Wine 0.9.44 Released

jshriverWVU writes to let us know about the release of Wine 0.9.44. Wine is a free implementation of Windows on Unix/Linux. New in this release are: better heuristics for making windows managed; automatic detection of timezone parameters; improvements to the built-in WordPad; better signatures support in crypt32; still more gdiplus functions; and of course lots of bug fixes.

Wine 1.0?

[lobiusmoop (305328)]

What ever happened to the impending release of Wine 1.0? I seem to remember it was coming very soon 6 months ago. It would be a great publicity boost for the software if it reached that point.

Re:Wine 1.0?

[alba7 (100502)]

Imagine Duke Nukem Forever running under Wine 1.0 on GNU Hurd.

Re:

[Circlotron (764156)]

Wine 1.0 needs a working fusion reactor to operate it, hence it will always be 6 months away.

Wine 1.0 would be a great mistake!

[z0M6 (1103593)]

At least at the moment. It would be like marking a half-built car (WARNING! car-analogy) as ready for use. I think it would be pointless to push such a product because it is simply not ready yet. Users would also have higher expectations of the product than what should be realistic. That said, Wine has come a long way. Playing opengl games works great. The same can't be said for directx. Some installers does not function at all. And there is a lot of other issues as well. Wine 9.64 seems more realistic than

Re:

[AJWM (19027)]

I think it would be pointless to push such a product because it is simply not ready yet. Users would also have higher expectations of the product than what should be realistic

You missed it. Think about it, this is a Windows (non-)emulator. Releasing a not quite ready for primetime version as 1.0 (or even 2.0) fits perfectly with providing the whole Windows experience.

How is this /.-worthy news?

[ketilwaa (1095727)]

Wine releases every 14 days, see http://winehq.org/ [winehq.org] Are we now going to see these kinds of news on /. every time there's a trivial update? I can think of a couple of apps and releases that are a little more important...

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[QuantumG (50515)]

The fact that they have 5 major improvements every 14 days is kinda impressive.

But yes, good point.

Re:

[QuantumG (50515)]

Wine isn't an app.

What are you running under Wine when this happens?

Have you filed a bug report?

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[robbak (775424)]

That is unsurprising. Windows installers have always been heavyweight. I don't think that this is wine's problem.
Indeed, wine has had a very hard time supporting Installshield, which seems like a very badly written application.

Re:How is this /.-worthy news?

[IamTheRealMike (537420)]

Badly written doesn't even begin to describe InstallShield. Where would I begin? Its 3 step install process that exists not because it makes sense, but because of InstallShield tortured history of an app? The amazing overhead it imposes on any app that uses it? Its custom programming language? Its heavy abuse of DCOM? The typos in its internal class names? The way it does an inter-thread RPC for every file copied (to update the label in the gui), meaning that if you want to install lots of small files most of the installers cpu time will be spent on RPC? As an ex-Wine developer, I spent many hours wrestling with this app. You haven't experienced true despair until you have encountered the hopeless, labrythine and worthless complexity of the InstallShield internals.

WordPad?

[by Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure there are some great new features, but mentioning improvements to WordPad is some serious flamebait...

Re:WordPad?

[by Anonymous Coward]

vi vs. emacs vs. WordPad?

Wordpad is actually important...

[robbak (775424)]

Because parts of Wordpad are often used as a text editing component in other programs. In addition, Wordpad acts as a good test case for much of wine's infrastructure.

Re:

[Jugalator (259273)]

You mean the rich text box of it? Yes, it's a reusable component, but it's not clear to me that control was a problem before, although maybe you're right.

WordPad is also an MFC application, like many others, and in case there were something to fix there, that could be pretty important due to MFC's wide use.

Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[baadger (764884)]

I've been thinking of starting to ./configure --prefix a Wine install into a subdirectory of my home directory and applying a script wrapper to the wine binary.

Pretty much every application or game I use under Wine requires either a patch against wine or some app specific hack to get it working properly, and often they don't work in the next Wine version.

Wine is great but setting up multiple apps or games to work under it is horrible.

Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[QuantumG (50515)]

So, err, just so I've got this right.. you're applying app specific patches to Wine to get it to work and then when you upgrade you're reapplying all those patches and finding that some of them don't apply anymore?

Ya know, Wine uses this revision control system that some Finnish guy wrote.. it's really good at helping you maintain a fork with your changes in it if that's what you want to do. I think it's called "git" or something. :)

Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[NickFortune (613926)]

To be fair, Wine does suffer quite a lot from regressions. Don't take my word for it - look up a few of your favourite games on the AppDB [winehq.org] and notice how the playability level varies from one release to the next.

That's not so likely to be a problem with the major apps. World of Warcraft and MS Office are likely to be rested between releases, so they tend to be fairly stable. On the other hand, it's pretty much a crap-shoot whether Deus Ex (my favourite use for Wine) will work with any particular release.

Don't get me wrong; I think Wine is a fantastic project, and the number of apps they can handle has risen steadily over the time I've been using it. But being realistic, the do have a problem with regressions. Once it gets out of beta, that will hopefully change.

Re:Wine breaks backward compatibility a lot.

[paskie (539112)]

Actually, this was my experience in the past as well, but during the 0.9 series this got a lot better for me and now for a long time already I didn't need to change any actual wine settings for specific application at all (and I'm messing with relatively wide variety of applications and games. At most I have to tweak (e.g. graphics) settings of the application itself. New versions don't break apps that previously were working that much either (though it happens sometimes; I still have bisecting what broke SC3000 in my long TODO list ;).

Finally!

[MarkByers (770551)]

improvements to the built-in WordPad

That's been one thing that really bugs me about Linux. I'm fed up of having to use horrible outdated editors like emacs and vi. Now finally I can use a decent editor without having to dual-boot.

Re:

[QuantumG (50515)]

hehe.. I have been known to use windows calculator under Wine.

Re:

[EvilRyry (1025309)]

qalculate is freaking awesome! I especially love the conversions so you can do stuff like 15m/s = x mph and it just works.

Re:

[MikeBabcock (65886)]

I've been known to wish that 'dc' was available on Windows :-)

Sure I could install it on cygwin but I'm just saying I much prefer RPN to the Windows calculator app.

Re:

[QuantumG (50515)]

idk, cause I'm not a freakin' gray beard?

Re:

[DrSkwid (118965)]

pfft bash perl shit

man bc

Office 2003

[E-Sabbath (42104)]

Has anyone ever managed to get Office 2003 fully working under WINE yet? I spent a week trying once. Never got it right. Probably something to do with the fact that it doesn't have the ability to run as a Win98 program.

New wine project

[edxwelch (600979)]

I would love to use Wine, but unfortunately I don't have Linux. Are there any plans to port Wine to Windows?

Re:New wine project

[by Anonymous Coward]

do not laugh to soon..

like dosbox, and I'm pretty sure that under Vista you *may* need wine to run some legacy windows softwares....

Re:New wine project

[by Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, but since MS isn't going to release DX10 on XP and Wine has already started implementing it, you might end up using Wine to run the new apps in a legacy OS.

Re:New wine project

[a strange guy (979772)]

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=6241&package_id=112520 [sourceforge.net] have fun ;-)

Re:New wine project

[caluml (551744)]

Download Cygwin and try and compile it under that. Windows -> Cygwin -> Wine -> ..... VMWare? :)

Re:

[Linker3000 (626634)]

My copy of Windows has a file called WOWEXEC (Wine on Windows?) - maybe it's been there all along?

Yes

[PeterBrett (780946)]

Yes.

(If you want a useful answer, ask a meaningful question).

</trollfood>

Re:useful yet?

[chaosite (930734)]

Yes, it has gotten way better.
It has support for Direct3D, tons of winapi functions, etc... It's pretty awesome at this stage, really.

Re:useful yet?

[tom17 (659054)]

I find it is pretty good at what it runs. The problem is that for me, the kind of things it runs are the things that I can get on Linux natively anyway.

The things it falls short on are things like the latest office products, latest adobe products and some of the games I like to play. It's helpful in places but does not yet close the gap for me.

Re:

[Dystopian Rebel (714995)]

Wine is one of the most useful open source projects if you are a BSD or Linux user and there is at least one M-Windows application that you can't replace.

In my case, I run the Oxford English Dictionary under Wine.

Newer != Better

[omnirealm (244599)]

chaosite wrote:
> Yes, it has gotten way better.
> It has support for Direct3D, tons of winapi functions, etc... It's pretty awesome at this stage, really.

Oblivion, perhaps the most widely acclaimed game from last year, runs pretty well on Wine 0.9.38. Someone made changes to the DirectX thread-related code that causes Oblivion under Wine to crash for every version since [winehq.org]. The lesson here is that the newest version of Wine is not necessarily the best one to use for any given application.

Re:

[QuantumG (50515)]

What were you trying to run?

Took me a while to get the last app I tried going too. One of the biggest problems was the lack of support for signatures in crypt32.. which co-incidentally this release fixes :)

I should write a tutorial or something.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

Try getting it to run on Cygwin. That's lots of fun!

Re:

[someone1234 (830754)]

If you got the source, you can do that yourself.
All you need is to comment out a few lines, you'll know which.

Re:useful yet?

[MadnessASAP (1052274)]

Ha! try getting it to run Cygwin and then using it to run Qemu to run Windows XP to VMware to run Linux. When you have completed that young grasshopper then your training is complete.

Re:

[ambrosen (176977)]

Never heard of coLinux, then? An excellent project for some things.

Re:But face it

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

the very existance of Wine is proof that Linux isn't able to exist without windows.

...and the very existence of SFU is proof that Windows isn't able to exist without Linux.

So let's all have a big group hug and make up. We need each other.

Re:But face it

[pakar (813627)]

Nope, but the existence of wine is proof that people don't like windows and want their apps running on gnu/linux systems..

Re:

[Xtifr (1323)]

> the very existance (sp) of Wine is proof that Linux isn't able to exist without windows.

Uh-huh. Offering an option proves that everybody needs that option. (Just for the record, I haven't had Wine installed since '01, and haven't used Windows since '98.)

Does the very existence of Viper mode prove that Emacs isn't able to exist without vi? Makes about as much sense.

Actually, what the existence of Wine proves is that some FLOSS developers are willing to try to provide a smoother migration path to thos

Re:

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

``Btw, I'm aware that OpenBSD's port of WINE dates from 1999, just another sign that BSD is dying, I guess!''

Or it could just mean that the demographic that runs OpenBSD (security conscious people, I'd imagine) isn't interested in running Windows apps.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't run on OpenBSD yet (I'm not sure about NetBSD or Solaris). OpenBSD porters continue to look at it, but it still has problems that are not easily solved (i.e. not a trivial port) and so they record their progress and move on to something more tractable. It will happen though. Neigh-sayers said OpenBSD would never crack the problems it had with Firefox or OpenOffice, or get native Java. It now has all of these, they are stable, and all up to date. In the meantime QEMU will run windows many Window

Re:Does it run on (Net||Open)BSD or Solaris yet?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Neigh-sayers said OpenBSD would never crack the problems it had with Firefox or OpenOffice, or get native Java.

But who cares what horses think?

Re:Any chance of a merge?

[ozamosi (615254)]

Cedega is based of an old version of Wine, which was forked off and made proprietary. Since then, Wine changed it's license to make it impossible to do another Cedega-style fork.

So, to merge, we would have to either convince transgaming to make their code completely free and LGPL, or convince all Wine authors to make their code non-free and a part of transgamings commercial product. I don't think either of those two alternatives are very likely.

Re:Any chance of a merge?

[rvalles (649635)]

No need. Since wine got LGPL'd, it has gone through a deep redesign around the WinNT model instead of the win9x model. Also, when wine was just LGPL'd, it would need tons of DLLs from windows in order to do anything; nowadays, no windows DLLs are needed anymore, since almost everything has been implemented.

Cedega used to have an advantadge on games since Wine held on Direct3d while waiting for Cedega to release its implementation; it never happened. So Wine's Direct3d began late, but it's catching up.

Nowadays, Wine and Cedega are quite close in game compatibility, while wine is much better with non-gaming stuff. Cedega's "work it around so that the game works instead of properly implementing it" is reaching its limits, and wine will soon run Cedega's "supported games" better than Cedega itself, not to menction non-Cedega supported games :).

Re:

[QuantumG (50515)]

If you want pointless, use PuTTY [greenend.org.uk] under Wine.