUILDS from the AUR and building and installing the package for you (it does let you inspect and modify the PKGBUILDS if you want to), and it'll even handle dependencies you need.

Quit wining

[stevegee58]

It's unbecoming.

Blast from the past

[Picass0]

It's truthfully been ages since I've thought about Wine.

Question directed at Wine users - how does it stack up against VMware, Virtualbox or the other virtual machine servers?

Re:Blast from the past

[Cornwallis]

i've been using it within Fedora and Mint with Office 2003 and Photoshop (and previously with Dreamweaver) and had no problems. I would say my experience is that the applications have been running faster than under Virtualbox - which I do use for testing builds on a fairly regular basis. YMMV.

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

Those need a Windows license. Wine doesn't.

Re:Blast from the past

[Narcocide]

Much faster for 3d-intensive gaming, and with less resource usage... when it works, that is.

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

how does it stack up against VMware, Virtualbox or the other virtual machine servers?

That's a little like asking how the Toyota Prius stacks up against a Boeing 727. While technically both are able to get you from Boston to New York, they have completely different use cases.

Virtual machine servers are intended to run an entire alternate operating system (under which you can run whatever applications you want). Wine, on the other hand, is intended to allow you to run Windows programs *without having Windows at all*.

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, let's see. VirtualBox, VMWare, etc. are virtualization layers, emulating a computer inside a computer. Whereas, Wine is not an emulator.

On a more useful note: I can play harware accelerated openGL games with Wine but the VirtualBox hardware accelerated OpenGL drivers suck ass. Not so sure about VMWare in that regard.

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

It's truthfully been ages since I've thought about Wine.

Question directed at Wine users - how does it stack up against VMware, Virtualbox or the other virtual machine servers?

Depends. If you need something that "just works" most of the time, you're probably going to want to do a virtual machine. The problems though can be extensive, namely in terms of performance. Games, for example, typically run like boiled crap in a VM. However, some stuff works okay that way, even if it's a rather ham-fisted way to do it (why virtualize an entire machine if all I need is Outlook?).

Wine still has its quriks but the performance it gives is substantially better (quick bench: World of Warcraft in a VM versus Wine...wine hands-down, every single day of the week for years on end). It's also rather nice these days with quite a few things either working out of the box or requiring fairly simple tweaks to make work. And if you're lazy Codeweavers' CrossOver line is still fantastic.

Re:Blast from the past

[Geeky]

Same here. When I used Linux regularly I eventually switched to VMWare for running Windows, as Wine didn't really cut it (probably talking about ten years ago, though...).

Eventually I realised that I was spending 90% of my time using either a web browser or a Windows applications (Photoshop and Lightroom) and I might as well run Windows on the bare metal. With tools like Cygwin and LAMP I have most of what I'd miss from Linux, so I guess I've done it the other way round; made Windows more like Linux rather than Linux more like Windows.

Re:Blast from the past

[Maquis196]

Comparing wine to a full system emulator is your first mistake. It's more akin to running things in a chroot then an emulator. Performance wise it's great as long as the program you are using works perfectly.

I'm a super admin very a couple of dozen games on the appdb with ratings between garbage and platinum and the truth is that nowadays I'm disappointed where wine doesn't run something out the box. It's older games that it struggles with, for instance RAGE worked out the box for me yet something like Starfleet Command 3 doesn't work at all.

If it works, wine is as quick as running something natively. I've never played Eve online on windows for instance, I have no need to. I wouldn't do anything mission critical with it though, don't let the stable tag fool you.

-Maq

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you can install a ReactOS image, or maybe a Linux+Wine image, or you can run a Windows image without a bloody license (would ya believe them pirates find ways to do that?) -- you hardly need a Windows license.

Re:Blast from the past

[larry bagina]

WINE Is Not an Emulator. It's a reimplementation of the win32 libraries, so win32 applications run without windows. Like a KDE application running in GNOME. Virtual machines will be more accurate/compatible since they're virtualizing the entire windows stack, but they're running within a box.

Also, if you have some legacy win32 source code, you can compile it with the WINE libs for a native application.

Re:Blast from the past

[Blaskowicz]

you get working 3D acceleration. never got that to run under Virtualbox even though you only have to check a box, and somehow other people have it working. your I/O is not slow and CPU hungry it seems. but compatibility is still hit or miss - I'm talking about games mainly. my wine 1.3.28 just crapped at running return to castle wolfenstein and even with warcraft III I have stuttering sound. but I should update my 1.3 via ppa.

my great plan is to switch to IOMMU virtualisation, running presumably Xen. a physical graphics card will be passed-thru to a windows gaming-only VM. but I need new hardware (an asrock mobo with 970 chipset, I will go from 2GB ddr2 to 8GB ddr3). I also fear that it may be a pain in the ass and ill supported, and needing a VGA switch or a KVM.

Re:Blast from the past

[timothyb89]

When it works, it's far better. Even with decent hardware virtualization is too slow for a lot of apps. VMware is slower than anything but has reasonable 3D support, while VirtualBox is fast but can only reliably run 2D apps. Neither is really an optimal setup for things like gaming.

When Wine works, though, it runs pretty darn fast and generally doesn't cause too many issues. It's really rare for me to find a game that isn't compatible anymore. The last I couldn't run that comes to mind is League of Legends, but it seems that within the last week since I checked there's been a new workaround that fixes it.

Overall, Wine is considerably more capable than it used to be. I generally don't even have to question whether most apps will run anymore, because the answer is, more often than not, "yes".

Re:Blast from the past

[Hatta]

No contest. If it works in Wine, it's far nicer to use under Wine. VMs are a lot more compatible, because they run the entire OS, but it doesn't integrate as nicely as Wine does. When you run a program with Wine, you're running a native program just using winelib instead of win32.

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

Wine Is Not an Emulator.

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

My migration, like many others', went the other way. As *NIX software became better and more compatible, I found myself booting Windows less and less often. Firefox made a huge difference, the Open/Star Office, then mplayer, soon I realized that I only had one or two reasons to boot windows any more. Wine has filled in all the remaining holes, it now works with every piece of Win software I still use (maybe 10 or 12 older programs), except one. I have exactly one reason to keep a Windows license, and it's a piece of software every company associated with Microsoft would love to kill : AnyDVD.

Re:Blast from the past

[Fallingwater]

I believe you mean "those need a Windows OS to be installed and maintained". No virtual Windows machine I've ever seen hasn't had the gentle attention of an activator. Or been installed from a preactivated all-versions torrent.

Re:Blast from the past

[hobarrera]

It's not a virtual machine, it's a reimplementation of the windows API.

That aside, I play last-gen games (like the Mass Effect 3 Demo) with great performance. That's imposible inside any VM.

Re:Blast from the past

[unixisc]

Once ReactOS is actually a complete OS, one can run it in place of Windows in the first place, and not have to worry about Windows 8 or more importantly, Windows eXPiry. But ReactOS does have to be completed first.

Re:Blast from the past

[Progman3K]

I hear you. I would so love if Wine could run Rogue Squadron... But even on Windows, that game was a little too peculiar.

Haven't tried running it in years, now.

One really pleasant surprise was being invited to a LAN party and installing Counterstrike. Its performance was flawless.

Cheers to the Wine developers!

Re:Blast from the past

[GameboyRMH]

Most of the things you'd want Windows for (DirectX games) don't work any better in a VM than in Wine anyway (in fact a lot of code has been shared back and forth between Wine and VirtualBox), so VMs rarely have an advantage in terms of app compatibility.

Re:Blast from the past

[MonsterTrimble]

Have you considered DeVeDe? I use to to build custom ISOs using whatever.

Re:Blast from the past

[formfeed]

Question directed at Wine users - how does it stack up against VMware, Virtualbox or the other virtual machine servers?

Virtualbox works for sure, wine sometimes.

But on the other hand, if you have an application that does work under wine, it is quite nice. It opens almost immediately, much faster than starting virtualbox, and often it can be integrated into your desktop. You can change settings according to application and have it kind of integrated into your desktop: It starts and doesn't look stranger than a java app.

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

Stacks up great... when playing Windows games :-)
Deus Ex (the original), Tomb Raider Anniversary, GTA: San Andreas, Half Life 2, Portal, Portal 2..

Re:Blast from the past

[k31bang]

Question directed at Wine users - how does it stack up against VMware, Virtualbox or the other virtual machine servers?

I can run Photoshop CS4 in wine with no major issues. I had been using Virtuabox before that, and I found the performance to be better with wine. (This was with an Athlon XP 1.4 GHz + 1256 megs of ram with Linux Mint)

Re:Blast from the past

[DragonWriter]

Question directed at Wine users - how does it stack up against VMware, Virtualbox or the other virtual machine servers?

Its approximately infinitely better if you want to use software designed for Windows without actually purchasing or pirating Windows.

On the other hand, its worse than Windows-in-a-VM if you want to test how something runs under Windows.

Re:Blast from the past

[Creepy]

VirtualBox and VMware emulators are a type called pass-through emulation, which actually only emulates a small amount of functionality of the system (mainly drivers) and the rest is all native, so the performance hit is generally trivial. At most you should see about a 20% hit in CPU here (as long as you aren't memory bound - WINE shouldn't chew up as much memory as a VM, generally). If the GPU is hardware accelerated and properly passed through, there should be almost no hit unless the drivers for that platform are particularly bad.

WINE is a native implementation of the Windows APIs, so if an API isn't implemented, it crashes and burns. Also it actually has the same problem as VMs in regards to devices - they need to be implemented or they won't work and in the case of WINE, very few are. OTOH, WINE can use all graphics memory if used with DX or OpenGL and most VMs share an amount of it (VirtualBox I think is up to 256M now, but my card has 1GB). Likewise emulators usually are assigned some of your CPUs and WINE can use all of them.

  When I have VirtualBox properly set up, I get two frames less in Linux running in the emulator than I did in native Windows, so I suspect your VM isn't running with hardware accelerated drivers. With VirtualBox you also need to turn off the native mouse pointer to use OpenGL with hardware acceleration or you spin like crazy (or it will start driving for you in 2D), so if you have the native pointer on and aren't spinning, you aren't in native OpenGL, which requires installing the VirtualBox extensions and the native hardware driver. If your hardware acceleration was properly set up, how much video memory did the OpenGL program consume?

Re:Blast from the past

[gangien]

Slightly off topic, but I wonder why react OS doesn't switch to using kde as a window manager. you would think that would free them up from having to do a lot of the crap that they spend their time on. But maybe i'm wrong.

Re:Blast from the past

[domatic]

There are native Linux binaries for RtCW. You don't have to run that one in Wine.

Re:Blast from the past

[somenickname]

The Xen + IOMMU setup is what I use and it works great once you get it setup. Hardware selection is the key to making it less painful to setup. Specifically, if you try to use an nVidia card as the passthrough card, you are in for a world of pain but, an ATI 6800 series is essentially an out of the box experience once you configure the bootloader to block the device from dom0. You'll also need to be careful which distro you use. The Debian flavor of distros do an awesome job of setting up grub to do the Xen magic so, something like Xubuntu 12.04 (haven't tried this setup on 11.10) should be ideal once it's released but, if you use something like Debian 6, you'll end up needing to get Xen 4.1 and a newer kernel (3.1+) to support the PCI passthrough backend. Both of those things are pretty simple to do if you know you need to do them beforehand.

Once you get the basics setup, you'll probably want to pass a few other PCI devices through. If you buy a cheap PCI USB controller, you can pass that through to the VM and then use a KVM to switch between Linux and Windows. If you have a crazy enough motherboard (or secondary cards), you can also passthrough things like one of your onboard NICs and my motherboard even has an LSI SAS controller that passes through just fine (you can't use it for boot devices but, RAID0 WD Raptors run at native speeds in the VM).

It sounds like a big hassle to setup and, if you are going at it completely blind, it definitely is but, once you get it setup, it's rock solid, native performance and no real upkeep at all. I've played things like Dragon Age II and Skyrim at max settings at 1920x1080 and had literally no problems.

Re:Blast from the past

[Darinbob]

VMware is big and bulky, it runs the entire machine inside an emulator. You install Windows inside the emulator. You can use VMware on machines with different architectures. Wine does not work that way, it uses the native processor and it emulates Windows through libraries and DLLs. So it's a lot less overhead. Ie, you'd be very hard pressed to get good game performance out of VMware but people do use Wine for games a lot.

Re:Blast from the past

[nurb432]

How does it compare to vmware? Huh? Those are different tools to solve different problems and work differently.

Why not compare iPads to cars too?

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a but big enough for an elephant.

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

You are being disingenuous. They are difference tools and take different strategies, but they solve very similar problems.

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

AnyDVD and DeVeDe do not look like they do the same thing. Seems like a nice enough suite of software, but building a data image to PUT onto optical media. How very 80s.

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

DVDFab runs very well in wine on Linux. I highly recommend it.

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

Question directed at Wine users - how does it stack up against VMware, Virtualbox or the other virtual machine servers?

They're largely different experiences for different use-cases. Some differences, comparing VirtualBox to wine:

* Wine handles 3d applications better. This is in part because a lot of wine development goes to DirectX implemntation, and in part because it uses your video card's memory directly. The VirtualBox driver uses system RAM as video memory, so there's a built-in performance hit. The VBox D3D driver is also based on wine's direct3d implementation, so it tends to have a lot of the same bugs while being behind wine's code.

* In contrast, VirtualBox tends to run 2d applications flawlessly, while wine often has odd bugs with it. You have the real OS underneath, with all its undocumented behaviours and legacy bugs, so the behaviour tends to be consistent with running Windows natively.

* If you have "special" hardware such as graphics tablets, webcams, and the like, wine tends to provide a smoother experience when supported. For example, it takes X pressure events from a wacom tablet and sends them to windows applications. This means you can use special hardware in both Windows and Linux programs at the same time without problems.

* If you want to use the hardware mentioned above in VirtualBox, you generally have to use USB passthrough. The hardware will work perfectly inside Windows, even if Linux can't use it at all, once you install the appropriate Windows drivers, but will now be unusable to the host OS until the VM is shut down.

* VirtualBox acts as a sandbox, so the applications inside the VM won't have access to anything outside the system presented. The host OS directory structure can be accessed as remote file shares, read-only or read-write, if wanted, but they aren't considered part of the guest OS filesystem.

* Wine is more like a chroot, with each $WINEPREFIX "install" given a directory structure within your home directory. By default, it also gives access to the entire system by mapping drive z: to /, but this can be removed, though some wine tools act oddly when it's removed.

* Wine integrates better with desktop environments. It creates menu entries and desktop shortcuts, which can be run just like native applications. With VirtualBox, you have to run the guest OS and then use its shell to run programs.

* VirtualBox has a 'seamless' mode that gives a feel of having the Windows apps on the desktop, but without really mixing the systems. Moving windows is glitchy, since it's basically a hack that removes the background wallpaper, but it does work.

* The aforementioned $WINEPREFIX variable can be used to maintain multiple wine "installs", each with their own configurations. If a program breaks, only other programs in the same wineprefix are affected. In addition to avoiding what would otherwise be catastrophic failure, it also means you can do things you can't do in Windows, such as run a fullscreen-only app (like many old games) inside a window, by using Wine's pseudo-fullscreen settings.

This also has the unintended side effect of allowing time-limited trials to be used indefinitely: after a trial ends, remove the program's wineprefix directory and then install again to a new one.

* VirtualBox needs a copy of Windows, while wine does not. Most people have one lying around somewhere, but licencing tends to prohibit use in VMs except with the more expensive copies such as Win7 Ultimate. If it's for home use, it likely doesn't matter, but for business use you have to be wary of pissing off the BSA.

* With VirtualBox, you have to maintain a second OS, while with wine you do not. However, with wine you have to deal with a separate set of bugs.

* You'll probably want the VirtualBox extensions pack for things like the USB support. VBox itself is GPL, but the extensions are not, so this may offend some users' sensibilities. Plus, if it's not for

Re:Blast from the past

[Blaskowicz]

thanks a lot!, it's hard to get accounts on this setup, besides a few youtube videos.

Yes I was planning an ATI card for windows (first a cheap one then maybe a radeon 7770), and my 8400GS for linux. dedicate a USB controller, easy enough (I can even use an old USB 1 card). yes, passing through random devices looks fun. you can use a both on-board and discrete sound cards, etc. I will have to get a damn USB to PS/2 adapter (one that works) and the USB KVM is another expense but it's not too bad.

Do you run the dom0 as the full linux desktop? it's the main interrogation I have right now. I guess that idea would horrify any sysadmin, but I guess that it's also possible, is begnin for a desktop, and would make the setup more simple. else I'd have to make another VGA passthrough to a linux domU and things might get hairy (nvidia issues + second VGA passthru?). or maybe use a 2D only linux which isn't that great either

Re:Blast from the past

[Em Adespoton]

Remember also that there are two parts to Wine: there's the runtime environment (take a compiled PE file and run it on another architecture) that most people think of, but the more interesting part is the libraries: you can take a piece of source code written for Windows 7 and compile it against the Wine libs to run on pretty much any other architecture.

That said, my main use for Wine has been to create portable OS X bundles of Windows apps, with all the config files, etc. being inside the application bundle. It works a treat, and enables one to run an app off of a USB key with persistent settings across OS X and Windows platforms. Something you can't do with a VM without a whole lot of extra heavy lifting (like loading an entire virtual machine onto the hardware).

Re:Blast from the past

[LingNoi]

VMWare, Virtual box and other virtual machines are well.. virtual machines, they require running an operating system on top of an operating system to run your windows app. WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) project doesn't do this.

WINE provides a set of APIs which translates windows API calls to BSD and Linux ones. For example, your windows application might call an api to open a directx window where as in wine it will have the same API name and inside that function call open an openGL window.

Doing this doesn't slow down, in theory, running the application because it's simply translating the calls. In practice things can sometimes run faster or slower either because the WINE calls do things in a way that's faster then the windows one or slower. Sometimes it doesn't even require implementing so WINE just skips over the function call.

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

You might as well say "I wonder why Linux doesn't switch to Windows for the kernel, it supports more hardware".

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

MakeMKV works well on any video disc I've tried it on, for local rips or streaming, and the open beta key will unlock the full BD functionality too. It's a little less all-inclusive, but you've still got ffmpeg for transcoding...

Re:Blast from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly any game at this point that doesn't have invasive device driver-level DRM, and is 32bpp color probably runs at bronze level or above now.

I've played STO, LOTRO, DDO, Uru Live, and a couple of chinese MMOs and all of them run flawlessly under wine (although STO as an example has a SEVERE framerate penalty compared to windows, I'm assuming due to use of DirectX instead of OGL, and possibly features that aren't 1:1.)

ATI 4000 series videocard BTW.

Re:Blast from the past

[b4dc0d3r]

It could, using the alternative windowing subsystem (X11). And in fact that branch is used to compare Wine vs. ReactOS behavior in certain cases.

Accoding to http://windows.kde.org/ the Windows port of KDE is not functional - but a Windows port would mean that all of the underlying API calls implemented by ReactOS have to be implemented and correct, or the port won't run anyway.

Finally, the point of ReactOS is that Windows programs should run on it. There is no reason to introduce KDE, when you have to write things like explorer.exe and the whole shell that Windows programs expect to have. The "crap that they spend their time on" is making a binary-compatible Windows OS.

Re:Blast from the past

[Stuarticus]

That's really interesting, you should write a guide! You think I'd have any luck with a Z68 mobo? I already have a 6880 and hate dual booting...

Re:Blast from the past

[gangien]

You are completely wrong.

Re:Blast from the past

[gangien]

Finally, the point of ReactOS is that Windows programs should run on it.

Yes, and unless I'm mistaken KDE on windows would run windows apps as well.

There is no reason to introduce KDE

THe reason, as I mentioned above would be to save them time from having to write a menu system and taskbar and ect. assuming KDE on windows was working well enough.

when you have to write things like explorer.exe and the whole shell that Windows programs expect to have. The "crap that they spend their time on" is making a binary-compatible Windows OS.

Yes, they'll have to make stuff work. Like explorer.exe. BUt they would save themselves much time.

How to tell if vintages are good.

[Anonymous Coward]

How to tell if WINE vintages are good:

The weather for that year: were the programmers working in enough darkness? Did they get too much sunlight?

Soil: Did the program get developed on a recent Linux distro?

Food: Did the programmers get enough coffee, colas, pizza and beer? VERY IMPORTANT.

If the programmers were put on a strict vegan diet while working in a tropical environment and spending their free time on the beach, well you might as well just have a Windows machine.

Re:How to tell if vintages are good.

[Anonymous Coward]

How to tell if WINE vintages are good:

The weather for that year: were the programmers working in enough darkness? Did they get too much sunlight?

Soil: Did the program get developed on a recent Linux distro?

Food: Did the programmers get enough coffee, colas, pizza and beer? VERY IMPORTANT.

If the programmers were put on a strict vegan diet while working in a tropical environment and spending their free time on the beach, well you might as well just have a Windows machine.

Don't forget to properly store it for proper aging. Test it along the way and when properly aged, decant and serve properly with appropriate accompaniments. Else all you will have is wine vinegar. In short,,,you need the right amount of time in the basement/cellar..

Hitler's reaction to Wine

[Blaskowicz]

Der Führer has a love/hate relationship with it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcvkbrwDuaY

Re:Hitler's reaction to Wine

[GameboyRMH]

adolf@reichsbox:~$: mv .wine wine_bak; sudo apt-get remove --purge wine; sudo apt-get install wine

Or alternatively "cp -pR .wine wine_bak" before screwing around with winetricks.

Re:Hitler's reaction to Wine

[SiChemist]

I just run every app in its own separate bottle. I have this alias in my .bashrc:

alias bottle='export WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=`pwd` && winecfg'

I open a terminal, CD in the directory that I want my windows program to go into and then type 'bottle'. It opens the winecfg panel and I make any adjustments needed. Then I run the installer from that terminal. Everything else is automagic. Program shortcuts are created with the appropriate env WINEPREFIX="blahblah" and work perfectly. As long as you set the appropriate WINEPREFIX, you can mess around with wine settings for that program to your heart's content without affecting any other programs in different prefixes.

Great, sometimes

[brunes69]

When Wine works well, it is far superior to running the app in a VM, for a number of reasons

- Performance - When an app runs well under Wine, it runs as fast as it does under Windows on the same machine, or sometimes it runs even faster. Running under a VM is never as fast as running native on the same hardware.

- Desktop integration - When an app is installed under Wine, it automatically integrates with your GNOME/KDE desktop... the application is available in the menu, same window manager, etc. Yes there are solutions for this under VMs like VMWare Fusion, but it is not as clean and frankly usually is buggy as all get out.

When an app runs in Wine well, I prefer to run it that way over a VM. VMs are much better though to be sure the app is running the exact way it was meant to run.

Re:Great, sometimes

[DuckDodgers]

Wine won't run some games as well because the nVidia and especially ATI/AMD graphics card drivers for Linux aren't as good as the ones for Windows. The performance difference is something you can live with, but if you want to squeeze the most visual beauty out of your expensive video card you'll have to do it under Windows.

Re:Great, sometimes

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't discount it though: Starcraft 2 (for instance) works wonderfully under Wine.

Re:Great, sometimes

[binarylarry]

I play SC2 in wine but I wouldn't call it wonderful. You have to play it at the lowest settings to get decent graphics performance.

Not to knock the devs, it's amazing the d3d->opengl translation layer works as well as it does.

Re:Great, sometimes

[Lotana]

All my friends that play SC2 run Windows and play it at the lowest settings anyway. For a twitch game like that where half a second miss-click costs you the game (According to them anyway), you just can't take any chances of local lag.

Thus if the only difference is the graphical settings, WINE is just as good as Windows platform.

Re:Great, sometimes

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't feel the need for any Windows apps so I am not a user of either solution but...

Wine doesn't require a Windows licence unlike the VM solutions. Big plus for many.

VM solutions have the benefit of built in containment to control what untrustworthy software can do (easily blown apart if you mount all your real drives in your VM but I think it might take time and effort to lock up Wine)

Re:Great, sometimes

[coolsnowmen]

VirtualBox has a 'seemless mode' for gnome/kde integration.
The only performance cost I've hit with VMs is if you don't have the ram, there is no real CPU performance hit.
I love win when it works, but that usually requires you to run it against software made for win 2000/XP unless it is popular enough for people to get fixes submitted upsteam (WoW)

Re:Great, sometimes

[DuckDodgers]

I've played Starcraft2 on my PC on Wine with the AMD/ATI proprietary drivers and on Windows, and on Wine I have all the graphics at the lowest setting at 1920x1200 and get 20 frames per second. On Windows I have all the graphics at the highest setting at 1900x1200 and get 50 frames per second. I know a professional gamer doesn't care because he can slaughter me in seven minutes using the lower visual effects and frames per second. But if you haven't seen the visual differences between lowest settings/20 and highest settings/50, it will blow you away. It's like seeing an entirely different game.

Re:Great, sometimes

[Anonymous Coward]

- Performance - When an app runs well under Wine, it runs as fast as it does under Windows on the same machine, or sometimes it runs even faster. Running under a VM is never as fast as running native on the same hardware.

This not really true. There is no law of computing that guarantees various APIs reimplemented in terms of X and POSIX/Linux will be faster than virtualizing large amounts of hardware facilities. The problem is way too complex to make generalizations. That is why sometimes Wine runs Windows workloads *faster*, it is not surprising that some will run slower (especially certain types of graphics intensive operations)... It is highly dependent on the exact implementations of wine... and ironically 1.4 is a lot about improvements in this area (where things have been and continue to be pretty shitty).

Desktop integration--- vmware unity or whatever the fuck they call that thing on virtualbox (seamless) are definitely *not* the whole story to integration... but you are ignorant if you think that wine apps just magically integrate well with desktop Linux either.

Not sure how useful now.

[Anonymous Coward]

With fast machines, loads of ram and virtual machines I am not sure what the point of wine is anymore. Fifteen or ten years ago yes but now? If I want to play a game I open up Win XP or Win 7 in parallels or fusion. Anything really heavy (that I suspect wine could not deal with) then bootcamp does the job. Great effort and kudos to the people who have produced it of course.

Re:Not sure how useful now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. I didn't even realize Wine was still being developed.

Re:Not sure how useful now.

[hobarrera]

It's usefull because I don't have to buy windows (simply because I don't want to), and because I have far better integration.

Re:Not sure how useful now.

[timothyb89]

Unless you're exclusively playing Solitaire, you're probably not going to be able to play most games in a virtual machine, at least on a Linux host. I have a Windows XP VM that I run in both VirtualBox and VMware, and I've had very limited success playing games in either. VirtualBox can barely handle 3D graphics at all (though its support has improved significantly in the last couple of years), and VMware's acceleration, while significantly more stable, is awfully slow.

Unless the situation is for some reason better on OS X, bootcamp is probably the only reasonable solution. Parallels likely wouldn't be any better than just using Wine, considering it uses Wine's Direct3D libraries.

Alternatively, of course, you can just use wine - which works so commonly now that there's really no reason to waste your system resources with the overhead cost of a virtual machine. Even when system resources aren't an issue, VMs are never as fast as native code, and for that reason alone are a poor choice.

Re:Not sure how useful now.

[silanea]

Wine differs significantly from a virtual machine:

• You do not need a Windows license. Windows 7 Home Premium starts at 57 € for OEM/system builder, 124 € for retail version. Professional and Ultimate go for around 200 €.
• A VM is a full operating system, so it needs drivers, updates etc., in addition to updates for the applications you want to run. Under Wine you only have to deal with the latter yourself, the rest is handled by your distro's automatic updater.
• Integrating a VM seamlessly into your desktop is quite a hurdle and can only go so far in my experience. Under Wine my applications are almost native. Sharing files and doing other magic works transparently and without much manual intervention.

Wine does have its flaws, and many applications are a lost cause. But my experience so far has been that if it works, it rocks.

Re:Not sure how useful now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most Steam games play fine under parallels on an iMac. A few require bootcamp. I would say that 90% of my games are playable in parallels (out of 200+). I will give wine a look but do not need to. Any fiddling however and it gets the chop. Sys admin on Solaris and Linux is my day job which is not allowed to spill over into time off.

Wine is $200 cheaper

[tepples]

With fast machines, loads of ram and virtual machines I am not sure what the point of wine is anymore.

You still to buy a $200 copy of retail Windows for the Mac or home-built desktop PC on which you run Windows inside a virtual machine. Xubuntu + Wine is cheaper than Windows, and Mac OS X + Wine is cheaper than Mac OS X + Windows.

Re:Wine is $200 cheaper

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair point I guess. To me cost is not a barrier. I have a job to do and or a game I want to play then I prefer something that just works. I used Linux from the SLS distribution which was in about 1992 and had fun along the way. Now I just want an appliance that works and will pay what it takes. Must be getting old.

Re:Wine is $200 cheaper

[Urza9814]

It depends on what you're doing with it. I used to play World of Warcraft, and I actually found I could get better performance under Wine on Linux than under Windows (NOT in a VM.) And something like WoW in a virtual machine? Not gonna happen. For office apps and such, a VM will probably work fine, but for any kind of gaming, I've even found noticable lag on a 2.5GHz quad-core machine with 4 gigs of RAM running a game made for Windows 98. Wine just performs better. Plus with a VM you run into issues with keyboard/mouse capture -- you don't want to accidentally hit the capture key in the middle of a WoW raid. Or if you're using host integration so there is no capture key, sometimes the mouse won't capture right and you'll run it right through the edge of the screen or something...

I haven't used Wine in a while; I'm mostly using VMs because what I need these things for now is testing apps in various environments, which Wine can't really do -- but with all the problems I've had with VMs (mostly VirtualBox, some VMWare), I can't imagine any situation in which I would ever choose to use a VM when Wine would do the job.

Re:Wine is $200 cheaper

[phorm]

For LAN parties, I have a PXE server with various games built in that run via wine (also a component which manages which serial keys are in-use at a given time).

There were some initial wrangles getting the Nvidia/ATI blobs to install-on-demand, but with that running it's quite nice. I wouldn't be able to do quite the same thing with VirtualBox/VMware, not to mention the network overhead of loading a full VM image (each app has its own wine directory, so only the necessary files for that app are needed, plus there are no conflicts)

Re:Wine is $200 cheaper

[phorm]

Let me guess, a slightly older laptop?

I found that wine similarly kicked butt over my windows machine, which was mostly due to the laptop manufacturer not updating nVidia drivers, and nVidia's windows drivers not necessarily working well.
The Linux install had newer drivers that performed much *better*

Re:Wine is $200 cheaper

[Urza9814]

Nope, Desktop, it was a few months old at the time, which was probably around two years ago.

Re:Wine is $200 cheaper

[pnutjam]

I'd love to get more information about how you are doing this.

Re:Wine is $200 cheaper

[Roogna]

While I agree that whenever possible something like Wine is preferable to running Windows in a VM. I would like to point out that this stuff about VM's not being useable for gaming is pretty out-of-date. I've run many recent releases, including SW:TOR in a VM on my year old laptop just fine. At playable frame rates. WoW I don't bother with since it has a native Mac client, but there is really nothing stopping someone these days.

Re:Wine is $200 cheaper

[Rakarra]

and I actually found I could get better performance under Wine on Linux than under Windows

I assure you, you're not in the majority there. For a little while, performance was pretty decent, but on my fairly new computer with top-of-the-line video card currently, performance drops down to almost-unbearable (less than 10-fps) in raid finder raids unless I turn every single video setting down to its minimum. This was also the case in Burning Crusade, but the game was quite playable in large groups in Wrath and I thought Cata as well.

My frustration with WoW under Wine is that OpenGL is treated as "good enough," while DirectX support for the client is very very rocky. This is unfortunate because for about five years now Blizzard has been making very few improvements to the OpenGL engine, and using OpenGL disables all the prettier improvements like realistic shadow, good-looking water, and sunshafts.

And yeah, I've found VMs (mostly using VirtualBox, but some VMWare too) to be insufficient for... well, for most things I'd want, graphically. The performance was too poor when I tried playing Silverlight and Flash videos awhile back.

Re:Wine is $200 cheaper

[jimi1x]

$200? You can buy Win7 for $95 here in Australia...

What I want to know

[morgauxo]

How does the new audio system affect multiple soundcard support? Is it improved?

Which apps?

[unixisc]

Better question I can think of - which Windows apps does one want to run under Linux/BSD? Office? IE? Chrysis? I checked out 2 versions of Minesweeper - one under Wine, and one native in Linux. Preferred the native one. Of course, if I prefer Office 2003 to Calligra Suite (I still find Office 2007 a pain to work w/), I might prefer Wine. Maybe QuickBooks could use Wine? That's one of the few apps I can think of that doesn't have a good replacement in Linux.

But honestly, I think a lot of apps could use a WABI like approach. In the past, they suffered, but the main reason for that was that WABI was about running Wintel binaries on RISC based Unixstations, such as Suns, HP-9000s, RS/6000 workstations and so on. But heck, NT on RISC itself couldn't run Wintel binaries, so it's no surprise that these platforms did worse. But w/ any Intel based Unix - be it Linux, BSD or whatever, that should not be an issue. If I'm working in an X based desktop, such as KDE or GNOME or something similar, I don't expect my applications to look like Windows to the point that even the Window menus and everything have to be identical: a KDE or GNOME look & feel is okay.

I think a better goal would be that instead of targetting Office 2010, which like 2007 is a new UI - ribbons & everything, make the native Linux Offices - LibreOffice, Calligra Suite, et al as similar to Office 2003 as possible, and promote that to users. I had been a long time Office 2003 user, and I find 2007 tough to navigate, despite being so fluent w/ its predecessor. And I'm not a typical lay user. So if the new Office suites were to target 2003 and win over their users, a lot would have been achieved. Similarly, use Wine for things like QuickBooks, while in the meantime, hopefully, add something in the KDE Office apps suite to work w/ it, and hopefully make some arrangements w/ banks to support it.

I have no suggestions about the games. Only thing I think would be good - something like Windows Movie Maker - dunno whether OpenShot video editor fits the bill. Cinerella and Avidemux are way too complicated.

I do hope that ReactOS matures soon, so that by the time MS has cleaned up its act on Windows 8, ReactOS is a good enough replacement for both XP and 7.

Re:Which apps?

[kaiser423]

Ah, but some of the new features in Office 2010 w/ regards to document maps and creating large technical documents are easily worth the price of admission. I love that WINE can do Office 2010 now, because in some cases on my Windows machine I'm using the free Office 2010 starter pack over the full 2007 pack until IT decides we can upgrade precisely because in certain situations it makes me much more productive. Being able to do that on my Linux boxes now without having to boot back into Windows or fire up a heavy VM is very nice.

Re:Which apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Wine for some Windows-only language learning software I *ahem* found on the internet, and to rescue photos from old high school yearbook software that also was Windows-only, with encrypted data files. For actual work type software, like spreadsheets and document editors and CAD tools, I just don't see the need. The native Linux software that is available has always been good enough for my needs.

Re:Which apps?

[LordLucless]

The following are the apps that I run under Wine (just to give you an idea):
- World of Warcraft
- Audible
- Goldwave Pro (to un-DRM the Audible files)
My wife also uses some website's proprietary software to assemble photo albums, which are then uploaded, printed, bound, and shipped to her.

Re:Which apps?

[wirelessduck]

Everyone's favourite timewaster, Diablo II, runs very nicely under Wine.

Re:Which apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

if you hate Office 2007, why not use Libre Office? UI wise it is almost exactly the same, but it is actually being updated and never lets me down, even with .docx files

the last rc version was rc6.

[G3ckoG33k]

the last rc version was 1.4-rc6 before this 1.4

Visual Studio, stupid

[eminencja]

Anybody could explain why it is so difficult to get this thing running? Last time I checked even Visual Studio 6.0 did not work. It seems that virtual machine is the only way to go...

Re:Visual Studio, stupid

[TheRealMindChild]

I've been able to use VB6 and VC++6 in WINE forever. There are hurdles, however. WINE doesn't have a MSVBVM60.dll replacement, so you need this for VB6. VC++6 has SOME issues with cross-process debuggering, especially when mixing windows threads with COM's apartment threading.

Re:Visual Studio, stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Install Visual Studio 6 while emulating Windows 98.
Run it while emulating Windows XP.
Happy days :).

DIB!

[Anonymous Coward]

If I understand this correctly, the DIB will make making a quartz back-end a lot easier.

I wrote one years ago using the now defunct QuickDraw ('cause it was a lot easier to implement GDI in QD), but found better things to do with my time.

I might revisit this, now, however.

Re:DIB!

[vinn]

It will absolutely make that possible. In fact, I suspect that's why CodeWeavers spent the development effort on the DIB engine. This enables the Wine release to happen now, and then even if a Quartz driver is developed, it'll still only be in the development branch for quite some time before it's released, or they can choose to develop that as a proprietary piece on their own.

Code sharing

[DrYak]

The ReactOS and the Wine project share a lot of code (most of the userspace libraries. Consider ReactOS as a Wine userland + WinNT-like kernel). So therefore, the day ReactOS is actually a complete OS that can run 100% of windows software, is also the day that Wine can run all the Windows software too.

Re:Code sharing

[Anonymous Coward]

So maybe 2013 will be the year of the ReactOS desktop?

Re:Code sharing

[TheRaven64]

Not quite. Anything that comes with a kernel driver will be problematic. To give a popular example, iTunes for Windows installs a driver to connect to iPods and iPhones. Something like this will be a lot easier to get working with ReactOS than WINE on Linux, because the kernel APIs will be the same on ReactOS and both the kernel and userspace components can run, while each program that does this would need custom shims on Linux.

Office 2010 Support = Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

Excel - Silver
Word - Bronze
OneNote - Bronze
Everything else - Garbage

How exactly is that considered support?

Re:Office 2010 Support = Garbage

[tomofumi]

last time i checked their WINE appdb (0.9? 1.0?), even Office 2003 is not supported, so there is a great progress already. But I'd still prefer to run under VMware for 100% compatibility.

netflix

[pnutjam]

can I watch netflix on linux?

Re:netflix

[airdweller]

Only in a VM AFAIK.

Re:netflix

[unixisc]

Yeah, it would depend on whether Wine supports Silverlight

Re:netflix

[airdweller]

Not at the moment. They're working on it.

Basic Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Wine able to handle multi-disc software installation properly now?

Internet Exploder

[markdavis]

About the only reason I would want to run WINE is to run [shutter] Internet Explorer so I can access some damn [private/business] web sites that STILL don't support anything else.

And yet WINE *STILL* cannot run Internet Explorer 7+ worth a damn (last ratings from 1.4.X)! Wouldn't one think that would be high on the list?

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=25 (IE9 = garbage, IE 8 = bronze, IE 7 = bronze/garbage)

Since it is not tested by anyone under 1.4 yet, I guess I should try hacking on it forever and see if it will work yet. But not holding my breath :(

Don't get me wrong- I think the WINE project is wonderful, and they have a lot of really good support for a lot of applications; just not the one I need.

Re:Internet Exploder

[markdavis]

>"worth a damn (last ratings from 1.4.X)!"

Sorry, that is a typo and should read:

"worth a damn (last ratings from 1.3.X)!"

Re:Internet Exploder

[unixisc]

If this Wine is compatible w/ Vista, shouldn't it run IE9 w/ ease? Also, in what way would Wine be supporting Vista but not Win7?

Re:Internet Exploder

[markdavis]

It has never been easy to run any version of IE under any version of WINE. The best we had it was an old project called "IES4Linux", but that was for IE 6, and didn't work all that well, and is now dead :(

http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

Re:Internet Exploder

[unixisc]

Sound okay - just port Chrome or Chromium to it, and make it the default browser for ReactOS.

Cookie Monster want run Silverlight

[anon208]

For the Netflixes

OEM vs. retail

[tepples]

Is Windows $95 the OEM version? You're not supposed to use the OEM version on a Mac or a home-built desktop PC.

Re:OEM vs. retail

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm probably not suppose to use my MSDN copies either.. meh.

Re:OEM vs. retail

[Anonymous Coward]

That's alright, I'll resell my newly-built PC to myself.

Re:OEM vs. retail

[tepples]

The page that I linked had already anticipated your joke: "Must be preinstalled on a PC and sold to another unrelated party" (my emphasis).

Re:OEM vs. retail

[Anonymous Coward]

Like it fucking matters. You can buy the OEM version from an online store (like newegg) without agreeing to anything, so they can't enforce it, and Microsoft has never tried to enforce that restriction on hobbyists. If MS really cared they would stop sites like newegg selling the OEM version as an individual item and make sure it only gets sold to actual OEMs

Now, just so we are clear, I've no love for Microsoft, and have never bought (or pirated) a MS product, but it is still legitimate for me to buy an OEM version and use it myself if I want to.

ActiveX?

[caspy7]

"The built-in (Gecko-based) web browser engine supports ActiveX."
How is this a feature?

Is wine an emulator?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is wine an emulator?

Civ

[unixisc]

It would be interesting to play Civ under it. I still have an old Civ2 which I sometimes play, but I'd like to try FreeCiv out. I do hope some of the features from later editions of the game, such as Civ3, Civ4 and Civ5 are adapted by FreeCiv.

while i remain chaste

[Anonymous Coward]

i still wonder why?

Wine 1.4 Released

[chromaffin]

i have been using wine for quite sometime now..and it has finally helped me get rid of my windows partition..thanx so much for the update...