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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."
Full bodied with a distinct Windowsy flavor.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Sadly the Debian bins are still at rc3 - http://www.winehq.org/download/debian
Still, thank you all for the fantastic project called Wine!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
God is imaginary