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Alexandre Julliard gets job Hacking Wine
Douglas Ridgway writes "Alexandre Julliard, leader of the Wine project, will be moving to Silicon Valley to work full-time on Wine.
See the press release for details.
"
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This is GREAT News for me.. My 3 year old has claimed my old Mac Performa as her computer for her CD-Rom games, but in the grand tradition of Mac vs Windows, more child-oriented games are *readily accessible* for me on the Windows platform. I would much rather set her up with a shell account on my workstation at home rather than have to purchase a copy of Windows to please hers *cough,cough* and mine gaming habit. My goal, to have her programming device drivers by the time she hits kindergarten :) Hmmm.... Fisher Price's "How to Code in Perl for Toddler's" I may have something here :)
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
Last time I tried WINE was at version 990131 on FreeBSD -CURRENT. It was fairly stable...I got Word 97 running in it, but then the fscking paper clip showed up and crashed everything. Bummer.
i didn't think so.
...
(oops, wine is not...)
don't flame, use arguments
Oh, man, settle down. I always agree with people who point-out that they want discussion without flames. Because it would be a shame if people were purposefully antagonistic and childish. Boy, that would be really, uh, bad.
Please try not to be so petty. It's not that hard to have a real conversation, even if the other person doesn't have the exact same opinion as you.
You raised some good points. It would be a shame if you simply encouraged a bunch of Flamebait, instead of real discussion.
any post containing the string "first post" would automatically...
Then wouldn't your post have been blasted into null?
Jesus, calm down.
I assume your comments are directed at me? How was what I said not true or a flame?
It is a FACT that we have had problems with older versions of some office apps not able to read files created by newer versions. I did not say or mean to imply that office 2000 files could not be read by previous versions. I have no experience in this, I've yet to get any 2000-format files. I just said that it does happen.
And how did you come up with the inference that I think there is a 'desktopdatabase' or anything running on a linux box. I didn't even come close to it. I didn't say anything was bad or better than something else. I was just pointing out an instance where wine might not be a viable alternative to keeping up with ms office apps under win32.
Christ, go un-knot your underwear, or something?
Damnit, preview, preview, preview...
Thou shalt always preview articles BEFORE thou posts them...
Has there been any work on WINE and non-x86 processors?
I understand this is beyond the stated goals of WINE, but...
I'm dying for SheepShaver PPC/Linux, so I can do on PowerPC what can be done with VMWare... run the native OS inside of Linux so you never need to reboot.
Wine is BSD which is still open source. Just because it's not GPL doesn't mean it's not open source.
-matt
MS will make defeating this project -- with "enhancements" -- priority one.
Hmmm... interesting claim... but a pretty far out one. There's no way that MS can "defeat this project with enhancements" without screwing up backwards compatibility with existing apps -- which is a MAJOR thing at Microsoft. It's why Win32 is (as people repeatedly claim here) a mess -- they can't change things without breaking software that's out there that people use day in, day out.
So what if Wine will always be a couple of years behind? That's still 100's of 1000's of apps that will run on the emulator. That's a massive software base to run.
Simon
[old APIs never die - they just end up in c:\windows\system32]
Coming soon - pyrogyra
It's not new, you just revealed that you're a slashdot-newbie... :) Click on it and check out the archives.
--
All Glory To The Hypnotoad!
While I believe that WINE is a great tool (I use quite a bit myself). I hope this doesn't prevent companies from doing a true port over to all the variants of *NIX. I can just hear a company saying, "Why should we? We can just develop our aplications for Windows, then let all the *NIX people run it with WINE if they need it."
This is a problem that OS/2 had, and part of the reason that it didn't flourish as it could have. Companies could develop for the Win16 environment, then market it for both because of OS/2's Win16 compatibility layer.
Anyways, congratulations to Alexandre, and I hope this will help both him and the development of WINE out!
chown -R us.
I understand that WINE is way different than VMware but with VMware why would we still need wine?
Good for him! I'm looking forward to getting the apps keeping Windows on my HD over to Linux; hopefully this should help.
On a side note, I may not be able to code Wine, but I sure can drink it - anyone wanna hire me?
"Old man yells at systemd"
Hopefully Wine development will pick up the pace. I'm personnaly very impressed with Wine, i can run my DirectX 6 Glide win95 game on linux. Very cool. Hopefully Wine will be the bridge that lets me delete win95 for good!
MS will make defeating this project -- with "enhancements" -- priority one.
Uhm...netscape was not ported using libwine. Netscape (mosaic) was written for unix way back when, windows and mac ports were done later. Also, netscape is older than libwine.
-matt
all this good news is more than I can bear :))
I see the AC's are speechless, at least as far as intelligent speech goes.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I think this is a step in the right direction. He's been maintaining Wine for so long now and it's paying off. Hats off to Open Source.
I enjoyed the article, all the way up to the word "synergy".
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Now we're able to run ActiveState Perl for Win 32 (I AM joking, y'all).
Mark Edwards
Proof of Sanity Forged Upon Request
We need to keep WINE production up, not in :-)
--
Infuriate left and right
Sorry if I'm getting hooked by a troll, but he has been one of the lead developers of Wine (an open-source project) for several years now (at least three). His open-source credentials are impeccable.
WINE does a lot more than allow Windows binaries to be run on x86 *nix boxes.
For one, Winelib can be used to compile Win32 apps against any *nix, be it x86 or not (after the bugs are out, at least).
Also, with the emulation layer for WINE that's been worked on from time to time, it'll be able to run Windows binaries on non-x86 boxes.
Furthermore, Wine allows such cool things as drag-and-drop between Windows and *nix apps. Can't do that in VMWare, and that can't be added without a tremendous amount of difficulty.
whatever happened to bochs?
Looks like it is alive and well. Apparently it can run Windows 9x and a fair amount of Windows software these days given a fast enough CPU.
The Bochs homepage can be found at:
http://www.bochs.com
Pardon?
Libwine's a library -- like GTK. It doesn't generate code.
>Has there been any work on WINE and non-x86 processors?
>I understand this is beyond the stated goals of WINE, but...
This was recently discussed on the wine development mailing list, when one of the active developers made a CPU emulator materialize out of thin air. Something like that brings non-x86's into the realm of possibility, but nowhere near practicality. Doing CPU emulation in addition to everything else is a tremendous burden. My guess is, don't look for non-intel Wine for a long time.
Winelib is a different story. It's intended to be much more portable. It serves a very different purpose than what you're hoping for, though.
OH GOODY!!!!! now I can run IE and Outlook Express on my Linux box... Just to have all the messages I send to myself denied 'cause I'm using OE.... sendmail DOES have some good filtering!
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
Download the current copy of the wine source from http://metalab.unc.edu/pub /Linux/ALPHA/wine/development/, gunzip and untar it, and run:
grep corel ChangeLog
from the base directory (wineYYYYMMDD) and see how many contributions Corel has made. They've made less than I personally hoped, but they've made quite a few. To be fair, I've poked in that code some, this is not a trivial project. In many ways it is much more complicated than the Linux kernel (I guess that shouldn't surprise any of us!). Corel's team may well be still finding their way around. They may also be concentrating on those things that affect their applications primarily.
They are there and they are doing things...
I doubt this news will do anything but improve Wine's situation. A guy who has done much of the lead work on Wine in his spare time will now be working on it full time and being paid to do so. I can't see how this can do anything but help.
In many cases, WINE is the beter option. Some of the code in some apps is just native x86 instructions, and can be executed directly, with the library calls intercepted and mapped to WINE internal calls. (Take StarCraft for example - it's quite playable on my P100 in Wine, because all it does is ask DirectDraw and DirectSound for output contexts, then output directly to the devices - no Win32 calls, afaik). Bochs and VMware both emulate a complete x86 CPU (slow because x86 is not a fully-virtualizable architecture, so a lot of work has to be done in software). For some things, a fully-emulated environment might be better, but if you care about performance, WINE's way of doing things may be the best option.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
As has been pointed out many times, the *most* important applications to many businesses are the ones that have been developed in house in VB/Delphi/VC++/Access/DBase/Whatever. The likelyhood that corporations would/could port these apps to Linux is pretty low.
In house apps nail the average corporate desktop to Windows, so without something like WINE, you'd probably never see Linux on an average corporate desktop.
(The good thing about most corporate apps is that they're unlikey to use the latest Windows voodoo API, so there's no worry about MS breaking WINE compatiblity.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
hey man I'm not a newbie at all, I've been here for over a year! Just because you I have a bad short term mem... what were we talking about...?
Ben Garrison, a mindless idiot who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
You might look at Bochs, which is an open sourced x86 emulator that should work on PPC (it works on Sparc). It isn't the fastest thing in the world, but it is supposed to be able to run Windows 9x and a lot of Windows software.
You can find the bochs home page at:
http://www.bochs.com
Corel's done a LOT of work on things like OLE2/COM/CraptiveX that most other people would never want to touch. I'm all for that :)
Dump this to a line printer and put it up in the nursery:
A is for ASCII
B is for Beta
C is for, well, C
D is for Drivers
E is for Emacs
F is for free() -- see M
G is for gcc
H is for Hex
I is for int
J is for jmp
K is for Kilobyte
L is for long
M is for malloc() -- see F
N is for NULL
O is for Open Source
P is for Perl
Q is for Queue
R is for Recursion -- see R
S is for Socket
T is for TCP/IP
U is for *nix
V is for Vi
W is for Window Manager -- see X
X is for wimps who can't handle a command line
Y is for Yacc
Z is for ZZ
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
www.winehq.com - it's FAR better looking (and less likely to attract M$ legal) than the butt-ugly thing /. uses.
You can sucessfully run windows Directx glide games? Any in particular?
That is what libwine does, basically. It implements the Windows API on UNIX.
\\'
Besides the obvious (there are lots of libraries that implement win32 on native Linux) there is no source code available for most Windows apps.
This means that you personally cannot recompile your Windows application unless you have written it. And lets not forget that most software companies aren't going to invest the money and energy into "band-aiding" their Windows code to make i9t run on Linux (with the obvious exception of Corel) as it is probably more cost effective in the long run to implement the code the "right" way (written as a native Linux app) since maintaining Windows code compiled for Linux will likely be a bear. Remember that most Windows APIs rely on Windows' poor OS design (ie, too many modules try to do too much...vs. simple one-function programs on Unix/Linux that are really really good at one thing instead of trying to do everything...)
My journal has hot
Pretty colors = bloat?
/. alot.
/. While I agree that substance is the more important of the two, style is important, too.
This is an attitude that I see here on
Especially from die-hard lynx users.
I like pretty colors.
I like multi-media on the web.
I like eye-candy.
Of course, the OS underneath has to be able to handle all this....
There is alot of "Substance over style" feeling here on
If we have both, there will be no stopping us!
Isn't that what the RTF (Rich Text Format) is for? I thought that that was about the only way that Word users communicate with each other.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
I heard a while back that Corel was going to give the wine guys some help. Any idea if they are still doing this? And how will this move affect what Corel does?
This sig is false.
!
That'd be showing a 1:1 correspondence between the two operating systems. There are larger, more fundamental differences between the OSes than the function names...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
VMWare is slow, locks up a considerable amount of memory and requires you to buy windows.
Wine lets you run Windows binaries, buy implementing the Windows library natively. This is fast!
Wine is a Good Thing (TM)!
geach
Oh, that would indeed be productive, considering the Windows binary culture. Source code is frowned upon, so how would you even get it to recompile? Besides, there are many Windowsisms in the API that would be next to impossible to implement on an OS that practices sound design principles in process and user segmentation.
Of course, there are quite a few "platform-neutral" APIs, but they are largely useless. And they still don't fill the niche that Wine, VMWare, and others do.
OK, let's say that WINE is incredible succesful and completely replaces the WIN32 API. Then Linux would get a lot more applications from the Windows world.
But that wouldn't encourage companies to port their software to Linux, since it already works almost as good as in Windows. That would leave Microsoft in charge of the WIN32 API should evolve. (And to my personal opinion, the WIN32 API sucks bigtime)
I would much rather see success for wxWindows, GTK and Qt.
Anyway, I think it's great that people writing Free software gets paid for their hard labour.
Is the new parent of WINE willing to guarantee they will keep it an open-source project? Free beer?
J.
damned vulpine http://sb.drtwister.com/
Free speech, not free beer.
*sigh*
How many times must we repeat this?
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
There's already a Posix layer for Windows (NT). It's not free, and it's not from Microsoft. (they have a crippled Posix subsystem by default).
Interix
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Zontar The Mindless,
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Has anyone had any success running windows program installers under Wine? I've tried several - from M$ Office 4.3 to IBM's VAJava to Stardock's Entrepreneur to several rather minor ones. They ALL failed at various places!
And I've heard that M$ Office 4.3 is supposed to work...
So... do people install stuff under 'Doze and copy the binaries over or is there a better way to get install programs to work?
BTW I haven't tried Wine since sometime in April. Gave up on it after that.
That happens to be pretty close to what libwine does. And exactly how Corel is porting their Suite to Linux.
God Fucking Damnit
Of course, this obviates the need for MS to produce a linux shell for winders. The Cheese shall put on his oracle hat (not that Oracle) and prophesy that MS will release such a beast, either as a ServPac for 98 or NT, or as a feature of 2k.
In fact, I'm surprised that MS doesn't already have one that they're giving away, a la Exploiter.
This is excellent news... Wine is a great tool for working with windows software under windows... It is the one reason I don't have windows anymore to run Unreal... Hopefully one day it will run most windows software under linux... :)
> FIRST POST
not even close!
The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient... - High Road to China
Bochs is shareware though. not GPL, not BSDstyle - shareware... yek.
/Elias
Hey Juju, congratulations for your work on Wine and this move to California! Is that more fun than porting X to the Smaky environment??... ;-)
Take it easy, but take it!
--Pierre
Looks like he got hired because he has a CS degree from the Swiss federal institute of technology. Getting hired because you have a degree in CS is no big news. Now if he got hired because of some open source project that would be something.
Yup, libwine is what you are describing.
I wouldn't be surprised if thats how they ported netscape, as the code isn't clean.
Code that comes out of libwine usually needs a lot of optimization, its usually pretty clunky.
my 2/100ths of a dollar.
-bugg