Submitted by After roughly 12 years of work, the Wine Project is about to take its widely used Windows translation layer to a place it has not been in all that time: beta. Wine Project leader Alexandre Julliard, who has worked on the software nearly since its beginning in 1993 and maintained it since 1994, said in an interview yesterday that the beta release is “a matter of days away.” He has since updated that forecast and said it would be released on Tuesday, October 25th.
After 12 Years of Work, WINE is Going Beta
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Can’t wait for the release! My experience with wine has been 50/50 working. Some apps work, others don’t some work half way. If they can get Wine to work 100%, I’m ditching microsoft for good
The only reason I stay in WinXp is for Half-life2/DoD:S, Dreamwever/Flash, and other games. IF they can all run SMOOTHLY in unix (OpenBSD for me
) or linux, I think the linux community can take their first offensive to the Microsoft camp.
Who knows, maybe in 3-4 years kids will be learning of the dismal failure of the Microsoft Corporation via some New Linux platform at school….
There’s a lot of work ahead for the Wine group though….
–ZaNkY
I’d like that prophecy to come true
Silly f–king kids.
Without Microsoft, chances are that you wouldn’t BE on your comfy little PCs at home talking on all these nice forum sites.
I was just as comfortable, maybe even more, on my amiga in 1992. The change has been evolutionary not revolutionary.
Get a clue; he’s a troll. Don’t fall for it…
im the boogy man
Kids! Don’t be like Johny, don’t fall for trolls.
“Without Microsoft, chances are that you wouldn’t BE on your comfy little PCs at home talking on all these nice forum sites.”
Uh, huh. Would that happen to be the Microsoft that almost missed the Internet? Or the Micro-soft that would still be doing stop lights if it wasn’t for IBM? News for you. There were home computers before there was a Microsoft.
“Uh, huh. Would that happen to be the Microsoft that almost missed the Internet? Or the Micro-soft that would still be doing stop lights if it wasn’t for IBM? News for you. There were home computers before there was a Microsoft.”
Totally agree with you there. The reality is that Microsoft have done nothing more than copying (or in most cases buying) other people’s ideas and bundling them into their monopoly, and delivering them through back door deals with hardware vendors so people had little choice to experience the true innovation which is their competitors.
Anyway, WINE is an awesome achievement, however I can’t help but to think that once Vista is out, it’s all back to square one.
“Who knows, maybe in 3-4 years kids will be learning of the dismal failure of the Microsoft Corporation via some New Linux platform at school….
”
Not if it takes another 12 years to get the other 50%.
You know how they say the last 20% is 80% of the project? We may be waiting a loooooong time…..
Wine does not implement a directX compatibility layer, you’re concerned mostly with WineX.
“Wine does not implement a directX compatibility layer, you’re concerned mostly with WineX.”
WINE will play many DX games like World of Warcraft and older games like C&C better than Cedega infact.
At least you never get tired of being wrong.
Who knows, maybe in 3-4 years kids will be learning of the dismal failure of the Microsoft Corporation via some New Linux platform at school…. :
hmmm…Seeing as the main use of WINE is to run non-free windows software (eg. Dreamweaver, MS Office) that are dependant on Win32 API, which is controlled by Microsoft. This doesn’t really make it a Microsoft killer at all.
– Jesse McNelis
“Who knows, maybe in 3-4 years kids will be learning of the dismal failure of the Microsoft Corporation via some New Linux platform at school….
”
I already use Linux, exclusivly, at school…..we have 2 rooms with about 35 computers each, plus about another 100 spread around the rest of the school all run from thin clients.
Why do we need the demise of Microsoft to enjoy the benefits of Linux???
Can we all just calm down. Please !!!!
Wine going BETA does not mean that you will be able to run windows applications, necessarily. It’s more of a cross platform develoment environement. That’s what becoming BETA.
I can write an application with the Wine environment as the target and be able to run it unaided on an Win2k machine and be able to run the same application on a Wine environment without modification.
Running windows applications flawlessly is still another ball game, that will need several progressive iterations of the software before it can be dependant of the windows binaries/libraries themselves….
It makes me sad that I couldn’t get Wirsbo Advanced Design Suite to work under Wine. Could’ve saved WADS of cash. (That was a pun, if you didn’t notice.)
Something about VisualBasic6/VisualBasic.NET and ODBC wasn’t playing right, and the darn thing would crash on startup with a stupidly vague error message.
Makes me sad, because it means I’ll have to build some Windows boxes at work. And we’re mostly a Linux shop. And Windows is trés annoying to adminstrate.
Try running the app on a seperate machine and export it to the X desktop (use RDP or something else). (May not be acceptable in this case, but it is an option in many cases.)
That’s a novel ideal, but it still requires a Windows machine. And, therefore, a Windows license.
I like to use either rdesktop (http://www.rdesktop.org/) to get windows on linux or freeNX (http://freenx.berlios.de/) for linux on windows.
— “Why fight over using Windows or Linux; Use both.”
You could try contacting Codeweavers and try to find out how much work it would be to get your apllication to work with Wine: http://www.codeweavers.com/services/engagements/kick_the_tires/
I’m 29 now.. At this rate by the time I retire it will be a final release. I guess the next generation will have to take up the next version.
Wine will likely reach the point of running all Windows 9x/NT/XP apps sooner than DUKE NUKEM FOREVER being released
I’ve said it before and I say it again. People are shitting their pants as the launch date for Windows Vista gets closer and closer. These folks have been doing Wine now for about 12 years. And now, as we are getting near to the point for their work becomes irrelevant, if its not already, they decide Wine is at beta level. This should serve as a lesson for all of us on what on not to do in software development: minimize copying and maximize new work…
Yes, because if anything, the history of Windows shows us that such enormous transitions are both instantaneous and complete. Vista will be out next year, and the very next day, ever computer will be running it, and all that existing Win32 software will magically dissapear. Please! It was only in this decade that we managed to finally get rid of DOS!
On top of that, what exactly do you think all that managed software is going to run on? The .NET VM is just a user app, one running on (you guessed it) Win32!
Vista will be out next year, and the very next day, ever computer will be running it, and all that existing Win32 software will magically dissapear.
It was a different thing when win16 and Dos are replaced by win32. New computers bought are in more number than the computers existing then. So the transition is very easy. Do you think someone will buy a brand new PC and Vista just to test Vista?
On top of that, what exactly do you think all that managed software is going to run on? The .NET VM is just a user app, one running on (you guessed it) Win32!
You know this. Compared to WINE(Alpha after 12 years), MONO(reaching 1.2) is complete in many respects. When MONO(1.2 with WinForms) is out it will run all the 100% .NET apps even before Vista is out.
New computers bought are in more number than the computers existing then.
What exactly is this sentence supposed to mean? If anything, the total inertia of Win32 is greater than the inertia of Win16/DOS, because the installed base is even larger!
So the transition is very easy.
Transitions are never easy.
Do you think someone will buy a brand new PC and Vista just to test Vista?
That’s irrelevent. The question is, once Vista is out, will people immediately upgrade? The whole NT thing suggests that it’ll take years before the majority of people have ugpraded. The Vista transition will likely take even longer, since XP -> Vista brings far less user-tangible benfits than 9x -> NT/XP did. There will be many apps to run on WINE for years to come.
You know this. Compared to WINE(Alpha after 12 years), MONO(reaching 1.2) is complete in many respects. When MONO(1.2 with WinForms) is out it will run all the 100% .NET apps even before Vista is out.
And how many .NET apps does the average person use every day? Zero! Nada. Zilch. You’re assuming that app developers will suddenly all start coding for .NET (and also never use native Win32 services). This is a ridiculous assumption. Indeed, the big apps, like Photoshop and the like, precisely the ones that people generally want to emulate, are exactly the ones who won’t rewrite in .NET!
He’s a troll. With or without a SWF implementation, Mono is still incomplete when not even considering all of the platform bindings people would actually use if anyone developed desktop software with .NET. When considering them, you have to wonder where exactly a Managed DirectX is going to spring forth from. Which cavity is that going to magically fly out of nowhere to go into Mono? Because that’s what the world will look like if Microsoft is ever successful in pushing managed development onto its ISVs.
And how many .NET apps does the average person use every day? Zero! Nada. Zilch.
Rayiner, I’ve always respected what you’ve had to say on this board, but this time I thoroughly disagree.
The average home user? Probably not many. That being said, .Net has an enormous presence in IT dept’s though…I’d say 90%+ of the folks working in a fortune 500 company use a .Net app of some sort (more than likely an asp.net app) on a daily basis.
I see this recurring theme around here all the time…people think if there isn’t a “killer” desktop app written in (fill in the blank) language, that it’s not important. VB/Java/.Net are very well entrenched in business scenarios…just b/c there isn’t some sort of desktop application written in said languages doesn’t mean they aren’t viable.
Yes, when discussing Mono vis-a-vis Wine as it pertains to Vista, what you should really be discussing are webapps. Not only webapps, but webapps constrained to Fortune 500 companies. If you were being any less topical I’d think you were starting a new discussion.
So am I to believe that Mono only runs on the desktop? Last I checked, .Net runs on both the server and the desktop, and therefore has just as much relevance in the IT realm as it does anywhere else. WINE will not survive w/o a presence in corporate IT…that’s my point. And it simply cannot get a foothold in IT as long as MS reigns supreme.
No, the point is that webapps are not pertinent to this discussion featuring “Vista,” “WinForms,” and the relevance of “Wine” in the face of Mono and Vista. Wine’s success or failure will have rather little to do with ASP.NET And trotting out webapps in a willfully-small domain to complain about your gripes with other discussions to flog on his wording is a total straw man.
Haha if that’s what you think you are seriously mistaken my friend. If wine is to be a serious contender, it must take into contention anything/everything that is windows related…that means the Vista API, .Net…everything.
Haha if that’s what you think you are seriously mistaken my friend. If wine is to be a serious contender, it must take into contention anything/everything that is windows related…that means the Vista API, .Net…everything.
No it doesn’t at all. All WINE has to do to be relevant is to run popular windows-based apps like photoshop, office, flash, etc. Some of these apps people can’t live without. When it comes to smaller apps there are usually excellent, and often superior, free software alternatives.
If that’s all Wine aims to do, then why not simply use other free alternatives? If they just want to relegate themselves to the desktop only, then so be it.
My point is this: Photoshop/Flash/[insert typical desktop application here] pale in complexity compared to distributed enterprise applications that most businesses have in place. If Wine is to be taken seriously (meaning adoption by businesses), then there needs to be guarantees that those types of applications will run seemlessly on top of Wine as well. And there is a TON of legacy MS code out there that barely even runs well on Windows…so who’s to say Wine will even work in those scenarios? To be taken seriously, Wine must work in all scenarios that Windows currently works in…it’s not just about running the desktop app du jour.
That has to be the most intellectually-bankrupt response to “your entire post has nothing to do with this conversation” that I’ve seen all day. Well done.
For your next trick you’ll expound on why unless Wine implements PHP the impending release of Vista will herald its irrelevance because 90% of all Fortune 500 companies use it to implement webapps. Thank you “Jayson Knight” for pointing everyone in the right direction. If that makes no sense at all, that’s good because you don’t.
New computers bought are in more number than the computers existing then. This clarifies the sentence
Microsoft grew up during the 1980s and 1990s, when the growth in personal computers was so dramatic that every year there were more new computers sold than the entire installed base. That meant that if you made a product that only worked on new computers, within a year or two it could take over the world even if nobody switched to your product. That was one of the reasons Word and Excel displaced WordPerfect and Lotus so thoroughly: Microsoft just waited for the next big wave of hardware upgrades and sold Windows, Word and Excel to corporations buying their next round of desktop computers (in some cases their first round). So in many ways Microsoft never needed to learn how to get an installed base to switch from product N to product N+1. When people get new computers, they’re happy to get all the latest Microsoft stuff on the new computer, but they’re far less likely to upgrade. This didn’t matter when the PC industry was growing like wildfire, but now that the world is saturated with PCs most of which are Just Fine, Thank You, Microsoft is suddenly realizing that it takes much longer for the latest thing to get out there. When they tried to “End Of Life” Windows 98, it turned out there were still so many people using it they had to promise to support that old creaking grandma for a few more year
I agree with you with the .NET apps thing. Majar apps are never rewritten because you have a brand new technology. But newer apps have a chance. I have already seen few **SMALL** apps all over the net who say that the apps run on .NET1.1 or Mono(I dont remember the sites)
The .net Runtime Environment is already being done mostly by Mono. It’s a LOT easier to reimplement as it’s published. And a lot of .Net applications run a lot better than some of the best running Wine programs (not really Wine programs, but I don’t know what to call them).
I think you will see a lot of applications move over the WPF and .Net much faster than you’ve seen them move from DOS to GDI. It’s a lot easier transition.
And, AFAIK, you only get access to WPF within .Net. Of course, there will probably be a horrible 15 year long stream of half-breed programs which will need some evil coersion via Wine+Mono to get them to do anything.
I think the Wine project is fast becoming irrelevant. The Linux/BSD platform is getting large enough to attract a few applications, and with Mono/.Net the costs of starting cross platform are lower. That doesn’t mean every program is ever going to run, or even 5 will do it “overnight” but it means that there’s less need everyday for Windows to get different kinds of work done.
The front page of OSNews was just splattered with something about a standalone database app in OOo for example. I’m sure it will be more pathetic than Access is, but nonetheless it will help a percentage of people out if they choose to leave the Wintel platform behind.
Or it will further convince people to switch to Unix instead of upgrading to MS Vista
actually it becomes even MORE RELEVANT.
You don’t understand all the uses of computer. MANY COMPUTERS ARE INTEGRAL PARTS OF MANUFACTURING MACHINES. Upgrading the OS and custom application means buying a new machine. Many of these machines are specialized and there are no competitors in the field.
Linux + Wine + The application would save a lot of money if the company network gets upgraded and you don’t have to upgraded your capital expensed hardware as well.
And now, as we are getting near to the point for their work becomes irrelevant, if its not already, they decide Wine is at beta level. This should serve as a lesson for all of us on what on not to do in software development: minimize copying and maximize new work…
Wow…this shows a complete lack of understanding anything. The problem with Linux is NOT that we need Win32 compatability. The problem is convincing people they don’t have to break compatability with their old software to move over. It doesn’t matter if Windows Vista comes out tomorrow.
The strenght of wine is that now when you tell a business to come over to linux, we can run some of their old software until they build/buy a new native linux tools while dropping MS. I mean if you had any idea how massive the Win32 api really is you wouldn’t be talking. Add in years of fixing broken functions while hacking in workaround for specific apps who are EXPECTING the broken functionality even after it’s fixed and you have a really big project. Seriously, if you’re not a programmer don’t talk about development you sound like an idiot.
“I’ve said it before and I say it again. People are shitting their pants as the launch date for Windows Vista gets closer and closer. These folks have been doing Wine now for about 12 years. And now, as we are getting near to the point for their work becomes irrelevant, if its not already, they decide Wine is at beta level. This should serve as a lesson for all of us on what on not to do in software development: minimize copying and maximize new work…”
This is what I call I troll. LOL. I had a discussion with a person who came to me all excited because he saw a video of vista capabilities. Then I showed him couple of MAC/Linux thing. He could not show me anything new. Just like Apple says: “Redmond start your copy machines”.
Since WINE tries to implement Win32 APIs under Linux, in my opinion it is simply reverse engineering and that is a problem. Only a fews ago there was a court ruling which created problems for all reverse engineering. So far Micorsoft has not taken any action because most programs do not work under WINE. But if its quality improves and it becomes a real threat then I won’t be surprised if Microsoft sues the WINE project and shuts it down.
Here is a quote from an article on NewsForge.com
“Blizzard Entertainment, maker of the popular Warcraft and Diablo videogame titles, handed opponents of reverse engineering perhaps their most potent weapon to date last month when the US 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in its case against open source software developers who had created BnetD, an application that emulated Blizzard’s Battle.Net and let gamers connect with each other outside of the company’s servers.”
Three things.
1) Wine
2) Samba
3) They both have been at it for years with nary a peep from MS. A judge would rightfully ask “why did you wait so long with full knowledge”?
4) I wouldn’t get too carried away with that Blizzard ruling. A lot of court cases are very specific (Intentionally so). One could argue the Think Secret/Apple case was some kind of blow against journalism if one just glanced through the case.
Not a problem. Simply move the Wine project, in it’s entirety to a non DMCA complying country, like say…France. Then stick your finger up at the damn yankees and tell them to fsck off. This is why copyright, software patents, DRM and the DMCA are all BAD. Get rid of all of them and we’ll have some true competition and innovation in the market.
Dave
Or move to a country that openly supports open source, like Brazil.
Simply move the Wine project, in it’s entirety to a non DMCA complying country
The DMCA is not the problem here as it explicitly excludes from it coverage rverse engineering for the purpose of computer interoperability
Reverse engineering isn’t (necessarily) illegal in the USA. What’s illegal is circumventing copy prevention, which is what the court ruled that Bnetd did.
WINE is an implementation of the Windows API on Linux. That API is a fully disclosed spec because third parties need it in order to write programs in order to run their apps on Windows. So, reverse engineering isn’t an issue here from what I can tell.
As to legalities, if Microsoft were to ever go after Wine/Codeweavers, Wine/Codeweavers could easily take Microsoft to court for violation of the Sherman Antitrust act concerning “tying” (i.e. you must only use Windows OS in order to run Windows programs). But I’m no lawyer…just repeating what I read in an interview with Codeweaver’s CEO.
From the Codeweavers’ Web site:
Emphasis mine…
/Quote/
Q. Can Microsoft sue CodeWeavers or its customers for copyright infringement or reverse engineering, either for Windows or its Windows applications such as Microsoft Office?
A. No. The underlying technology utilized by CodeWeavers to enable Windows software to run under Linux is an open-source technology called Wine. Wine has been developed completely independently, with no reverse engineering and no access to Microsoft source code. The Wine source tree, with a complete revision history since the inception of the project, is freely available to the public, and will substantiate the claim that Wine was created as a strictly separate entity from the Microsoft proprietary code base.
/quote/
Quote from Codeweavers’ web site:
Emphasis mine…
Q. Can Microsoft prevent CodeWeavers’ customers from running Microsoft applications on Linux?
A. No. Microsoft’s end-user licenses do not preclude operating their applications under other operating systems. Were Microsoft to attempt to prohibit such usage, by requiring that Microsoft products be run only on the Windows OS, they would be in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The Sherman Act precludes making the usage of a non-monopoly product dependent on the purchase of a monopoly product. Microsoft has been convicted of monopolist practices under the Sherman Act regarding their operating systems. As a result, they cannot legally make Microsoft Office dependent on having a Windows OS license.
Okay now…everyone breathe a little easier…
“Quote from Codeweavers’ web site:
Emphasis mine…
Q. Can Microsoft prevent CodeWeavers’ customers from running Microsoft applications on Linux?
A. No. Microsoft’s end-user licenses do not preclude operating their applications under other operating systems”
I hope you are right. But the above is probably from before the Bnetd decision, and what can prevent Microsoft from changing their EULA to preclude other operating systems? Anti-trust law, as some have suggested? We already know how that went the last time it was used.
I hope you are right. But the above is probably from before the Bnetd decision, and what can prevent Microsoft from changing their EULA to preclude other operating systems?
Even if you consider an EULA a contract, you have to realize that contracts cannot contain arbitrary statements. For example, I could have an EULA on this post that says “by reading this post you are agreeing to give rayiner $10”. However, if I actually brought you to court over it, no judge would actually rule in my favor!
For example there would be a wine16 for 16 bit win3.1 apps, wine9x for win95-ME apps, and wineNT for NT/2k/XP apps. Of corse they would share code that was compatible across all versions.
THe reason I think this would help is that wine developers would only have to focus on getting compatability for the win version they are working on, without worrying about breaking compatiblity with other versions. With windows vista around the corner wine is going to have another hurdle.
To me it seems like we would have wine16 in final, myabe 9x in neer final and NT in alpha/beta this way. of course this is in an ideal situation with the developers sticking to one version.
IS there some reason why they don’t or is this how they do it in the background and just combine it all with the release?
for anything outside of notepad or calc it’s useless.
Bullshit. I quite happily used it over the summer to run a jet engine simulator for a project. Some of the menus were a bit weird, but it was entirely usable. Saved me quite a few trips to the lab, and dozens of hours in front of a Windows machine.
Agreed, I’ve used wine to run several windows applications, it’ll run quite a few programs from office suites to games.
1) The DirectX compatibility layer is part of Wine. The Wine project has reimplemented most of DirectX ; for example Direct3D is implemented as a wrapper through OpenGL. WineX/Cedega adds relatively little to Wine actually.
2) Reverse engineering is perfectly legal, except in a few countries. Reverse engineering is a necessary thing if you want to maintain competition and prevent monopolies to happen.
Beta in respect to what version of windows?
One of the main reason that wine being forever-alpha is because it is playing constant catch up with newer windows.
Are they saying that they have now implement *most* of the winxp APIs? Or may be older Win9x API?
If it is still in a flux like the last CVS snapshot, I don’t see why would it qualify as a beta.
Great news. I expect to see Wine 1.0 sometime around 2011. In the meantime, the maintainer’s employer – Crossover – will have released 8 or 9 more versions of their commercial release.
Just being open isn’t good enough if you expect the community to take you seriously. You actually have to make stable releases. So far the only stable releases have been via Crossover Office, admittedly a fine product, but a commercial product for paid customers only. The community has been left with no stabilization and only raw snapshots. That leaves us with a body of raw LGPL code that meets the definitions for both Free Software and Open Source but still manages to leave most users empty handed. “Stable code for paying customers” and “barely usable unstable code for the community” is not an acceptable business model. Lack of visible results also seriously harms developer interest, making development even slower. Solution: the project has to start making some goddamned releases, just like all viable projects have to make some goddamned releases.
The glacial pace toward 1.0 so far gives me no reason to believe that the “beta” label means anything meaningful, other than that we have another 5 or 6 years to wait before stable code emerges. But I guess we’ll see.
If backwards convicted monopolies didn’t hide their source code and not play well with others (like the ugly rich mutant basement dweller on the block who wants to rule the world type) people wouldn’t have to piss away time trying to run it on different OS
The future is open source, humans working together, not people stepping on each other’s back to make a buck
People who defend convicted monopolies reveal themselves every day for the soulless, anti-human disgusting reality tv show watchers they are. These are the type who look into the toilet and see the rim as a halo on their head surrounding their reflection. They can’t stand the thought of people helping others and contributing to future generations for free.
Unix has been around forever, yet by default WindowsXP can’t even see unix/linux partitions, how stupid is that?
Hooray for wine! Hooray for FOSS! Hooray for HUMANITY
I wrote an open letter to Michael Robertson a couple years ago when he was so ambitiously pushing Linspire’s full support for Windows applications…I feel it’s relevant in this case, so here’s the link:
http://jaysonknight.com/blog/archive/2003/12/19/187.aspx
It’ll never fly, though you have to give them kudos for trying.
Did he even know about that? I see nothing there to indicate that he read it, replied to it, or even knew it was there.
I hope you at least e-mailed the guy to let him know, people don’t just read something because it appeared on some corner of the internet that’s still unknown to them.
Of course I emailed it to Robertson. Of course I never heard anything back either. I actually emailed it to him numerous times…what’s funny is Lindows (as it was known then) wasn’t even in Alpha stages (just a concept he had come up with), yet their systems picked up my email as a request for support (for a product that wasn’t even out yet!), so I always got a canned response back.
For the record, I was genuinely interested in Lindows at the time, and I feel the questions I raised were quite valid. Of course Lindows ended falling very far short of their promises, so I quickly lost interest. As far as Wine is concerned, I’ll believe it when I see it.
I hope that ReactOS was helpfull…
http://www.reactos.org
I’m hoping that since the two projects seem closely related and share code, the one goin beta will have a positive boost on the other.
I’m looking forward to being able to replace Windows with ReactOS, once it reaches good compatibility with Windows 98 it’ll be good enough for my needs; even if that takes a while I’m willing to wait. Windows 98 is still good enough for most home users today, albeit that won’t run the latest MS office or Visual Studio, but then that is what OpenOffice.org and mingw are for 🙂 . If/when it has driver compatibility that will really make it attractive.
okay..good on you guys. Personally, I think wine is a bandaid. It allows us to use stuff that we wish ran native, and thats okay for you guys that use macromedia flash, photoshop etc. Personally i would rather just not use windows apps. If the big software houses want us to use their apps, let them spend the money and port it to GNU/linux systems.
okay..good on you guys. Personally, I think wine is a bandaid. It allows us to use stuff that we wish ran native, and thats okay for you guys that use macromedia flash, photoshop etc. Personally i would rather just not use windows apps. If the big software houses want us to use their apps, let them spend the money and port it to GNU/linux systems.
The point of Wine is that it becomes possible to integrate those last few ‘missing’ programs…not to stop development on ports.
* Some apps won’t be ported.
* Some apps will be ported, but not soon.
* Wine can be used to port apps — even to non-x86 platforms.
Costs are an issue. Create the market with Wine, show that there is interest, and native ports will follow.
Note: Before you drag up ‘it did not work for OS/2’ I’ll agree on OS/2 being damaged by the Windows compatability layer they had. The situations are entirely different here, though.
1. IBM promoted that everything would run; a better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows. For a few years, they were right.
2. IBM did not have rights to the code; Microsoft did. Opps!
3. When MS changed the APIs, IBM had the choice of abandoning MS’s code or reinventing it from scratch.
4. In the case of OS/2, OS/2 wasn’t established and even IBM wavered or abandoned it at times.
None of these apply to the Wine project;
1. The Wine project only cares about specific apps running, not everything.
2. The Wine project wrote the code themselves; MS can’t take it away.
3. If the APIs change — and they are — they will be addressed on an app-by-app basis.
4. The Wine project is supported by quite a few groups — Codeweavers and React OS as two very interested and dependent groups. As Wine is an open source project, as long as people and entities are interested, Wine will continue to be developed.
Besides, if you can get legacy programs working under Linux or BSD with Wine, you can move off of Windows and don’t care about the current twists in the Windows API wars.
ReactOS, are working with wine project. Changing patches, and knowledgment. And yes ReactOS will be a future (1 – 2 years).
I don’t tihnk that an API, can be patented. Because of that microsoft never gave any step. And because it has profital company backing up a project.
And you trolls should be happy, because windows aplications finally can be used without native windows. I sincerely do not understand, why are they so pissed of. If you want to use windows, use it. Yesterday i have installed a machine with Windows XP Pro SP2, after i downloaded 60MB of patches. Then stupidily my network drivers wouldn’t work, get new drivers(solution). But windows now can find my NIC. Full reinstall needed, not every time happens but for god sake windows still have bugs, and drivers are still pain in the ass. If we don’t like we don’t buy it.
And yes, probably if reactos get too close from full api compatibility microsoft will launch processes just to stop development, it’s a world of money and self-interest.
I’ve been using Wine and/or Crossover for a couple of years. I’ve managed to get Wine installed, but it didn’t run anything reliably enough to be a real way of using an app you cared about. On some systems, when I installed it, it wouldn’t run properly at all, and I could never get to understand why.
Crossover always installed, and always ran, but the range of apps it supports is rather limited (understandably). Its not till you use them in detail that you see this, though. Its like, you install Filemaker, and everything seems fine, until you discover one of the parts – think it was to do with field creation display – doesn’t work right. But if it is a real alternative, it all has to just work. By comparison, Virtual PC did do everything, but it’s so expensive, you’re better off just getting a cheap Windows box. If you think about it, XP OEM is now not much more expensive than Crossover.
My bottom line in the end was get a KVM and a usb stick for file transfer. It just works.
Wish them well though, and I’ll give Wine another try as soon as they pronounce it beta ready.
If we could get Nero Recode and AnyDVD working under WINE, then I would be able to completely ditch Windows on my one remaining box (oh, tell a lie, I have a dual boot laptop too, but that’s just for visiting clients sites).
DVD Shrink and DVD Decrypter work after a fashion, with a lot of hacking, but they’re both dead products now, plus the latest WINE/Crossover doesn’t seem to be able to use the SPTI driver anymore (even in nt40/win2k mode).
Of course they work under VMWare, but that still requires Windows and really does work the processor hard emulating the drives, it’s a lot slower than native.
Linux really doesn’t have anything near the quality of these 4 products, vobcopy, Perl-Video-DVDRip etc. just don’t come close.
I guess we can always hope that Recode gets ported to Linux like Nero Burning ROM did.
The October 19 version is still teh best in my opinion. I wonder how this will be.
I feel kind of silly for being so impataint waiting on a game for 3 years, hehe.
Well, I never thought WINE would get to that stage. Well done guys – you all have the patience of a saint.
People may laugh, but despite Microsoft pushing .Net (hopelessly in many cases, and .Net relies on Win32 in any case) the usage of the Win32 API is going to be around for a long time to come. There are a lot of systems out there that will continue to use it for ages, and when they stop or re-write their systems they’ll probably just move to another platform. Having an open source Win32 layer will help immensely (and yes, Wine is not an emulator!). Remember all of those twenty year old mainframe applications people didn’t think would exist now? They do, and that’s the situation Microsoft is in now.
It is going to be really interesting, and potentially funny, to see just how backwards compatible Vista will be with existing applications. There is a lot of what Microsoft considers to be old technology that they want to get rid of starting with Vista, for various reasons (DRM, making more money, DRM and making more money).
In 1998 I was a Windows user preparing to switch to Linux. I was told Linux had all the apps I needed and the missing ones could be run using Wine. If Solitare and Office 95 were the only missing apps back then this would have been correct.