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Wine Software Linux

Jeremy White on WINE Installer Challenge 58

Posted by timothy from the assimilation dept.
polar_bear` writes "Last week, CodeWeavers issued a "Installer Challenge" to improve Wine "until it can run nearly every Windows program." Linux Magazine interviewed CodeWeavers Founder and CEO Jeremy White about the challenge, Wine on OS X on Intel, the Linux desktop and what is ahead for CodeWeavers. White has some pretty interesting answers."
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Jeremy White on WINE Installer Challenge More

Jeremy White on WINE Installer Challenge

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  • A lot of this was covered in WWN (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mad Merlin ( 837387 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @10:42PM (#13172996) Homepage
    If you're looking for more information about this, Wine Weekly News [winehq.org] for last week has two writeups on the issue. Basically the last of some very ugly and gritty DCOM work and related items has been finished in Wine. Installers are notorious for using these sorts of features and hence have generally been hit or miss in the past. This is a big step forward for Wine, sometime in the near future the vast majority of installers should work properly (hence the challenge).
  • What we're doing right now, is we've spent a great deal of energy over the last year, sort of a lot of unsexy, dirty, nasty, grinding work that has the very sexy, exciting work that has the result that we believe many applications will install, and we believe that those that won't install will be very easy to get install.

    He must have been hard at work. Just not sure if it was sexy or not.

    • Well, apparently the work was unsexy, but the work that the work had to do was. Now, if work is doing work independent of the work, they have either invented a functioning AI or they are stuck in a recursive call.
  • Even Windows has problems with that task.
  • Is he on drugs, or what? He can barely string together a coherent sentence, let alone manage to simplify a project like Wine.... From the article: What we're doing right now, is we've spent a great deal of energy over the last year, sort of a lot of unsexy, dirty, nasty, grinding work that has the very sexy, exciting work that has the result that we believe many applications will install, and we believe that those that won't install will be very easy to get install. We're very hopeful that with this, if
    • Dammit Jim, he's a engineer not a politician!

      In any case, have you ever been interviewed? Were you perfectly coherent throughout? Say no.

      Well, now that I think of it, there was one interview that went perfectly...the one that got me a summer stock job.

      Manager: Are you willing to throw around 20-80 lb boxes for 35 hours a week?

      Me: Yeah

      Manager: Can you come in at 4 AM?

      Me: Yeah Manager: Alright, if your ok with $7.50/hr you're hired.

      Me: OK
    • Is he on drugs, or what? He can barely string together a coherent sentence, let alone manage to simplify a project like Wine

      Yeah, that's going to be a real handicap seeing as how Wine is written in 'English' (the developers just wouldn't go for English++, dammit). You should see their codebase, it looks like James Joyce and ee cummings got into a pie-throwing contest, but with words.

  • We're not making promises yet around your app working, okay? Let me be clear, it's not as wonderful a thing as it sounds. But this is sort of step one, once we get everything to install, then hopefully the community of people who try Wine or try CrossOver will grow dramatically because suddenly the experience when you go to run an application is "Oh hey! It installs." You can get in the game at least.

    I don't think that having a bunch of people try their favorite app in WINE only to have it install but not

    • He's talking about developers dipshit. You know, those hard working people you mooch off and then go on to give shit to.
    • My problem with Wine is that what little does install doesn't run. I've tried several packages and haven't found anything yet that works well enough to want to use it. I don't want to do anything too fancy. If I could get Quickbooks running then I'd be happy.
      • You may have to buy a copy of Crossover Office. It's basically the pay version of wine, but luckily you get tech support to help you get it actually running ;)
      • I agree with you. I think the idea of having everyone try to install every program they can get their hands on is misguided in the extreme. At the end of that endeavor all they will have accomplished is ensuring WINE is compatible with a handful of installer utilities.

        They've concentrated on Office and gotten that running. I would think a better next step would be to focus on another class of applications and get all of the programs in that set working. Like, for instance, get all Windows personal finance

        • Installers were the next app to focus. If you can't install it you can't run it. They could work on one more hack for each app to make it install, but in the long run that just makes for ugly code, and it costs more. Most of the hard code that installers need is also needed by some other app, so by doing this work now they not only get installers to work for all the future apps they focus on, but they eliminate one area where they would have to create some hack to get that other app to work. (and goo

  • A price quote from TFA... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Mad Merlin ( 837387 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @11:58PM (#13173407) Homepage
    "Sometimes what we do is really a dirty job. We let people run IE on Linux, and that's just sick and wrong..."

    I'd be apt to agree...

  • These will be the 2 key issues to get morepeople to use this and Linux. My Mom and Dad wil NOT /can not be bothered to look around the internet for various dependencies to make a program to work. Why? - cause with Windows all you need to do usually - is just click on the install button, and occasionally automagically update one's drivers.

    For people to adopt something, it must be EASIER.

    Now as far as games go - how many home computers have you seen, that didn't have a game or two installed on it? Not many

    • For people to adopt something, it must be EASIER.

      I have to respectfully disagree. I've seen data that indicates people are extremely unlikely to change their habits for only a perceived marginal improvement.

      In other words - making it "easier" won't get people to adopt it. It has to be obviously, noticably, incredibly, "Wow! I've gotta get me some of that!" easier before people will even start to THINK of adopting it.

  • Aww...I'm disappointed now. I thought they were finally gonna make it easy to install WINE itself under Linux... Maybe they'll put it out as an autopackage? But then again, it probably needs system integration :/ When a new Linux user can click an icon or something that says "install wine" and then it's ready to use without jumping through hoops, Just Works[tm] style...that's when Wine will be actually worth while.
    • You know, that's one of the key selling points of CrossOver - it comes in a Loki setup. Why no autopackage? Well, I guess Mike is just a slacker ;)
    • Any distro that includes Wine on the CDs or in it's repository (which I'd imagine is at least 95% of them) already does this. Open up your package manager, search for Wine and install it. How is that more difficult than searching on Google for Wine, downloading an installer and running it?

      I think the real problem here is that people are stuck in the mindset of "must go download an installer and install it manually" rather than "let the package manager do the work for me". The reason for this of course is

      • It's more difficult because broken, out of date or non-exsistant Wine packages are very common. For instance, where is the Wine package in Fedora? Why did Debian release a update fixing a non-existant security bug in Wine? Why did the official Wine Red Hat packager have to rewrite the Gentoo ebuilds for them as they were so broken?
        • You're probably right, but I think the blame lies in the fact that Wine is still alpha software. The roughly monthly "releases" are just a snapshot of CVS, I'm relatively sure they're not tested beyond that, certainly not with the rigor you would expect for a 1.0 release or even a beta release, because they're not really a release at all. The fact that Wine is a rapidly moving target also doesn't help matters.

          As to Fedora packages, there are RH7.3 through FC3 packages here [winehq.org], as well as numerous other binar

      • Well, on my Gentoo machine after i did an "emerge wine" there were no signs of it even being there. There were no desktop additions; I stick in a Windows CD and it still doesn't recognize what an .exe is. Even typing "wine" at the command line gives no result. Should I look up some tutorials and stuff on this? Yeah...probably so. Should I have to? No. And that's my point ;)
        • Which ebuild did you use? I'm using wine-20050111-r1, and while yes there is no desktop or K menu item added for Wine, it certainly is there at the command prompt. Unless you took /usr/bin out of your $PATH for some reason, I'm not sure why it wouldn't be there. What does
          find / -name wine 2>/dev/null | grep "wine$"
          or
          locate wine | grep "wine$"
          give you?
  • It's called an "Installer Challenge" because the goal is to run all the installers, soon. Not all windows programs, soon.

    Not going to happen in the 'soon' time frame, or likely even the 'not too long' time frame. Wine is still horribly unstable, unless you're using one of the programs that the developers of wine uses it to run. ANd there's far more than just MS based installers, even though MS has supplied an installer for many years now, there's tons of developers who seem to refuse to use it.

    And, whene
    • Installshield is the other main suspect in terms of Windows installers, and it was also specifically targeted in the new/fixed support for Wine. The fact that Wine would actually run a lot of programs, but couldn't install them properly without sometimes cryptic workarounds was a huge thorn in its side, and getting the installer out of the way is a huge step forward. Despite your pessimism about Wine, (Codeweavers) has spent roughly the last 9 months specifically developing all of the necessary components t
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Wine is a breeze to install compared to Cygwin. Cygwin uses a webinstaller to download packages from mirroring sites, but keeps the folders for those sites separate. Cygwin works well with dependencies, but I think it wants to download too much. What if I just want one program? Wine is great despite Microsoft holding back information about how the system works. If users can administrate Linux, they can work with Wine.

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