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Shouldn't have to click a link to find out what it is. It could easily be summarized in one brief paragraph: what it is, and why it's in the news today.
I've wanted to say something about this issue a few times recently, but didn't want to appear ignorant; maybe I was the only person on the planet who didn't know what Bordeaux is.
OSNews could have simply given us a brief explanation like a line or two detailing what this product is rather than only liking to their web site. Right after "The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.0 for Linux today." They could have added: "Bordeaux is..." etc.
If the name doesn't ring a bell, at least tell us what it is. Same here, I have never heard of this distribution before.
Edited 2010-01-30 23:28 UTC
The same issue from 6 months ago
http://www.osnews.com/story/21734/Bordeaux_1_8_for_FreeBSD_Released
I even commented the same complaint
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?370611
Perhaps Bordeaux releases should include a descriptive sentence at the beginning.
Edited 2010-01-31 23:12 UTC
So is this just another thing like playonlinux?
I think it makes no sense to package all these separate components into one package, the whole point of a distro is to offer these things through some package management system. So why would a company want to offer (soon outdated) software for packages that are available in every distro. Shouldn't they just rather offer a frontend for these programs instead of bundling them?
Linux builds Wine and has all the tools necessary out of the box (most of the time). But when you move to BSD or Solaris its not that easy.. Solaris for example, large parts have to be installed from the contrib or dev repository's. And if you want new libs like mpg123 you have to compile and install them from source as OpenSolaris ships version .59 when the latest version is 1.10.0 and Wine requires 1.8.1
Same goes for BSD, for Example FreeBSD ships a version of Flex 12 years old...
see : http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=143351
Mac OSX is the same, everything you need just inst in place. So you have to bundle it or ask your end users to go and compile and install it their self.
We file bugs and try to improve the build environment on all the platforms we support.
Cheers,
Tom
From what I know about the three ways of running Windows applications on Linux:
Wine by it-self targets the hard-core Linux crowd who loves thinkering with the command line and system settings.
Cross-Over Office (Code Weaver) targets the sophisticated user who prefers Linux yet has to deal with Windows for a living. Their various white papers aims at enticing the corporate/enterprise IT. Their Bottle concept (refinement over Wine) is interesting in that one could develop end-user applications and VB scripts for the various versions of (e.g. Office 2003, Office 2007, and soon Office 2010) and test them on a single machine without re-booting and without interferences between the versions.
Bordeaux targets the intermediate user - no thinkering required as it is packaged for specific Linux distributions.
Wine by it-self targets the hard-core Linux crowd who loves thinkering with the command line and system settings.
What? What tinkering, what command line? You install it, then you start it from menu, then you install the apps...and they either work or not. There is no tinkering or command line work.
Hello,
Bordeaux is Wine and many of the tools it depends upon bundled with a simple GTK front-end. In the 1.x release we only had a front-end to Vanilla Wine, like Wine-Doors, PlayOnLinux, Q4Wine etc. etc..
The problem with this approach is you have to focus on one single Wine release preferably Wine 1.0.1 (stable) the only problem is almost NO one now uses Wine 1.0.1 and everyone uses it seems a different development version. And anyone who knows anything about Wine knows what works in one release isn't guaranteed to work in the next release (regressions).
So with 2.0.0 and onward we are going to bundle our own Wine release with Bordeaux. This helps us on many fronts, for one we can add hacks, workarounds, patches whatever you prefer to call them to our release.
Second thing is we know what version/build people are using so it helps us tremendously as far as support goes.
Third thing is we can bundle our own tool set and have a unified package.
Bordeaux runs on Linux, Solaris, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, PC-BSD, Mac OSX at this time. And we plan to have a release for StormOS in the near future.
The front-end as ive already pointed out is still just a simple GTK app, but now that we have most of the grunt work on the back-end done we plan to clean it up and add more features to the front-end in version 2.2
Our cellar manager, e.g wineprefix manager will also see some improvements in our next release.
Bordeaux cost $20.00 for Linux, BSD, Mac and $25.00 for Solaris at this time. But we plan to increase the price to $25.00 across the board when 2.2 ships... Just to let everyone here know.
Also, I posted some screenshots here : http://www.wine-reviews.net/wine-reviews/bordeaux/bordeaux-200-for-...
Office 2007 and Left 4 Dead 2 in Steam
Cheers,
Tom
Thanks for the post. My only concern about Bordeaux is that there is less of a community compared to Wine and Cross over.
For example the application database:
http://appdb.winehq.org/
http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/
Its hard to tell what you are paying for without there being a Demo version or in-depth reviews of the product (At some point I would like to write a review of Wine for OSnews).
Edited 2010-01-31 22:39 UTC
I'm tempted at looking at Bordeaux in the near future if I ever move from Mac over to OpenSolaris but the big question is the support policy regarding future updates, the quality of the office support - for me I'm quite happy to be at least one release behind.
Btw, I am not too clued up on things but is there an ETA on Wine 1.2 being released? there is a heck of alot of work being done, I just hope that OpenSolaris going to be a first class citizen with full support rather than the bastard red headed step child of the family.
"the big question is the support policy regarding future updates"
You get six months of updates with your purchase.
Here is the Wine 1.2 bug list :
http://bugs.winehq.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_statu...
Cheers,
Tom
Hello,
Just so everyone knows we have given back 100% of our changes to WineHQ and to all the other tools projects we use.
Your correct, CodeWeavers is a much larger player then what we are. They employee many of Wine's core contributors and give back most of their work to Free Wine.
So if your not happy, or don't see what you need in our product I suggest you go to CodeWeavers and take a look at their offerings.
Cheers,
Tom



