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CodeWeavers Package Google Chrome For Linux and Mac
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Sep 15, 2008 02:34 PM
from the not-to-be-forgotten dept.
from the not-to-be-forgotten dept.
jfbilodeau writes "The fine folks at Codeweavers performed an 11 day experiment in getting Google Chrome working on Linux and Mac. Their efforts resulted in the Chromium proof of concept. 'Not only does this give Mac and Linux users a chance to see what all the hype is about, it also lets the world see just how far Wine has come and how powerful it truly can be. In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux.' Caveat: their implementation is free as in beer but not free as in speech."
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Politics: Lame Duck Challenge Ends With Free Codeweavers Software For All 433 comments
gzipped_tar writes to tell us that The Codeweavers "Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge" has ended in surprise and free software all day Tuesday (October 28, 2008) at the Codeweavers site. A while back Codeweavers gave President Bush a challenge to meet one of several goals before he left office. One of these goals was to lower gas prices in the Twin Cities below $2.79 a gallon, which has since transpired. "How was I to know that President Bush would take my challenge so seriously? And, give the man credit, I didn't think there was *any* way he could pull it off. But engineering a total market meltdown - wow - that was pure genius. I clearly underestimated the man. I'm ashamed that I goaded him into this and take full responsibility for the collapse of any savings you might have. Please accept our free software as my way of apologizing for the global calamity we now find ourselves embroiled in."
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Predictable, Really. (Score:5, Interesting)
Google's vision isn't truly understood by everyone, IMHO. Google knew that the Open Source community would fork and port Chrome anyway and that freed up time for developers to work out the system bugs and get the thing live. Releasing the source code is a redeemable action from the many gripes that flooded about Google not offering Linux or Mac support in Chrome on launch, among other [arstechnica.com] things.
Now I personally would like to see a fork that would upgrade Chrome to remove any significant Windows reliance. I don't trust Microsoft to put my interests first and therefore I don't like the idea of a browser that relies so heavily on Microsoft for security.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
free as in beer
but not free as in speech
What of free from fear
Of corporate over-reach?
Re:Predictable, Really. (Score:5, Funny)
free as in beer
but not free as in speech
What of free from fear
Of corporate over-reach?
Yeah! Opera gives you corporate reach-around!
Parent
Re:Predictable, Really. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mac and Linux users should reject Windows applications and games. If they can't, they should question their OS of choice.
Why should anyone restrict themselves to native applications when they don't have to?
Ever heard of the best of both worlds?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ever heard of the best of both worlds?
Of course! That's one of my favorite episodes... :-P
Re:Predictable, Really. (Score:4, Informative)
Windows shares BSD roots with it's TCP/IP stack.
That used to be true. The Vista one is all new code.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Aha, but we will always have C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Because Microsoft focuses on application compatibility above all else, and removing hosts would probably break five 10 year old apps.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Mac and Linux users should reject Windows applications and games. If they can't, they should question their OS of choice.
You're joking right?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, I don't joke. If I feel forced to use windows applications and games, I would go with Windows.
Long time before Ubuntu or other kind of stuff, I used Slackware Linux without WINE (it didn't work anyway) or any kind of dual booting as my only OS. Loki Games were alive and kicking that time so I purchased my games from them, running natively on Linux. I used Windows (as my only OS) a while and when I figured Desktop Linux won't serve to my kind of usage that time and only way to get full support is running
Re:Predictable, Really. (Score:5, Insightful)
free as in beer but not free as in speech
What of free from fear Of corporate over-reach?
I'm getting pretty sick of the whole "drunk as in beer, not as in scotch" disclaimer crap. Everything has its limits, and petty squabbles about "mine is freer than yours" serve only to enrage a flock of wannabe first amendment lawyers. They fill the blog'O'sphere with masturbatory rants about "you published your peanut butter without my chocolate disclaimer!"
Can't we find something better to squabble endlessly about? Like why Firefox's spell checker didn't complain about the word "masturbatory"?
Parent
Your annoyance is misplaced. (Score:5, Insightful)
Your annoyance is misplaced.
The speech/beer convention was devised as a patch for a bug in the English language. One word, "free", has two distinct meanings. Normally people deal with these cases by using context ("Some atoms are ionized but most are unionized" vs. "Plumbers in many areas are unionized") but in this case both meanings are plausible. The two types are free are distinct, software could be free in either sense, yet English (unlike most other languages) gives us only one preferred word for both meanings.
This resulted in numerous exceedingly tedious flame wars that ended, if at all, with a lame "Oh, that's not what I thought you meant--why didn't you say so in the first place?"
Clarifying which homonym is intended right up front may annoy you, but trust me, it is far, far better than the alternative.
--MarkusQ
Parent
Won't you take me.... to crappytown? (Score:3, Insightful)
Duly impressed in their success in porting in less than two weeks, I downloaded the Mac port. Alas, the joy is short-lived. It's terribly slow, locked up for short periods a couple of times, and had a generally poor user experience. It was not dock-aware, had odd-looking widgets that looked poor compared to Firefox or Safari, and didn't integrate with the OS at all. I suspect that's par for the course for a Wine-ported app, but the end experience is worse than running Chrome in Parallels desktop in Cohe
Re:Won't you take me.... to crappytown? (Score:5, Interesting)
> I suspect that's par for the course for a Wine-ported app
Wine apps are/can be much better than that on Leopard. I only have one data point, but I use it _extensively_ and it works super-well. And stably. And actually, maybe even better than on Windows.
The app? ies4osx [kronenberg.org] under Darwine. Specifically, I am running Internet Explorer 6.0 for web-dev testing.
The ONLY complaint I have is that it's under the "X" program, instead of it's own program, so I can't cmd-tab to it effectively. Web I'm doing web-dev, I also run Xemacs, so I have to ctrl-tab to get to IE, then cmd-tab to get to Safari and Firefox.
And it's such a small complaint that I haven't even googled for a solution yet.
Parent
It's a hack! (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
as good as Wine is, it will never compete with a browser which is designed to run natively on a platform
I don't know that that's true. WINE is not an emulator, it's an implementation of the Windows API. It's certainly possible for it to be a better-performing implementation.
If you were talking about virtualization, or even pseudo-virtualization like VMWare, where I/O is the serious bottleneck, then you'd be right.
I'd definitely like to see the benchmarks you suggest.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
it's just really a hack. I mean, as good as Wine is, it will never compete with a browser which is designed to run natively on a platform.
WINE is an implementation of the Windows API. This implementation is native, so you can say that applications are in fact running natively.
Copy and pasted from Wine faq:
4.3. Is Wine slower than just using Windows?
Actually, Wine is sometimes faster. The speed of an application depends on a lot of factors: the available hardware and their drivers, the quality of the code in the APIs the application uses, and the quality of the code in the underlying operating system.
Driver code matters a lot. If you
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I assume when you say Chrome is a "privacy killer" you have read the whole source or at least monitored network traffic while browsing. Or maybe you are pulling it all out of your Google-hating er... parts.
Proxy logs (Score:3, Insightful)
I assume when you say Chrome is a "privacy killer" you have read the whole source or at least monitored network traffic while browsing.
Serious defenders of online privacy do exactly the latter by testing software on a honeypot behind a proxy, reading the proxy's log, and reporting the result on a blog.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah! (Score:5, Funny)
Giving Google all your data is not just for Windows users anymore!
TANSFAAFB! (Score:3, Funny)
There ain't no such thing as a free beer!
Re:TANSFAAFB! (Score:5, Funny)
It does if you've been drinking.
Parent
I wouldn't be surprised... (Score:2)
Google Earth is native! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Google Earth is native! (Score:4, Insightful)
What I'd like to know is why .kml/.kmz files created by Google Earth are incompatible with Google Maps.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They aren't, it's just that Maps supports a smaller set of features than Earth does (because DHTML is less powerful than OpenGL for rendering).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I realize Google didn't create the .kml standard (k is for "keyhole" after all), but it defies reason that I can stick a bunch of markers on Google Earth, save that as a .kml file, then try to open that up with Google Maps, and it doesn't work. I'm only using Google products here.
Re:Google Earth is native! (Score:4, Informative)
At least then it'd feel native.
Parent
Native port? (Score:4, Insightful)
Please help with the port (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Please help with the port (Score:4, Insightful)
Does Linux users, especially the newbies who just comes from Windows land need such a potential privacy killer?
They moved to Linux because their Windows became impossible to use since they kept not reading EULAs and leaving "default options" checked.
Parent
Re:Please help with the port (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You're missing a few points though.
1. I can see a number of people purchasing the Windows version of MSOffice because it has VB macro support.
2. A number of web developers would use IE on and off. I'm sure there are a few bank sites that still only support IE with active X.
3. Games use their own guis for immersion. Done correctly, no Mac user would ever notice. Especially for games I could see Mac users bending backwards so they wouldn't have to boot up Windows.
4. If Wine becomes more streamlined, I can
Works pretty well for me (Score:2, Informative)
In Just 11 Days (Score:5, Funny)
'In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux.'
How long would it take to send it back?
Re:In Just 11 Days (Score:4, Funny)
'In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux.'
How long would it take to send it back?
It's like the trash in your collage apartment; let it start stinking first and then someone will take it out.
I give it about three days.
Parent
All the vendors wave your hands in the air and say (Score:4, Funny)
BTW, we don't care about your hippy licensing schemes yet. Try back in 10 years.
First impressions (Score:5, Informative)
Google Sketchup on Wine? (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish CodeWeavers would go and get Google SketchUp, their "easy 3D drawing" program, to work on Wine for Linux. Because that's the only way to make models to export into Google Earth (Earth does have a Linux version, SketchUp does not).
There's all kinds of crashing problems with SketchUp on Wine in simple things like opening/saving/exporting files, corrupted cursors and icons, which a team like CodeWeavers could probably straighten out pretty quick. Since Google hasn't shown any progress towards releasing a Linux version of SketchUp, someone else has to do the work.
The Internet... (Score:5, Funny)
More technical details (Score:5, Informative)
Cheers,
Jeremy
The Fonts on Linux Suck (Score:5, Interesting)
Case in point: http://img140.imageshack.us/my.php?image=chromeox9.jpg [imageshack.us]
Ah well. I guess it'll give me something to play with until Google puts out an official Linux build.
Re:For those of you using Firefox on linux.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't work for me. "wine ChromeSetup.exe" gives
fixme:advapi:CheckTokenMembership ((nil) 0x12a078 0x33f930) stub! fixme:process:SetProcessShutdownParameters (00000280, 00000001): partial stub. fixme:ole:CoInitializeSecurity ((nil),-1,(nil),(nil),6,2,(nil),64,(nil)) - stub! fixme:winhttp:WinHttpOpen ((null), 1, (null), (null), 0x0): stub
Good for Crossover!
How 'bout you actually try the Crossover packages then like you were supposed to? http://www.codeweavers.com/services/ports/chromium/ [codeweavers.com]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Is the gist of what I'd written, before I hit 'Submit', and it crashed (Taking my internet connection, requiring a restart!).
Re:For those of you using Firefox on linux.... (Score:5, Informative)
Cheers,
Jeremy
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Wine 1.1.3, it sorta worked in a crashy sorta way. Wine 1.1.4, it installed and mostly worked except SSL. I expect a fully working Chrome in Wine 1.1.5 or 1.1.6. Here's to fortnightly releases!
Really, I'm amazed just how good Wine is these days - and when it isn't yet, how easy it is to add support for a new whizbang app when you really need to.
Re:it is a remarkable achievement (Score:4, Funny)
Now, 12, that's just pushing it. And 10 would have been unrealistic.
Parent
Re:"just" 11 days? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, like a lot of :) For instance it does all the multi-process and security stuff. But then it also does what a lot of Windows programs do these days and replace the standard window management stuff as well. It relies on parts of Internet Explorer as well (like the HTTP library).
Windows apps Chrome does some, uh, interesting things that you might not expect a them to do
If you want an example of the sort of fun they had making things work, the bug this patch fixes [winehq.org] was "Chrome URL bar has a black background" yet the fix is to the low level assembly generated by Wines build process. That's because Chrome shims BeginPaint/EndPaint by patching the in-memory system DLL headers, so it can muck about with the Windows richedit control internals and the Chrome IAT patcher didn't support Borland style imports.
For a program that has such complicated interactions with the OS, and is so heavily reliant on it for functionality, 11 days is remarkably good actually. A good sign of Wines increasing maturity.
Parent
Why would you want to emulate windows? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, aside from the fact WINE is NOT emulating, ever think you need to run an application that is ONLY available on Windows?
Happens all the time in business. You can rant and rave all you want about alternatives or boycotting, or demanding a *nix port, but the reality is you have your business to attend too.
Sure, still push for that alternative, but you still gotta be running TODAY, not someday, and WINE can often do that for you and still let you ditch Windows along the way..
You're looking at it wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
You're looking at it wrong. Wine will not truly shine (I made a rhyme!) until developers start thinking of it as a tool for porting their programs to Linux/Mac OS X. For this, Mac and Linux markets becoming large enough is a natural and slightly lofty prerequisite. Wine itself only has to reach adequate compatibility status.
During porting, large studios will use Wine to simplify and speed up the job. Rather than changing their code to make it compatible with Wine deficiencies, it will make more sense to