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Winex 3.0 Released
Posted by
michael
on Thu Apr 17, 2003 06:42 AM
from the getting-my-hopes-up dept.
from the getting-my-hopes-up dept.
syntaxman writes "You'll find the information thread here, or see the release notes. The pre-packaged files (rpms,debs,tarballs) are available only for subscribers."
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Alright (Score:2, Funny)
A full DirectX Win32 wrapper? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A full DirectX Win32 wrapper? (Score:2)
I'm sure with a few thousand subscriptions they will have enough money to hire a few more programmers.
Re:A full DirectX Win32 wrapper? (Score:5, Insightful)
You have a choice: emulate Windows (forever), or seek native software ports. I've chosen [idsoftware.com] native [unrealtournament2003.com] ports [bioware.com], because I think that is the better long-term solution. But if you just can't stand to give over your EverCrack until they provide a Linux client... that is your choice. Just be aware I won't be sympathetic to complaints about the dearth of Linux game ports.
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Re:A full DirectX Win32 wrapper? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:A full DirectX Win32 wrapper? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, it's not as if Linux doesn't [linuxgames.com] run [happypenguin.org] games [linux-games.com] without WINE.
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Re:A full DirectX Win32 wrapper? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A full DirectX Win32 wrapper? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think we have to be fair in acknowledging that Loki had no market because there aren't enough gamers using Linux. This is changing, albeit slowly, and I've seen a number of friends and colleagues consider the switch from MS to Linux. The can consider such a move largely because of WineX. Once there is enough gamers using Linux and willing to use Linux as a primary platform for games then ports will make sense.
It think it would be interesting to get so
Re:A full DirectX Win32 wrapper? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, not really. First you would have to throw away all your existing games when switching and then Loki just offered 20 or so games out of several 100 current titles.
If you play 10 games and only one game is not ported by Loki, you will not make the switch, period. Only Wine with near-100% compatibility will allow the masses to switch.
Re:A full DirectX Win32 wrapper? (Score:4, Funny)
Do you even know what the acronym Wine stands for?
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Re:A full DirectX Win32 wrapper? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:A full DirectX Win32 wrapper? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A full DirectX Win32 wrapper? (Score:5, Interesting)
If we have binary emulation of windows apps more people will use linux, and if more people use linux more companies will port their product to native linux. but for the user winex is a really good thing, some companies just can't spend money on a linux port for this few thousand sales atm.
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Native ports wont happen until (Score:5, Interesting)
Theres enough Windows users to buy those Native ports using linux.
How do you attract Windows users? With games. You have to start somewhere, you need a market of gamers before you can sell games. Heres how it can work, use WineX to bring tons of new games, get maybe a million gamers to switch to Linux.
Now you have a million linux gamers, little independent Linux development companies can sell games, let the big companies sit on the fence while the little linux companies make plenty of money selling games, and suddenly the big companies will see how much money they could be making and start to port.
This is the only way, you need games to attract gamers, and you need gamers to attract games. So bring games, increased gamers = increased games.
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There is Another Way (Score:3, Insightful)
There are projects [clanlib.org] out [libsdl.org] there [opengl.org] that aim to provide a platform-independent method to produce commercial-quality games. There is no real reason that a company has to struggle with long, difficult ports of system-oriented code if they use the platform independent OpenGL (and other libraries) instead.
Now, how do you convince developers (or, more importantly, their managers) of the value of this approach? I don't know, because to a manager market flexibility is just Yet Another Buzz
Re:There is Another Way (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Native ports wont happen until (Score:3, Insightful)
*Their development cycle is slow.
*I couldn't any games out of the box.
*I couldn't find any tried and true instructions to get a game running under linux in their forums ( or anywhere else on their web site, for that matter..
*Their forums are very disorganized, trying to search them is a lesson in futility. And when you do find some information, it's always a hodgepodge
of '
Re:A full DirectX Win32 wrapper? (Score:3, Interesting)
From the first page:
Any Windows replacement must run Windows applications
The dependency is not so much on Microsoft Windows as it is on Windows applications. Boxed off-the-shelf applications, games, in-house applications, vertical market applications, are what prevents users, companies and governments from switching to another operating system. Even if 90%
Comment Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
30% Why would I want to run windows anyway ?
20% Its dreadful they limit it to subscribers for the RPMs
20% This great news, it means I can run X, Y but not Z
10% It sucks because Z doesn't work
10% If you want to run Windows you should install windows.
Re:Comment Summary (Score:5, Funny)
5% Complaining about how your numbers didn't add up to 100% (even though it doesn't matter).
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good or bad? (Score:4, Interesting)
I am just wondering if we will ever get the performance we get with games under windows. I know that they have a couple games ported, but in games like FPS where framerates are so important. I think that if Wine can perform in this area, we would see a lot more conversions to linux. Games sell computers, think of the first application that you baught, I know I didn't buy a word processor first(Links386 to be exact).
Now flame me if i am wrong, but doesn't wine work on some sort of Virtual Machine, thus adding an extra layer between the hardware and the code?
In some cases we get better (Score:2)
It depends on the game, certain games can actually be faster than they are in windows, it all depends on the game. Some games will be slower.
What matters is, we will have all the Windows games that matter. This means we win. What I'd like to see transgaming support next is AsheronsCall.
You have the tools to build a linux compatible AsheronsCall here AsheronsCall server emulation [uas.ath.cx]
All you have to do is vote on it.
Re:good or bad? (Score:5, Informative)
No.
http://www.winehq.com/?page=myths
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Re:good or bad? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have one machine for development, one for games, and one for CAD. The problem is that the ideal machine for games is not necessarily the ideal machine for development or CAD. With 3D CAD software and animation and such, I need graphics cards with more capabilities than your average ATI Radeon or nVIDIA GeForce. But games don't run well on cards designed for the CAD market. And for development, I want all the tools I love to use, and many of them either suck on Windows or don't have Win32 ports at all (Quanta+ comes to mind as one that doesn't have a Win32 port). Plus I'm working on a few Linux-specific projects, in addition to the PHP stuff I'm working on.
So my suggestion: one machine for development, another for games. Surak's rule of hardware: Hardware is cheap.
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Re:good or bad? (Score:3, Informative)
Flame On!
But sadly no. Wine ( as the acronym goes : WINE IS NOT AN EMULATOR )
It is the libraries and system support that allows linux to direclty execute PE executables, and link them to libraries which have the same interface as Windows itself.
It is a layer in the sense so is QT, GLIBC, etc.. and other libraries that provide support for application services on
Re:good or bad? (Score:3, Informative)
With most games yes.
> I know that they have a couple games ported
More than just a few games work in winex
> like FPS where framerates are so important.
Yep.. games based on slightly older engines, such as the quake3 engine (rtcw, moh, jk2, sof2), and Halflife (Counterstrike)... pretty much run at the same speeds in WineX and WIndows already.
What would be interested to see is how new games such as bf1942
Re:good or bad? (Score:3, Informative)
I guess it depends on your definition of modern graphics cards. The aforementioned games are all based on the Quake3 Engine.. which is over three years old now. On modern video cards (as in... GeForce2 and up, or original Radeon and up), all of the games above should run smoothly, unless you are running 1600x1200@32 bit@4x FSAA or something crazy like that.
Anyway, these games pretty much have FPS caps where it's not
Re:good or bad? (Score:3, Informative)
Make no mistake, while Wine is getting damn good it is not perfect or even practical for all Windows software. Some software will probably never run under it, most will not run without some tweaking, so don't expect it to. OTOH, if you tried Wine even as late as a fe
Good effort, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing happened to OS/2 (Score:5, Interesting)
OS/2 only lost because they didnt try. I didnt see a single OS/2 on any computer except for maybe IBMs computers and eventually IBM even took it off their own computers.
So if OS/2 did bad it was because of IBM, I had wanted to get OS/2 Warp and an IBM but the cost was ridiculous, this is why I never purchased it and its the same reason I never owned a mac.
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Re:Nothing happened to OS/2 (Score:4, Informative)
OS/2 only lost because they didnt try. I didnt see a single OS/2 on any computer except for maybe IBMs computers and eventually IBM even took it off their own computers.
IBM certainly tried with OS/2, but not until it was too late.
OS/2 version 1 was too slow for the machines of the day, and shipped without a GUI partially because Microsoft fscked IBM over on their joint development deal. IBM pushed this version, but got laughed at because nobody wanted to run it.
Version 2 was much better, and had a good GUI but developers and IBM marketing really didn't get behind it, feeling burned from Version 1.
Version 3 (The first OS/2 Warp) was even better, it was faster, the machines were faster, the GUI was really polished, critical apps had native versions, developers started getting interested, IBM's marketting really pushed it well. OS/2 Warp sold more retail copies in its first year than its contemporary, Windows 95. The problem was, that was the year that the heavy duty Windows OEM licensing really started, OS/2 was flooded out of the market by computers shipped with Windows 95 preinstalled.
By Version 4, IBM knew that OS/2 really couldn't compete in the wild against Microsoft's OEM deals, so they focusesed their marketing on their core strength, corporate sales, and did reasonably well.
So if OS/2 did bad it was because of IBM, I had wanted to get OS/2 Warp and an IBM but the cost was ridiculous, this is why I never purchased it and its the same reason I never owned a mac.
While IBM certainly holds most of the responsibility for OS/2's failure, Microsoft shares some of the blame too, for backing out of their codevelopment contract, and anticompetitive OEM deals.
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Everquest in Winex (Score:3, Informative)
I hope vendor do provide linux client in future besides windows there are a lot of us who plays purely in linux.
In related news (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:In related news (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:In related news (Score:3, Informative)
The workaround is only partially effective. you will still run into (at least) the incredibly annoying message about there being no "wineserver-socket" filey-thing. You will still have to manually rm -rf the damn thing after/before every individual run of winex to get your app working. So, if you use winex to install a game and don't start the game from the install screen (if it has such an option) then you will first have to go to the .transgaming directory and rm -rf the wineserver-socket dir and then
Re:In related news (Score:3, Informative)
You can get a pre-packaged (unofficial) binary for RedHat 9 here: http://newrpms.sunsite.dk/ [sunsite.dk].
Or install from source.
Or even switch distro :) (says while writing this on his RH8 box and as a packager of Wine for RH8 on sf.net [sf.net]).
dont get your hopes up (Score:2, Informative)
Yay (Score:4, Funny)
This is nice and all, respect to Transgaming.
But I just have to vent my concern over the lacking win64 support. The bit-gap between native win32/win64 and wine32 might be the final nail in the coffin for linux on the desktop.winex no substitute for windows (Score:3, Interesting)
Win32 port (Score:5, Funny)
*Anxiously waiting its release*
Re:Win32 port (Score:3, Informative)
Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
I look forward to the day when Wine is only for... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I look forward to the day when Wine is only for (Score:4, Informative)
It's good for developers to support ANYTHING besides Win32, but I'd rather have developers starting with Linux, and then porting to OSX, UNIX, and Windows - for the simple reason that OSX is VERY sweet, but doesn't encourage cross-platform coding (at least from what I've seen of their dev tools). Same with Windows. People who write for Windows tend not to care if it runs on any other OS, their focus is only on their own system, and this closes down their future options should they change their mind, or if they are successful and want to expand. My experience is that this is true with Macheads as well, and Apple Corporate doesn't seem at all interested in bringing OSX apps over to Linux, just getting them from Linux over to OSX....
It's best to use strictly open standards which allow for easy cross-platform portability if you're at all interested in supporting other OSes. I've talked to guys who said "If I had only thought of that BEFORE I wrote the whole thing in VisualBasic (or whatever)..." Being able to write your code using open tools and thus support three or more platforms from basically the same codebase (like Opera) is very very cool.
But yeah, OSX is definitely a VeryGoodThing. It's nice to have Apple join the party, and it's interesting to watch how Apple Legal interacts with the OpenSource movement. Apple has a lot of strengths and a lot of things to bring to the table - if they decide to get into the game in a big way and deal a few hands themselves. Hopefully, they keep heading in the "right" direction (openness and sharing). They may get a gold star from the teacher yet.
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Internal Server Error (Score:3, Funny)
Or not not emulating IIS, since Wine Is Not an Emulator?
Don't get excited, still "broken" (Score:4, Insightful)
with any distro using glibc-3.2.2 (which is just about any new distro release). If you are using older distros, you may be happy and fine with it but if you use RH 9.0 or Mandrake 9.1 (or any other 3.2.2-based distro) you will not be pleased.
This isn't a winex problem, but a problem that affects ALL wine variants whether from WineHQ, Codeweavers, or Transgaming. The glibc developers have happily gone off and broken software everyone uses (again) for no real good reason. I imagine they change things here and there just so they have something to do or simply to try something to see how it works. LEAVE IT THE FUCK ALONE! IF IT AIN'T BROKE DON'T FRICKIN' TOUCH IT!
Sheesh.
glibc 2.3.2 issues are fixed with 3.0 (Score:4, Informative)
Take care,
-Gav
--
Gavriel State, CEO & CTO
TransGaming Technologies Inc.
gav@transgaming.com
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WineX - Not as evil as you think. (Score:4, Insightful)
If a company can use WineX for their game, they won't bother making a true native port.
Here's the deal: If a company cares about it's audience, and a significant number of it's audience are running Linux, they are not going to want to use WineX. Why? Performance. Higher hardware requirements on games means you lessen your audience, so it's in a game developer's best interest to make the game as fast as possible, which means NOT using WineX. In addition to a game developer having to make their game run efficiently to reach more players, they have even more incentive to have their game run well due to competetion. If company X and company Y both have a FPS Doom 3 clone, and company X created a native binary while company Y did not, whose game will Linux gamers choose (assuming the games have comparable gameplay/fun factor)?
What if a company doesn't care about their Linux audience and decides to use WineX? Well, we lose nothing. If they don't care about their Linux audience (because it's much smaller than it's Windows audience or whatever) then chances are they weren't going to do a native port anyway. For example, it's obvious that Blizzard has no intention of porting to Linux in the near future. If they decided to create a Linux 'port' of World of Warcraft using WineX because it was extremely cheap, it doesn't mean that WineX prevented a native port. We lost nothing, but gain a title which is likely to attract many more Linux gamers, which will increase monetary incentive for companies to port their games to Linux. An example of a company that could have used WineX to port their game, but didn't, would be Bioware. They obviously care about their Linux audience (late port issues aside.)
To sum this point up, while WineX could cost us a native port or two, it will increase the Linux gamer audience to the point that it is significant, which is usually what is required for companies to even consider a native port of their game. And companies that do choose WineX during the Linux gaming movement's infancy due to monetary reasons will be reconsidering, because the savings from using WineX will be overshadowed by the return from reaching more gamers, and outselling a competetor whose game is less efficient because it uses WineX.
I'll be buying Neverwinter Nights from Tuxgames.com when it's stable under Linux, I'll be buying Doom 3 from Tuxgames, when it's released, and I'll be buying any other native Linux ports that I can get my hands on. I will also continue to be a Transgaming subscriber so I can play Battlefield 1942, the current game of the year (although, since BF1942 didn't run before, I had to dual-boot, which means I am registering my hits to websites as a Windows user. Is surfing under Linux important? Web hosts know the percentage of Windows users to Linux users. [google.com])
WINE is Peculiar (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine that some guy has grown up with an oppressive, domineering, butt-ugly, and mean mother.
One night, he decides to do something rather independent -- something he knows that she would not approve of: He hires a hooker.
When she shows up at the hotel room, he hands her some of his mother's clothes to put on, douses her with his mother's perfume, and then he straps a mother mask onto the girl before he does his business.
Hey guys, if you're going to use Unix or Linux, use Unix or Linux.
You're creepin' me out.
--Richard
Re:Great news! (Score:5, Informative)
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