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Wine Software

How Is Wine Doing These Days? 294

Posted by CmdrTaco from the why-do-I-gotta-reboot-to-play-diablo-2? dept.
zigzag noted a nice article Summarizing the Wine Architecture. It has some interesting technical stuff, as well as poll results asking what Wine's priorities should be (running Office came first, followed by games. I vote games, but I'm sick of having to run Diablo2 on my crappy old laptop w/o 3D Acceleration since it's my only windows box). Anyway, not a lot there, but this is a seriously important project so take a gander.
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How is Wine Doing These Days? More

How is Wine Doing These Days?

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  • ...arm in arm, holding cups of wine, clearly drunk off their asses (red-nosed and singing or something stupid like that).
  • The right tool for the right job, right? Game support with WINE would be nice, but I think that it's just asking for trouble since coding compatibility with Microsoft graphics APIs is like shooting at a moving target (and an erratically moving one at that!)

    How is it a moving target? You could pick, say, Windows 98's base level of support - its been available for two years now - and support that.

    It's only a moving target if you emulate everything that's available now; Wine has been in progress for years, and it still doesn't do Windows 3.1 correctly...
  • P3 + Sysboard will run you $300, $100 for the mem, $200 for the vid/sound, $300 for the monitor.

    So I was off by $100 bucks, sue me. I still think you're a cheapass if you can't stick another computer together to play games if you're that concerned with playing Diablo (a fucking $65 video game!). If you can afford that, you can afford to give money to bill gates and intel and run a Windows98 machine. You twits.

  • I have a dual PII 450, I do use X on ocassion, with bloated window managers. Mainly to have xterms next to each other and for netscape. I didn't mean to insult those that use X, I'm just stating my personal opinion and responding to a post made jokingly with another post made jokeingly
  • No luck on Diablo 2 yet (or Tribes [winehq.com] apparently), but Tribes 2 will be ported to Linux (mentioned here [linuxgames.com])... hopefully at some point the majority of PC gaming titles will be available with native Linux clients. However, the only way to bring that about is to support what's there already, so be sure to put your $ where your convictions lie :)
  • Come on, man, how hard is it to type <a href="www.winehq.com">www.winehq.com [winehq.com]</a>???

    In conclusion, I hate you.

  • Uhm, [Alt-F] pops open the File menu. Not what you wanted. Consulting WordPad under Wine, it appears [Ctrl-H] is what you wanted to press.

    And, once you press [Enter], that'll get you though the first "find". If you want to "Replace All", you'll have to do a little more work, such as pressing [Alt-A].

    Also, you forgot the 2-stroke penalties for the "[Control] reach" and "[Alt] reach". Both of them are "reaches" on PC keyboards because the Control key is off in the corner, rather than where it should be. And, both are more expensive than hitting [Esc]. :-)

    --Joe
    --
  • No, in my humble opinion, re-implementing a broken API on Linux is not a noble cause. But I've been shouted down every time I've tried to point out how stupid it is to try and impress people with WINE.

    rant:
    My point is that the Linux community (myself included) has tried for years to claim that Linux is not a cheap imitation of Windows. Now, to prove that: we are using a broken and buggy emulation layer to implement an already broken and buggy API, to poorly run broken and buggy software that was meant for Windows. Um, Linux isn't a cheap imitation of Windows?
    /rant

    I see WINE as being just one more thing that people are doing to make Linux look bad. I know this isn't a popular opinion, but in the long run WINE encourages people to "port" Windows software to Linux through WINE (Look at WordPerfect Office) instead of writing solid native apps. I don't see this as a good thing.

    Now, flame away....
  • While it is frightening, it is also extremely funny. I fear for the person's sanity, but isn't laughing at crazy people always fun?
  • You can run a Tribes server under wine with nor problems however a playing client I don't think is possible because of the nature of directx usage.
  • Cripes, everyone flames me saying you can't get what I listed for $800 or so.. Go to pricewatch and build one yourself for around that amount. Twits, everywhere unite!

  • If you're too damn lazy to cut and paste, just who the hell are you to critisize him for being to damn lazy to use "a href" tags?

    In conclusion... hate yourself.

    john
    Resistance is NOT futile!!!

    Haiku:
    I am not a drone.
    Remove the collective if

  • Of course it is. If you can't laugh at the mentally instable, who can you laugh at?

    --

  • If you want full windows functionality, it seems that dual-booting is a smarter option. WINE will prolly never match windows, so what's the point?

    Because I don't want to quit everything that I'm running at the moment just to run some application of other operating system? Dual boot would require me to do that, WINE doesn't. True, WINE doesn't run 100% of Windows programs, but then again, there's the comfortability I mentioned earlier...

  • You are missing something:

    4) People who use Linux almost exclusively but have a few applications that are only available in windows flavors, and dual booting would be excessive work. Ie, creating website graffics using gimp, and creating macromedia flash for the same website.

    5) People who can't justify buying a windows license for a few applications.

    6) People who have written a windows version of a program and want to get a linux port out quick using libwine (Ie, Corel, yes I know Corel Office uses wine not libwine, but the plan is to use libwine in the future).

    7) Not contributing to the Microsoft Defense Fund (not buying software from MS).
  • if DirectX is implemented, any games that run under Windows 2000 should run under Linux.

    Well, they should..... There are a few problems. in my experience. Firstly, its not 100% bug free (I am using an old version of Wine, so it may be better by now) Most of the problems I find are in Direct3D. I think the problems caused by D3D being implemented in Mesa. i.e. a low level API is being implemented using a high level API. The D3D driver also unfortunately tells the application that all of D3D is implemented in hardware, which makes it painfully slow if you don't have acceleration.
  • Microsoft's plan for the future also saw everyone moving to Xenix at some point after DOS 2.0. My how their plans have changed.

  • I was pleased to find that Wine compiled cleanly and Starcraft installed easily. The only problem was that it locks up after about 20 min of playing. Save early, save often.

  • Bah, all of those are way overrated. Try a nice Spanish Rioja sometime... Verrrry nice. Some call it "Sangre de La Tierra", for good reason.

  • I believe it would be around $600 dollars. Remember, add the wonderful $100 dollar Windows tax. Also, its not just that it "isn't windows", it's the ideas/morals behind free software. He believes in it, he makes a living off of it, he doesn't feel like doing something against it. Some of us feel real strongly about it... jeez.

    Also, I'm not going to comment on win2k behing a worthwhile product...

  • MMMMMMmmmmm Direct X in Linux
    you could run a multuser Unreal tournement on one box.
    hmmmm

  • www.winehq.com and read the faq , tells some reasons why linux would wanna run some windows binarys and another thing , can windows run linux binarys? ... heh
  • He certainly has the submission queue on a Linux box ok. Most of us only reboot for windows games, not some quicktime trailler too. And I'm sure you'd bitch more if he posted a quicktime. But really, get lives or write some code or something.
  • i love applixware! i had bought a "student edition" when i was a student, oh, right when redhat 4.0 came out.. unfortunately, years later when i upgraded to suse 6.2 applix refused to install, because it wasn't red hat.

    i'm sure i could probably have hacked around and got it to install, but then there was the libc5 issues also, and staroffice was free with my new suse, so i just went to that

    oh, and that old applix wouldn't handle the newest .DOC conversions, either.. just some word 3.1 or something..

    wish
    ---

  • Re:For Christ's sake, USE HYPERLINKS (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Uhm, bonehead, if you are going to correct people, do so correctly, mmm'kay?

    Notably, you forgot the http:// at the front of your URL. The correct answer is: <A HREF="http://www.winehq.com/">WineHQ</A&gt

    But, then, you knew that already, didn't you?

  • i am a grad student. i was ta'ing a class that required the students to use a math package that only ran in windows. i was having the students submit/store their homework via ftp to my linux box. i wanted them to be able to always have access to their files so they could work on their assignments and fetch their grades.

    the problem was that i needed to grade the homework in windows. so i tried vmware (too slow), but wine worked really well execpt the greek fonts used in mathcad really got screwed up.

    re: 1) since i am a grad student i have very little extra money in the bank to devote to a new computer so that i can run this one windows program. this makes wine very important.

    re:2) 90$ oem/$300 retail for an shrinkwrapped pile crap seems like alot to me.

    re:3) i would prefer not to steal software even a steaming pile like windows.

    john
  • You'd at least expect a shag for $800.
  • I know alot of people waiting for Wine to work perfectly...from what I have heard, it is on Version 2+ but still doesn't support alot. (I know its hard to support every app out there).
    So the question is...is Wine ready to be used extensively? Should we be premoting it?
  • I totally agree that an OS is a tool to get a job done (or have fun, or whatever).

    However, the idealogy of the tool is just as important as the tool, I think. That is why GNU software is so important and why RMS makes such a big deal about the difference between Open Source Software and Free Software (not to mention proprietary software).

    What is the use of having a nice tool if you cannot make improvements to the tool and/or share those improvements with the world?

    Nothing can possiblai go wrong. Er...possibly go wrong.
    Strange, that's the first thing that's ever gone wrong.

  • For Christ's sake, FIX THE WINE LOGO (Score:5)

    by Ian Schmidt ( 6899 ) on Thursday July 06, 2000 @10:24AM (#953153)
    For well over a year now Wine has had a correct, nice looking logo which you can view on www.winehq.com yet Slashdot insists on using the ugly, insulting, modified Windows logo.

    I hate to get bent over something this trivial, but somebody's gotta.

    -Ian, wine-developer, but probably not speaking for all of 'em.
  • Quoting the poster of the story (that would be CmdrTaco)...

    I'm sick of having to run Diablo2 on my crappy old laptop w/o 3D Acceleration since it's my only windows box

    Remember yesterday (I think), everyone said: "What do you mean you won't take reviews of online movies if you can't view them under linux? What do you mean you have 'no way to view them'? How do you play Diablo2?"

    Maybe he was listening.. His "only" Windows machine is a "crappy old laptop w/o 3d acceleration" that he uses for diablo2. Guess he told everyone.

    Garpenlov
    --Not ashamed of any OS he runs
  • There isn't a need to have word working on linux, simply because there are other programs that are written for linux AND can read the DOC format. I can think of one straight off(StarOffice) and know that there are others. It is still a shame that people insist on sending mails with word attachments. Personally I would have sent the reply in StarOffice format and see what they did with it.
  • Since when was a laptop a box ?

  • See link. [slashdot.org]

    Just out of curiosity, what functionality of Quicken do you use that's so far beyond GnuCash?

  • WINE's first priority should be running ridiculously overpriced bloatware from a company made infamous for its repeated misuse of undocumented APIs

    That ridiculously overpriced bloatware (which, to be fair, it is) controls 90-95% of the office software market share. There are a lot of companies that want to keep that bloatware but remove Windows, and would switch to linux if they new Office ran on it. That is why it is priority #1. Frankly, though, I am disappointed that Quicken and other Intuit products aren't as high up.
  • He's kind of saying that it is useless to feel strongly about *software* And that guy doesn't seem to feel THAT strongly, since he is running a windows machine at all. You have to be pragmatic about these things. If you feel so strongly about not running Windows, then I'm sure you have the willpower to simply not play Diablo 2.

  • If you type at anything more than 60 wpm, it's faster to type, say:

    [ESC]:%s/foo/bar/[Enter]

    ... than it is to navigate most text editor or wordprocessor GUIs (even using only keystrokes) to do the same thing.

    (n.b., the [ESC] is supposed to denote one keystroke, making that a total of 14 keystrokes. That's a fixed overhead of 8 keystrokes, and no modifiers.)


  • Do we really want to do it the Corel way, as some people suggest? WINE might be good and all for binary emulation, but if you care so much about porting, it seems to me that you should write UNIX first, then Windows.

    I think you answered your own question in your opening statement. "OK, Corel is using WINE to port their Windows applications to Linux...." They're porting existing Windows apps. At this point in time, the software most people use is/was written for Windows. Wine gives users of those products a choice in operating systems until the vendors can get their Linux act together. The problem with this strategy for the Linux community is that there is no automatic feedback to the software companies as to which platform their product is being run on unless, like Corel, they begin to distribute a Linux version that installs the package with hooks into Wine. Without that feedback it just looks like they're selling more windows software and may choose to ignore the needs of some unknown segment of their user base. The only other alternative is for the user community to voice their desire for a Linux version of the package even if we get it running under Wine. It will take a lot of feedback since I'm sure they get requests from the Linux 'zealots' already.

    carlos

  • "If you want full Unix functionality, go use a Unix machine. A PC-based version of Unix will prolly never match Unix itself, so what's the point?" I'm glad not everyone is willing to throw in the towel as easy as you.

    --
  • Two reasons I can think of:

    - Linux is not yet a proven market in most companies' minds, and a Wine/WineLib port allows them to "test the waters" for a full Qt or GTK or whatever port. This is Deneba's Canvas strategy - if there is substantial interest as a WineLib app they'll commit manpower to do a full native port. If not, they're out a couple engineer's time for about 3 months. That's not bad at all considering :-)

    - Many Windows programs are old-but-profitable codebases which have never seen the light of a non-Windows API. (There are obvious exceptions: Canvas also was available for MacOS, Photoshop's been seen on IRIX, and so on). For stuff like that WineLib makes an excellent crutch or scaffolding to get things working on Linux and then strip off the Windowsisms. I ported a large MFC-based application in just that way a few months back. I got it working as WineLib, then gradually converted it to all native Linux calls and a Qt/KDE user interface.
  • Unfortunately because the general populous thinks that the .DOC is the standard it becomes the standard. I have had several occations where I have called up a place to see if they could send me information in a format OTHER than .DOC. No one seems to know what a postscript file is these days. If people transfered files in .ps, .pdf, or even .dvi I would be much happier but that doesn't happen.

    It doesn't help that MS Windows doesn't come with any way of creating standardized formats like .dvi's or .ps.

    .DOC is a standard because the general populous thinks it is.
  • Maybe because Office is better than all the native applications? Office is better than Applix, AbiWord, etc, and most parts of it are better than WordPerfect Suite (except word.)
  • How successful was the running of Quicken 99? My girlfriend is thinking of switching herself and her parents over to Linux but they depend heavly on Quicken. If it runs without too much of a hitch then I'm sure she will be extremely happy to hear that.

    Are you running with native .DLLs or Wine only?
  • Project Odin [netlabs.org] is basically Wine on OS/2. I think there's a lot of Wine code in Odin, but from what I've heard, Odin surpassed Wine in Win32 compatibility a long time ago.

    Plus, OS/2 already runs DOS and Windows 3.1 apps better than any other OS out there. It runs XFree86 and several *nix apps have already been ported to OS/2 (Gimp, Apache, MySQL, and thousands more). Not only that, but Everblue [netlabs.org] is working on adding Linux compatibility to OS/2.

    It looks to me like Project Odin is far more interesting than Wine. All of this awesome work being done every day for OS/2 is the reason why I still use it.

    --

    --

  • Actually it wouldn't. DirectX in Windows 2000 is unadultered, bonafied, wholesome, god-given, 100% pure DirectX. Without the superlatives it means that DirectX on Win2K bypasses the HAL so it works similarly to the one in Win9x. However, Linux doesn't offer this kind of direct access so those games that depend on it won't run.
  • Even if it was drawn with GIMP [gimp.org] for Eunuchs, they could still claim it was made with WinGIMP [gimp.org] because they both write something like "Made with GIMP" in the JPEG/G*F comments.
  • You don't :) Without basing the system API on something like COM (like DirecX does) it isn't really feasible to upgrade the API. However, I think the UNIX way to avoid it is to simply add a new API. Take a look at all the baggage APIs in Linux. You have POSIX, you have some SystemV APIs you have X, you have GNOME, you have Motif, you have KDE, you have TK, TCL, ncurses, ad nauseum.
  • The very fact that you think s/// comes from PERL tells me that you have yet to experience the pure state of euphoria that is UNIX.

    How about this, given a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers (not always in that order, but one per line), I want find everybody who lives in east Bloomington, MN (zip code 55420) and replace their old area code (612) with the new one (952) to reflect the changes.

    In Windows: Alt-f to each line with 55420 and visually grep where the area code is, then paste 952 over it and move on to the next one, and the next, and the next... Or spend the day formatting it properly so you can export it to a database like MS Access.

    Now let's do that in UNIX:

    Step one: type "g/55420/s/(612)/(952)/g"

    Step two: there's no step two, unless you want to take a coffee break and go laugh at your company's NT admin.

    (Note: some flavors of *n?x or various shells might spell "find-every-line-with-this-and-replace-that-with-s omething" differently, but they can all do it.)

  • Isn't that something akin to "Man Bites Dog"?

  • No matter what your intent is, you write for Windows first. Whatever thing you use, the system that the program was one first will be the better port. Thus, if you care about your customers you write to Windows because your customers (statistically) all use Windows. If you care about selling software, you write to Windows, because (again) your customers are using Windows.
  • Then fricken partition one of your other damn computers and put Windows on it. Or, here is a novel idea, buy another computer! A cheap computer that could run Diablo would cost less than $500, if that (without monitor).

    You Linux devotees are worse than anything or one Microsoft produces. You just blindly use Linux and follow the community no matter what the consequences. Shitty software? Shitty drivers? Shitty support? Who cares, it's not Microsoft!

    If you fail to see that Microsoft isn't the damn devil and acctually produces worthwhile products (win2k) then you deserve to be playing Diablo 2 on a shitty laptop. If at all.

  • Doing things the NT way (Score:5)

    by 11223 ( 201561 ) on Thursday July 06, 2000 @10:27AM (#953227)
    Several times in the article it mentions that they're leaning towards doing things the NT way. Is that because of NT's POSIX capabilities and cleaner design, or just because it seems to be better documented?

    Related: Are there any status updates on MainWin for Linux? It'd be nice to see that as an easy and well-proven method for porters.

  • Why should WINE be used to run Office? It requires the X86 architecture, so, it's not going to run Office on a computer that CAN'T run office. I think that GAMES should be first. If you want to run M$ products, you might as well run them under their operating system. GAMES are one of the few things that Linux doesn't have a version of (yeah, quake and doom and tetris, I mean Swat 3! I gotsta have my SWAT 3!) At any rate, I run a dual boot so I can run my games, but many of THOSE can be run under WINE too! JOY!

  • not games....yet (Score:5)

    by fluxrad ( 125130 ) on Thursday July 06, 2000 @10:30AM (#953246)
    supporting games in linux with WINE is not necessarily a good ideal to shoot for. At it's best, it's crappy windows emulation with worse performance, at it's worst, it's an excuse for game coders to say "bah - they've got wine, why code fo linux now?"

    Additionally, there are a lot more games coming out for linux now than ever before - alot of the top games are now available for linux, and although i never really liked diablo, i REALLY want to see a half-life client. - GIMME MY FSCKING COUNTER-STRIKE IN LINUX DAMNIT!!!! Anyway, the place we need to be looking is just all around kick-ass compatibility/ability to use generic windows software. Office would be nice, but we do have several alternatives there. I would personally like to see programs like Mplayer and Acid or ReBirth with better support. I have, though, seen wine go from a puny little program that helped you run windows apps like minesweeper, into a powerful tool that even professional coders (like the folks at Corel) are using. The guys at wine should keep doing what they're doing and we'll see wine go exactly where it needs to go.


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • "At it's best, it's crappy windows emulation with worse performance
    Wine Is Not an Emulator.



    From http://www.winehq.com/about.html [winehq.com]:
    "Wine is an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer."
    And try http://www.winehq.com/faq.html#q1 [winehq.com]:
    "Is Wine an emulator?

    Unfortunately, no. Wine provides low-level binary compatibility, but currently only for OSes running on Intel-compatible chips. "
  • I know it's not for everybody, but if you have a great employer like I do who will buy you a whole server and expensive software to run on it, then citrix metaframe [citrix.com] is a wonderful solution. All I need to run is a very light-weight Linux client (works on BSD too with linuxcompat), and I have all the MS software I need right there in my X server. I can do all the Outlook/Word/Excel crap I need to, without ever worrying about rebooting or hogging resources or not having the full functionality of the software. I can even cut and paste from an xterm to NT without any extra effort.

    Those guys at Citrix really did a great job, it's saved my uptimes and the NT guys can worry about all the email viruses I open with Outlook. HA!

  • Looking forward to the upcoming 1.0 release (Score:3)

    by kdgarris ( 91435 ) on Thursday July 06, 2000 @10:30AM (#953255) Journal

    Wine is apparently approching a stable 1.0 release sometime in the next several months, I believe (my source is previous Wine news updates on WineHQ [winehq.com]).

    A 1.0 release won't mean everything will be complete, but it will mean tha a known set of application will work with it. The most frustrating thing about Wine is how applications may work in one version, not the next version since the code is always changing. As a result, one often has to have several versions of Wine loaded for specific applications that run well with that particular version.

  • Why waste good hardware running Windows? Sure, CmdrTaco, or even me, for instance could afford a 'decent computer' for Windows. But why?

  • The ideologoy of a tool? WOW! no wonder I just don't get Open Source. If I'm buying a ratchet, I just buy the best ratchet for the money. I pay my taxes, pay (a little) attention to politics, vote, and expect the collective will of the people, expressed through their elected officials, to keep rampant captalism gone wild in check. Kinda like in this whole anti-trust thing.... I guess I'm just hopelessly naive.
    ---
  • GO Ian! :-)

    I'll send you some new pictures sometime soon, people might want to check out Ian's WINE pictures [rr.com]


    Chris Morgan(also a wine developer)

  • I don't think a lot of people are aware of this yet, since it has happened so recently... but Halflife has a 5 on the winehq list since mid-june. Hopefully this gets moderated up so everybody notices it :) P.S. There is a patch for quakeforge to run Halflife bsp's.. it is buggy and it isn't a complete client, but may eventually be worth it's weight in gold.

  • Re:NT's POSIX capabilities (Score:3)

    by styopa ( 58097 ) <hillsr AT colorado DOT edu> on Thursday July 06, 2000 @02:00PM (#953270) Homepage
    MS tried to get help from SCO on POSIX support for what was going to be their next product Windows New Technologies in 1991. SCO basically told them to take a flying leap. Interesting thing, after that MS wouldn't license Word, during its early really crappy days, to them.

    I'm not a programmer, but from what I have been told there is only one posix thread, or whatever, available from NT and if it crashes then you are hosed.

  • WINE is NOT EMU (Score:5)

    by Dungeon Dweller ( 134014 ) on Thursday July 06, 2000 @10:35AM (#953278)
    A little info on WINE, it doesn't actually EMULATE. What it does do is allow for Windows executables to be loaded on the platforms that WINE is compiled under. It also feeds the applications with false information/conversions needed in order to operate under this environment. For instance, my C: drive is actually a FAT32 partition loaded under Linux. In the config file, it is /mnt/fat-c. When the program asks for the C: drive, WINE returns that mount point as if it were the C: drive. It can also pass info to my sound and networking capabilities.

    Interestingly, WINE just sort of started as a posting to a news group on letting Linux load Windows binaries, which it technically can with a little kernel hacking, it just won't actually RUN them if they need the .dll's and environment that Windows provides.

    WINE may never be able to run programs quite as fast as Windows, but supposing that the Linux equivalents of the DLL's used by Windows apps are faster, it actually is theoretically possible that it could run programs FASTER. The steps are translation, not emulation.
  • The porting of Office products, whether it be MS Office or Quicken, or whatever, should be priority 1 for the Wine team. There are some good reasons why.
    1. The office product market is a relatively stable market. MS Office updates itself ever 2-3 years, and Intuit products every year. The game industry is constantly producing more games every month. The amount of time and effort to port even the most popular of games becomes a nightmare.

      • Also, even with major updates in the Office products, the ports of those updates become less of a problem because people don't like extremely drastic change in the products that they use. The ability to fix small problems in updates is more reasonable then trying to create whole new ports for each new fangled game.

    3. As someone else mentioned, in order for Linux to make it into the Corparate world, or even the desktop or academic world, MS Office and other major office products need to be ported. By rallying support through the corparate and desktop worlds other products will move to porting their products natively.
    4. Linux is targeting several markets.
      • Small Business Server
      • Workstation
      • Desktop/Home use
      • Academic

      All of these markets have use for office products, but not all of them have the need for games.

    Frankly, I would much rather run a game natively on MS then wine it for speed issues.
  • I think WINE is a project that has an overall goal of moving towards non-existance. Companies like Corel are moving toward linux using WINE. If I were a developer, I'd use WINE to "port" my Window$ projects to linux, basically to get my company name/software recognized in the linux community. Corel is going full force into WINE just to beat other companies to linux and gain name recognition. Once you have that, you can start taking the time to port your code natively to linux. When it comes to running WIndow$ apps under linux, I personally prefer VMWare just to give my alternate OS's a clean environment to run at their best. I think the life span of WINE is short, but it's significance is tremendous for the time being.

  • I work for people in the desktop publishing industrie and they can't migrate to Linux due to them using almost exclusivly two programs; Adobe PageMaker and Photoshop.

    Some time ago I tried to make Photoshop work under WINE. I didn't succed, but came close enough to be impressed. So my question is this. Do these programs now work under Linux? If so, we could dualboot all the computers at work, and only keep a minimal Windows installation.

    Since so much in this bussiness are depending on these two programs, it would mean a great deal for the Linux community if they could be run under Linux. (IMONSHO, of course ;-)

    *hope*

  • The Wine team is certainly interested in adding CPU emulation at some point, but a lot of other things need to be cleaned up first. There's some promising early work going on now with using WineLib to compile Windows programs on SPARC Solaris, and that will only help future portability.

    If anyone out there would like to code instead of whine ;-) getting WineLib running on LinuxPPC and the like would be an important step - not only would it allow people like Corel to easily release e.g. LinuxPPC versions of their stuff, but it would make things work much nicer when CPU emulation finally happens.

  • But then with OS/2, and the bits n pieces IBM put in for the sake of Windows emulation, there's less work to be done

    Not true.

    If you're talking about Open32, the Win32 compatibility layer that's part of Warp 4, it is not used in Project Odin. It used to be used, but the Odin developers wrote their own (or grabbed stuff from Wine, probably a combination of both).

    and native operating system features that can be utilised.

    If you're trying to say that OS/2 is a lot like Windows anyway, that it's easier to support, then I'm not sure I'd agree. For one thing, (0,0) on OS/2 is in the lower-left corner (where it's supposed to be), but in Win32 it's in the upper-left corner.

    --

    --

  • It's actually quite simple. The primary reason that Microsoft has to support old APIs in their programs is that they have too many customers that aren't willing to upgrade to newer versions of their OS, but they are willing to purchase newer versions of their applications. The two primary reasons that people don't upgrade are:

    1) Upgrading Windows is costly.

    2) Upgrading Windows is difficult.

    Linux has both of these problems fairly well licked. Upgrading a Debian GNU/Linux system is as easy as "apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade", and the price is quite reasonable :).

    Linux also has a sane library versioning scheme that allows you to safely and easily install older versions of shared libraries. Your older applications will use then use the same libraries that they have always used, and your newer applications will use the newest fancy-dan versions.

    Linux's library versioning strengths even extend to the development tools. Tools like GNU/autoconfigure were designed to port GNU programs between completely different architectures, keeping track of the difference between Linux versions is a comparative snap. Of course, this only helps you with software that comes with source code, but that covers just about all of the Linux software I use.

    My guess is that application vendors will largely target distributions. In other words they will state that application Foo works with RedHat Linux versions 5.2+. Curious hackers will then find out what libraries the application actually depends on and they will install those libraries and run it on the distribution that they like best.

  • must be .2 or something then...just took a quick look at the webpage for a version number...they seem to use the date right now as either the build number or the version number
  • Would you take a nice lampshade produced by slave labour? Cos most people usually say they wouldn't.
  • BTW, on a LAN, just use +connect at the command line and then use slist to list all the LAN servers. (+connect'll dump you into the console as the command won't work, I think it needs to be the last option. It's just to skip the menus.)

    Then just use connect n (where n is the number of the server, or IP/IPX addy).

    Also, I've found the control under Counter-Strike to be horribly sluggish, making it nearly unplayable. Maybe it's improved some. I'll have to get the latest CVS when I have the time...

  • Counterstrike runs right now on Wine if you have a 3dfx board (for GLIDE) or an NVIDIA or other XFree 4.x DRI supported board for OpenGL. There are some glitches, but you can work around most of 'em and the framerate's fast and furious :)

    This page has full details:
    http://eg4l.sourceforge.net/ehl/

  • But you see, I don't WANT lampshades of human skin. Why should I want it. What is the advantage? I, personally, wouldn't ever buy it. But the ideology of it? I don't care if the lamp I buy is made by maoists or christian funamentalists. I just don't care.
    ---
  • i would have to say that M$ Office is the greatest priority.

    I hate saying that.

    The problem is that microsoft has its hooks too deep into the world. Two examples:

    1) After my graduating last year, I accepted a job and was asked to fill out a background check form. This was e-mailed to me in M$ word format.

    2) I recently bought some Palm software online with a 30 day money back guarantee. I just put in my cc# and downloaded it. To return it, however, I had to sign a document promising that I had destroyed the software and mail/fax it to them. This was e-mailed to me in M$ word format.

    Luckily Kinkos has M$ Word. And shame on these two companies for using a closed format.

    But the point is, Linux users need M$ word. Not because it's better. Not because they may want to use it (and i'm sure some do, but that's personal preference).

    Linux users need access to M$ word because other people don't realize or care that .DOC is not standard.

    But this is not the *only* thing we need.

    While we are doing this, we need to remind everyone who e-mails us a .DOC that it is a nonstandard file and to send .RTF, .HTML, whatever, instead.

    wish
    ---
  • you won't convince Windows users to come to the Linux/BSD,etc. World if you don't offer them a way to execute any of the application they are used to.

    *sigh* I think I need to put this statement in my signature: I am not interested in convincing anyone to use anything. What does it matter what people use? If they are stupid enough to use winDOS, let them. Our objective should be to maximize freedom and quality, not to convince people to use our stuff. Everyone says derogatory things about "marketdroids" but if you look closely you'll see that the function of marketing is to convince people to use your product. In other words, you've become marketdroids without even realizing it.

  • Since this topic is about people's opinions on wine: My favorite game is Tribes. My favorite operating system is Linux.

    The two don't mix, much to my dismay. (T2 will have a linux client, yay)

    Tribes will run under wine, with no noticeable loss in performance. I'd love to ditch windows... but... It locks up after anywhere from a few minutes to an hour due to some obscure error. (locks hard, can't get back to system without reboot, can't even kill it from telnet)

    Once they get the bugs worked out, wine will be an EXTREMELY important piece of the picture for people as they start migrating from windows to linux, and don't want to leave their favorite win32 programs behind.

    I love the desktop option, I'd love for a full implementation of the windows desktop and program menus, so I could ditch windows completely. as others have pointed out here, for most people, it's not realistic to be completely without a windows box at this point. Wine could change that.

    Wine is great, I suspect it's going to get better, and during the coming period when the general public begins to understand the advantages of Linux, it will play an important role in making migration easier.

    Finally, If any of the wine devs read this, thanks for your work. I, for one, appreciate it and look forward to the upcoming versions.

    ________
    1995: Microsoft - "Resistance is futile"

  • at it's worst, it's an excuse for game coders to say "bah - they've got wine, why code fo linux now?"

    That logic would apply to any software, not just games. So why have Wine at all?


    ---
  • Wine provides exactly that, called winelib. IIRC, "emulatation" is only a minor application running atop this Win32 API to translate the exact format of Win32 calls to Linux calls. The real work is in the library. And it allows you to recompile a Win32 program for Linux.
  • I personally do it a different way. I have my absolutely kick ass box (well, it was kick ass at the time I bought it, but you know how those things go) and instead of having either a purely Windoze system (for games, that's it), or a pure Linux system (for EVERYTHING else) I have two hard drives, and a removeable drive bay. When I feel like working with a good operating system or programming or just learning something new, I toss in my Linux hard drive, and when I want some mindless entertainment by way of games, I power down the computer, swap out my Linux drive for my Windows drive, reboot and have at it. It's a very simple and rather inexpensive solution.
  • If you've already got Windows installed to run Office, why would you boot up under Linux to play the games in WINE that you could otherwise run under Windows?

    Office support in WINE is much more important than game support because Office is much less likely ever to be ported. Games are being ported to Linux all over the place. But for Microsoft it simply is not strategic to port Office while their application and OS interests are interdependent.

    Additionally, Office is used to access and create content that is often used in other places. So for a Linux user, switching to Windows for Office is much more of a hassle than switching for games becuase of the need for interoperability between apps.

    OT: It occurrs to me that Microsoft could harm Linux development by releasing their own distribution. They'd grab a large market share immediately because of their name, and then how many developers would balk at writing free code for MS to make money off of?

    -- ShadyG

  • An OS is a tool. (Score:4)

    by HardCase ( 14757 ) on Thursday July 06, 2000 @10:51AM (#953365)
    The right tool for the right job, right? Game support with WINE would be nice, but I think that it's just asking for trouble since coding compatibility with Microsoft graphics APIs is like shooting at a moving target (and an erratically moving one at that!)

    Why not just consider an operating system as a tool? That's what I do. If there is something that I need to do that I can only do (or more efficiently do) with Windows, then I do it with Windows. If Linux works better, then I use that. If Be did the job better, I'd use it, but so far that isn't the case.

    A much better idea is to advocate genuine binary compatibility, and that's the best approach with games. Sure, Office on WINE is a great target since business software stays (relatively) static for long periods of time. It's probably a pipe dream to envision Office for Linux anyway. Of course, Office on Windows is maybe more efficient.

    Maybe it's time to shed the idea of avoiding Microsoft products at any cost and consider operating systems for what they are: a tool to get a job done.

    =h=

  • Probably not. But that has nothing to do with the ideology of the slave involved but a slave being invovled. I guess that seems a subtle distinction. I guess the fact that a software tool's source is open is a characteristic of that thing, like the fact that the tech support is good (that would go into my decision to buy it). But the licensing of that source code or what they do with that source code really doesn't concern me, I guess that is what I'm getting at
    ---
  • OK, Corel is using WINE to port their Windows applications to Linux, and Free Software projects could easily do the same. On some level, that's good; easy porting between the two platforms.

    But why do it that way? If I was going to do the kind of work that needed lots of translation from one OS to another, I would use Cygwin or some similar thing. It's much more mature, and uses the much more sane UNIX interfaces, then translates them to Win32, not the other way around. Do we really want to do it the Corel way, as some people suggest? WINE might be good and all for binary emulation, but if you care so much about porting, it seems to me that you should write UNIX first, then Windows.

  • Shifty APIs (Score:3)

    by dpilot ( 134227 ) on Thursday July 06, 2000 @10:52AM (#953372) Homepage Journal
    I'd like to see some commentary in WINE development about the shifting nature of the Win32 API(s), and what that has cost them in development time and effort. Clearly there must be SOME reason that WINE doesn't just run Win16 or Win32, but instead has Win31, Win95, Win98, and at least one WinNT switch values.

    I know, if I'd like to see it, do it myself.

  • Re:GAMES! (Score:4)

    by overshoot ( 39700 ) on Thursday July 06, 2000 @11:01AM (#953374)
    Why should WINE be used to run Office? It requires the X86 architecture, so, it's not going to run Office on a computer that CAN'T run office. I think that GAMES should be first. If you want to run M$ products, you might as well run them under their operating system.

    • Two reasons:
      • No matter how the crew tries, there will be a lot of games that suck regardless.
      • The game API functions are quirky, and put the minimum of overhead between the application and the hardware.
      • Hardware actually is designed with the Windows API in mind, so sticking X11 or any other layer in there is going to cost double.
      • Games are extreme performance stressors, so any of these added costs will be noticed.
      • Finally, too many games still expect unrestricted access to the hardware, and giving Wine kernel access is a price a lot of us aren't willing to pay.
      • Office, on the other hand, is for better or worse
      • the Windows app.
      • What with all of its backdoor system accesses and the APIs that it exports, if the Wine crew can get it working well they will have indisputable claim to have nailed Windows workalikehood.
      • MICROS~1 will have an absolute bitch of a time revving Win32 to break Wine without cutting their own throat.
      • It's the #1 obstacle to acceptance of Linux on corporate desktops.
  • Now there's someone who doesn't have mortgage payments to make!

  • Re:Shifty APIs (Score:5)

    by Ian Schmidt ( 6899 ) on Thursday July 06, 2000 @11:04AM (#953377)
    The main reason is that apps sometimes pull weird tricks for specific OS versions. The command line winver switch in Wine doesn't actually change the behavior of anything, it just changes what value the GetVersion() APIs return to Windows apps. The best example of this is Internet Explorer 5.0. When running on Win95, it uses the well-documented (if gross) VxD calls to allocate and manage memory blocks. When running on Win98, the identical binary uses some undocumented features that Wine doesn't support yet. Result: -winver win95 displays pictures on web pages, -winver win98 doesn't :-)

    As an aside, this sort of thing is basically a symptom of the fact that MS is now held hostage by their own massive installed base. Before you laugh, read on ;-) It *doesn't matter* what APIs they add/change in Win2000, because all software for the next several years (including Office) will still need to run on MS operating systems all the way back to Win95. This is great for Wine, since it lets it catch up with MS while Windows is essentially stuck in a rut.

    MS got away with "out-innovating" OS/2 on APIs in the early 90s because Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were just starting to take off, so there was no legacy software to worry about breaking. But as early as Win95 they started doing things like not fixing documented bugs in APIs because it would break existing application software.

    It's actually funny to think about - their own monopoly is strangling them :-)
  • I like the /. icon [slashdot.org] (not logo) better for the story positings, personally. Not because the Wine logo [winehq.com] is bad, but because it does not capture the essence of what Wine is all about (running "Windows" programs). To someone unfamiliar with WINE, the /. icon is self-explanitory.

  • Re:Doing things the NT way (Score:5)

    by Ian Schmidt ( 6899 ) on Thursday July 06, 2000 @10:53AM (#953383)
    WineLib is getting to be very well-proven indeed. In addition to the port you've heard of (Canvas), there's a whole slew of others in progress covering everything from text editors to CAD packages. Deneba's success with Canvas pretty much opened the floodgates based on traffic on the mailing list and news group, and personally I think it's all good :-)

    As for NT, the reasoning is much as you say. It's both *far* cleaner than Win9x (no 16-bit code, no VxDs running wild in kernel mode) and generally far better documented. Plus, MS's stated goal is to eventually merge all their OSes onto a NT/2000 based kernel. It hasn't happened yet (Windows ME, shipping this fall, is still DOS-based) and there are rumors of ANOTHER DOS-based Windows after WinME, but if you believe MS it will eventually.
  • I'm quite happy to report that I've been successfully running Quicken 99 in Wine for over a month now. It's been a long while since I've had to reboot into Windows, and that's a refreshing feeling. Financial software is the biggest thing missing from Linux's software suite, and Wine allows me to still use my OS of choice while continuing to use my financial software of choice.

    Good work, guys!

  • Not really. Outlook is a mail application that has its own seperate protocols and ability to use exchange mailboxes and the like. It also does the whole personal imformation management thing. Anyway. Anyway the issues wioth office api's and the like for Word, Excell and the gang are similar, but Outlook requires a whole new set of protocols and Microsoft nonstandards to be accounted for. Also take into consideration that many sites use Outlook and heavily depend on it, while Staroffice would satisfy there basic personal productivity needs.

  • Why use it? (Score:3)

    by davebooth ( 101350 ) on Thursday July 06, 2000 @11:07AM (#953395)

    Because it works and I cant be bothered rebooting my workstation every time I need a program that I dont have for any platform but win* - Where good alternatives (with either converters available or file-compatibility) exist for linux I use those instead but wine fills up the gaps by letting me use the win* programs. It works the other way around too - if I have the main workstation booted into windows for any reason but I need access to a utility I only have under linux I'll telnet to the other linux box to do it rather than reboot it to switch OSes. After all, in windows it will crash soon enough without me going and telling it to reboot! ;)

    The better wine gets the closer I can get to my ideal of never having to boot windows at all (at least on my machine - I'll still have to support it, my family still has a couple of windows users in it)
    # human firmware exploit
    # Word will insert into your optic buffer
    # without bounds checking

  • games on Wine would be a step back (Score:4)

    by ledbetter ( 179623 ) on Thursday July 06, 2000 @11:08AM (#953396) Homepage
    While the idea of playing windows games on a linux box with Wine sounds like a good idea at first, when you really think about it there are some consequences.

    1. Having Wine fully handle games would just be one more reason for game developers to not bother putting out a Linux version of their games.

    2. I doubt that performance under Wine would be up to the levels of the game running under Windows. While the symbolic FU to MS may be fulfilling (as in "Ha, I'm running a DirectX game on Linux!"), frame rates that don't look like flash cards are even better!

    The argument can be made that this goes for Business type applications (like Office) too. While their performance would be less degraded than that of a game, it's just another exaultation of the Win32 platform. It will encourage people who were thinking of making a linux version of their program to keep it all in Win32 and then just use Wine to port it over. Still a Win32 app! And however good Wine is, it will never be as good as Win32 on Win32. That's just a fact.

  • In France, home of the world's best wines, most producers expect a fair year, not as good as to produce classics but good enough to keep tradition intact.

    In California, on the other hand, the wine will probably keep its distinct "american" mood. Californian wine will keep being the (upper/middle) middle-class favourite all around the world, due to its cheaper price and sweeter flavour (when compared to its French counterpart).

    The "niche" wines (Italian, Portuguese), of course, will always have a place in the drinker's heart and this year will be no different from the others. A Port after dinner is still a distinctive mark of good taste.

    As for the less famous wines (Chilean, German come to mind), they will keep being what they are, poor but sometimes acceptable substitutes to the real thing, their consumption growing steadly with globalization and the access to new markets.

    Disclaimer: all above information was made up on the fly.
  • You can't rack up giant uptimes if you dual boot though.

    Also, dual booting is annoying. My system has a some flaky hardware (although you can't complain too much when it's free) that makes booting a real chore. Plus you have to stop everything you're doing to reboot the machine, which is annoying if you only wanted to run the Windows program for some particular value that you need to stick in some mostly filled out form on a web page, etc...

    Plus, Windows is not small, especially when you consider how many people still have 2 and 4GB drives, and most of that drive space is wasted for the 99% of the time you're running Linux/*BSD/BeOS...

    As for #1, I doubt most people are trying to run Windows apps under Wine on mission critical 4 9 servers. I doubt many of those servers even have X running. The best part is the fact that Wine is the only application I've ever run into that will crash XFree (It usually only take about 8-10 hours in Wine to make my X server unstable, which is easy to do when I go on a Stars! binge :)

  • Re:You call THAT a logo? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06, 2000 @11:50AM (#953412)
    A naked chick. No, naked twins.

    Scratch that! Naked Triplets!

    With big breasts!

    But then, I recommend that as a logo for anything.

  • Re:question: (Score:3)

    by carlos_benj ( 140796 ) on Thursday July 06, 2000 @11:16AM (#953413) Journal
    being that there are many anti-windows people here on slashdot, my question is "is porting the windows API to linux a noble cause?"

    The absence or presence of people who feel a certain way shouldn't dictate what is and is not a 'noble cause'. Slavery persisted in the US and Britain for many years because there were a number of people who were anti-abolitionist. Of course, the consequences could be far more costly than your average flame war.

    Actually, the animosity some feel toward Windows doesn't necessarily extend to say, Quicken. Dropping the stumblingblock of 'limited apps' by allowing access to software that users already know can only strengthen Linux's position.

    I don't necessarily agree that Office should be the priority since there are other, stable alternatives with similar features/functionality. I can process words and spread all kinds of sheets on my Linux box, but need better personal finance software. Last time I tried Quicken under WINE it only worked 'sort of'. I've also tried moneydance and another (don't remember the name) package to no avail.

  • Interesting, but how do we (the Linux community) avoid doing the same thing?

    Until now there have been few apps, now we are starting to see the floodgate open (first the Database Servers, then the Desktops, games and office suites, etc.). As more and more commercial apps are being produced for Linux, how do we not fall into the rut Microsquish did?
  • as was recently written up here [slashdot.org]

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