This whitepaper by Codeweavers COO Jon Parshall and CEO Jeremy White takes a detailed look at the potential value of WINE as an ingredient in a strategy for enterprise migration from Windows to Linux desktops. The paper itemizes the requirements for enterprise desktop migration, examines a range of available tactics, and then suggests strategies for making the journey in ways that are “pragmatic, economical, and customer focused,” the authors say.
The role of WINE in migrating enterprise desktops to Linux
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Eugenia Loli
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The authors fail to mention the other approach that can be used for legacy applications that cannot be ported. That is to run them in Windows on a server and remotely access them using Rdesktop for Windows Terminal Services or the Citrix Linux client for applications run on the server using Metaframe.
This approach does have the disadvantage of per user licences for the application, but it can allow for a uniform adoption of Linux clients (fat, thin or in between) in the enterprise.
CodeWeavers should release, if they haven’t already, a plugin to Visual Studio that will show at the time of development (either through syntax highlighting or compile time), whether code will work under WINE. That will create the awareness and perception at the time of development and allow them to target a cross-platform Win32 api instead of just a Windows one. That would give some incentive to work around the potential incompatibilities and allow *other people* to do more of the work instead of constantly chasing incompatibilities.
IS that crossover/wine just isn’t mature enough. There are several known issue that just aren’t going away. At my company we considered a variety of solutions for linux desktop migrations and in then end we decided that crossover was *not* an option.
Why?
1. File locking does not work on cifs shares. This has been a known bug in wine for a long time and by itself makes wine a non-option. If I open a word doc and someone else opens a word doc and we both edit it and there is corruption (this is actually what does happen) then people will go beserk and IT guys get fired (as they would deserve if they had rolled wine out).
2. Annoying little UI bugs persist even in “gold” applications. For example, if I have word focused and and then do alt-tab to switch to another window, then do alt-tab back then hit q (for whatever reason), gues what happens? The word closes. Why? Because the control key got stuck when I did the alt-tab and unfocused word. So hitting q is hitting ctrl-q. Bad bad bad.
These bugs have literally been in the codeweavers bugs database for *years*. I posted asking them when these were going to be fixed and got blow off answers. When I looked deeper and saw these long unresolved threads in their database I got pissed. Only then did they explain to me that it was the fault of the samba/cifs developers and that I should talk to them. I explained to them some basic rules of business economics and ethics and how *they* should go and talk to the samba developers themselves and get this fixed ASAP with some $$ incentive and that was the last I heard from them. Whatever.
In any case, this crap about wine adoption is just fantasy. Every wonder why you still always hear stuff about people needing an outlook equivalent to migrate? Well if outlook and word really ran well under wine then you wouldn’t hear that stuff would you? For that matter, you wouldn’t hear that stuff if Evolution connector actually worked either, but that is another post.
agree with your tone completely.
when I tried to receive help about a WINE issue I went to their irc channel (after googling) and got scolded (nearly) for not using the latest wine version. After installing it and still seeing my bug they chalked the problem up to gentoo developers (my distro).
Sorry, but WINE has always been crap on any system i’ve tried to run it on.
Its interesting to note tho, that codeweavers starts making more noise as they begin to realize that their business model is failing due to *better* cross-platform development. Their entire business model relies on poor development strategies, which is bound to (and is currently) improving dramatically.
Well, i think WINE is really cool, but migrating from Windows to Linux (expecially for newbies) is not so simple.
I belive that ReactOS could be the really alternative to MS operating systems…
http://WWW.REACTOS.ORG
– as they tell us on the front page of http://www.reactos.org/ – so don’t expect Reactos to work miracles.
Crossover Office works for me – for the supported applications (and a couple of others). I don’t use it with CIFS.