Guest post by The folks at WineHQ are gearing up for the second release of Wine. “The 64-bit support is now more or less complete, and we have most of the fancy new icons, so it’s time to think about the next stable release. Unless some major problems come up, 1.1.44 will be the last of the 1.1.x series. The next release will be 1.2-rc1, which will mark the beginning of the code freeze. This should result in a 1.2 final sometime in June.”
Does it mean that the emulator is considered stable, full-featured, i.e. near-perfect? I don’t use Linux so I don’t use Wine, just curious.
This release does not mean that Wine is fully featured or near perfect. However 1.2 will be a good choice for people who have got a particular set of applications working and do not want to deal with regressions that might occur on the twice monthly development releases.
I personally use Wine for running games that were previously bought when running Windows in the past. It works well with most of the games that I have with a little tweaking.
The below link might be worth viewing:
http://appdb.winehq.org/
Its feedback from the Wine community on how Windows applications are working.
Well I think that for the past 4 years wine has been perfectly capable of running most of my applications. I have been using it for 9 years I think, but in the beginning it was just unusable for any serious work. For some time I used cedega to play games (worked for some, but not all games), then when my license expired I just used wine and it turned out it worked better than it’s commercial counterpart.
Also because of useful things like winetricks and playonlinux wine has become a perfect tool for new users as these tools take a lot of stress out of using wine.
Wine is pretty amazing, to me. When I was running linux for a few months last year I did manage to get several games going in it, including Steam / VTMB and it was quite playable. Could also use other Windows apps. I was pleasantly surprised. Before that the last time I tried Wine (years ago) it seemed like a pain in the behind to get set up and to install/configure apps… these days it seems almost automagic.
Anyway, kudos to the Wine team. They’ve worked long and hard and their product is looking pretty darn good.
wine is far from finished, of course it never can be.
it means “ok folks this is kinda good to give out to people, let’s not change too much for now and make it look good”
after 1.2 is out they will continue
In addition to what the others said (and at risk of being pedantic), WINE is not an emulator.
It is an emulator, it just emulates things like directx rather than emulating hardware.
You’re wrong, it’s an API reimplementation, according to your logic mono is an emulator of .net
WINE is a set of Windows libraries for Linux. So WINE doesn’t emulate DirectX any more than QT emulates Linux APIs.
Furthermore, WINE’s support for DirectX is very poor at the moment. So if you plan to run any Windows games via WINE, you’re better off using OpenGL.
I wouldn’t call WINE’s DirectX implementation “poor”, there has been huge progress at WINE’s DirectX implementation.
Many recent titles that are DX work perfectly in WINE.
A few examples:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLMZVCw73xg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeTp4Ol5Z5Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ147bcoLi0
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=19376
I’m not saying DX implementation in Wine is perfect either, it has a long way to go… but it isn’t “poor.”
Edited 2010-05-18 08:10 UTC
Thanks for the correction.
My personal experiences unfortunatly differ. Much of DirectX felt very poor in comparison of how well much of the other libraries in WINE perform.
But I appreciate I’m now just talking about my own anecdotal evidence so perhaps I was a little too quick and harsh with my criticism.
You wrote it wrong
Wine Is Not an Emulator
hehehe – I actually didn’t even notice I spelt the name out until after I posted.
Actually, while Wine isn’t an emulator per-say (It simply exports Windows API’s [E.g. Win32, NtXXX), it does -emulate- the different VM memory model of Windows under, say, Linux [1]. This alone makes it an emulator.
– Gilboa
[1] http://www.winehq.org/docs/winedev-guide/x2853
Freezing the code doesn’t mean that. Every time a
project want to make a release, they “freeze” the code.
The freeze means no new features/functions are added
so they can concentrate on fixing any bug they can
find in the actual functionality.
Once the new release is published, the development
resumes as always, adding new things.
The thing that is lacking for me is communications. I haven’t been able, as a forinstance, to get serial port working under Wine. It would be nice if this is improved in this version. USB would also be nice….
You’ll be happy to know I’ve been working on USB support for Wine (http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2010-April/087351.html), but it’s a lot of work and won’t be ready for 1.2.
wine users are those who can’t accept the reality that linux apps are sucks…
The big question is…. will I still have to run winecfg and change compatibility mode to NT4.0 to be able to run DVD Decryptor?