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

[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

[Tyrannosaur]

What's wrong with Win 7?

It can't run on Linux

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

[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.

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

[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.

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.

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

[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.

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.