Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Sun 5th Mar 2006 01:54 UTC, submitted by Dylan
Windows This is release 0.9.9 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on UNIX. New features include better web browser support, recursive directory change notifications, debugger improvements, and lots of other bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements.
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progress and regression
by MamiyaOtaru on Sun 5th Mar 2006 02:36 UTC
MamiyaOtaru
Member since:
2005-11-11

2005 07 is the last release I can get to run WinMX. WinMX is an old app, and not mission critical for anyone, but it's symptomatic of the sisyphean task the Wine devs face. It makes me leery of trusting Wine with important apps and yet at the same time I feel like standing up and cheering the devs.

Maybe this will be the release that works with WinMX again (without any magic required). There's always that hope driving my upgrade cycles ;)

RE: progress and regression
by Dark_Knight on Sun 5th Mar 2006 03:02 in reply to "progress and regression"
Dark_Knight Member since:
2005-07-10

Re: "2005 07 is the last release I can get to run WinMX. WinMX is an old app, and not mission critical for anyone, but it's symptomatic of the sisyphean task the Wine devs face. It makes me leery of trusting Wine with important apps and yet at the same time I feel like standing up and cheering the devs."

Except in the case of P2P software there are alternatives such as Azureus, KTorrent, LimeWire, etc. I would rather Wine developers focus their resources and time on applications such as Premiere Pro 2.0 and ZBrush 2.0 where there is no Linux port offered by the developer.

Edited 2006-03-05 03:08

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RE[2]: progress and regression
by JLF65 on Sun 5th Mar 2006 03:30 in reply to "RE: progress and regression"
JLF65 Member since:
2005-07-06

Also, sometimes the break is elsewhere. For example, WinRAR quit working with WINE due to increased checking in X11. WinRAR tries to open an offscreen bitmap to hold toolbar icons; it tries to make it huge in case the person (idiot) adds an insane number of icons to the toolbar, so it asks for a bitmap just under 33000 pixels wide. X11 only allows bitmaps to be 32767 wide since all coordinates in X11 are a 16bit word.

Now under old versions of X11, it never checked if the bitmap asked for was too large - it simply made it. New versions check the boundaries and fail if they are greater than 32767. So now when WinRAR tries allocate its bitmap, it fails causing WinRAR to fail where it used to work.

The WINE folks and the XOrg folks have been arguing over who needs to fix what. The XOrg folks think that the WINE folks should make some kind of work-around for huge bitmaps, and the WINE folks think the XOrg folks should allow bitmaps to be created at any size.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 5