No WINE Before Its Time 192
Joe Barr writes "Stephen Feller has a story about WINE on NewsForge this morning ahead of next week's expected Beta release. The WINE project is 12 years old, so it's just about time." From the article: "'Wine has historically had a very frustrating history because it has been alpha software,' White said. 'This is really hard work. We're replicating the work of a billion-dollar company. The reason we're saying it's alpha is because we believe we still have fundamental changes to make on the way the internals work.' Noting that it has not always been easy to install software with Wine's alpha releases over the last decade, White said that once you got something working it has never meant it would continue to do so, or do so properly. There may have been display glitches or things not functioning properly, if a program even worked with Wine at all." OSTG is the parent company of both Slashdot and NewsForge.
More info.. (Score:5, Informative)
http://lwn.net/Articles/154451/ [lwn.net]
Re:More info.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Great Wine Quote (Score:5, Funny)
Cheers.
Re:Great Wine Quote (Score:2)
I don't seem to be able to find a scan of the actual cartoon online anywhere, oh well.
Yes but.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Yes but.. (Score:2)
Also, I wonder how well WINE runs Cygwin.
VisualStudio Plugin (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:VisualStudio Plugin (Score:2, Informative)
One exists for PHP, so its not out of the question (Score:3, Informative)
Also, in the new Visual studio HTML editor, there's a web standards dropdown so that the code will flag as errors if not part of the selected standard. The same dropdown could exist for Wine code. I'd use it.
Moonbase Alpha (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Moonbase Alpha (Score:2)
Re:Moonbase Alpha (Score:2)
vista (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:vista (Score:5, Funny)
Re:vista (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:vista (Score:2)
Wine for OSX (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wine for OSX (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wine for OSX (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea of running Wine on Intel Macs probably occurred to every WINE enthusiast roughly 300 milliseconds after Apple announced they were abandoning POWER. No doubt many people are working on it, including Codweavers. But forget about financial support from Apple.
Re:Wine for OSX (Score:2)
to quote
Pure speculation of course .
Some apple employs in their spare time working on the Darwine project , getting extra bonuses at Christmas and long holidays
Re:Wine for OSX (Score:2)
Re:Wine for OSX (Score:2)
Re:Wine for OSX (Score:2)
Already announced (Score:2)
I can't find the announcement, but have a line from the last WINE CVS drop changelog:
* Some fixes for MacOS/x86.
Re:Wine for OSX (Score:5, Funny)
Mac: It Just Works.
Wine: Whoah, something almost worked!
Re:Wine for OSX (Score:3, Informative)
Wine used to work somewhat, back when all configuration was done with a config file, because then you could just copy-paste it from the Net. However, then some nincompoop decided to remove support for the text config in favor of graphical configuratio tool, which not only makes it harder to config things (since you can't just copy-paste config file from Net anymore), but apparently doesn't properly save little details like "is this drive the CD-ROM or hard drive", ev
Re:Wine for OSX (Score:2, Interesting)
The only place where this falls apart is when you want to play a game on your PC. The fact is, developers support the Windows pla
Re:Wine for OSX (Score:2)
While I agree that Wine is sometimes barely useful, the people from CodeWeavers [codeweavers.com] make a really useful release every now and then. It's really stable, if you use the supported applications (check their website, mainly MS Office). The download version is $40.
No hidden agenda, just a satisfied customer.
Re:Wine for OSX (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Wine for OSX (Score:4, Informative)
It would appear that you are not alone...
Thank you! (Score:2)
Re:Wine for OSX (Score:2)
IIRC I heard that they were on the wine list.
Obsolete model? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Obsolete model? (Score:2)
Sure you can run Windows on a virtual machine, but you need a legal copy of Windows first. WINE allows you to run Windows applications without having to pay Microsoft any $$$.
Also applications running in a VM are captive within the VM's window. I like the ability to move/resize/manage
Re:Obsolete model? (Score:2)
Yeah, sure. If you want to run a notepad, minesweeper or solitaire.
Good point. I really meant to say "In theory WINE allows you to run Windows applications without having to pay Microsoft any $$$"
Re:Obsolete model? (Score:2)
Re:Obsolete model? (Score:2)
Other people did [codeweavers.com]
Re:Obsolete model? (Score:2, Informative)
But:
--
sig:
Re:Obsolete model? (Score:2)
It would propably work better than in Wine, since it won't work at all in Wine. Or at least I haven't gotten a single game to even install, much less work with Wine... With the sole exception of Fallout 2.
Re:Obsolete model? (Score:2)
Try the right tool [transgaming.org]
Re:Obsolete model? (Score:2)
Re:Obsolete model? (Score:2)
Re:Obsolete model? (Score:2)
Windows Standard Base (Score:4, Interesting)
Wouldn't that be great, or am I wrong?
Re:Windows Standard Base (Score:2)
yes it can be done, but you still have one company that controls the basis. therefor there is no need for embrace, just extend, and watch all the rest chase their tails...
Re:Windows Standard Base (Score:2)
Re:Windows Standard Base (Score:2)
Not as hard as quote suggests (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes and no. It is a little simpler than this quote suggests. Wine does not need to implement every API that Microsoft produces. It needs to implement every API that desired Windows applications use. In some ways it is a quality of service problem, the marginal cost between supporting 90% of apps and 100% of apps may be too expensive. Maybe 80% to 90% is too expensive. I don't pretend to know what the optimal percentage is but it is surely not 100% or even mid to high 90%s.
In any case this is a monumental task and the Wine developers deserve an awful lot of credit and thanks.
Re:Not as hard as quote suggests (Score:2)
Except users come in all flavors, and the list of desired apps is probably as long as the API list. And sometimes building the system is just as much work as building the API, if you want to do the "desired" parts of the API the rest just naturally fits in. In the end, they're still trying to recreate most of what Microsoft has made.
Re:Not as hard as quote suggests (Score:5, Informative)
Take the recent DCOM work we did. This is what I'm going to talk about because it's what I know - myself (CW) and Rob Shearman (CW), along with some help from Marcus Meissner (Novell) and Huw Davies (CW) reimplemented large parts of DCOM mostly for one application. The work took many months - starting from a pre-existing codebase written by Marcus years earlier, we were "finished" ~135 patches later.
What was that one application which was so important?
InstallShield.
Now perhaps you see the problem - sure, not every API is used by every app. But there are hundreds of thousands of APIs, many extremely complex, and many millions of applications. All it takes is ONE popular application to use a single API that was not yet reimplemented and you have months of work ahead of you.
This is especially true of something like DCOM where the supporting infrastructure for 4 or 5 functions can run to 10,000+ lines of code.
Re:Not as hard as quote suggests (Score:4, Interesting)
Your point is well taken but it really seems to address how to pick which APIs go into that xx% that gives you optimal coverage. Optimal coverage is also not something that is fixed. Naturally as new or updated apps come out there will be more work (and pain) for the Wine developers. I guess another way to describe the point that I was trying to get at is that there is a lag between Microsoft introducing APIs and applications beginning to use those APIs, and that it would seem the latter is more important than the former. Adopting a new API can be tricky for a developer because that API may not be supported on older versions of Windows. I'm guessing here but I would expect apps with broader appeal, and more importance to the average Wine user, would be more resistant to requiring newer APIs with little backwards compatibility. I would expect that apps that immediately jump on new APIs and ignore backwards compatibility would tend to be more specialized and more niche oriented and less likely to be needed by Wine users. Again, just guessing.
Maybe this leads us to a way to estimate what xx is. Take the top 10 most commonly used apps, what APIs are used? Now the top 50, then top 250. Plot the % of API coverage required, maybe we'll have a useful curve.
Re:Not as hard as quote suggests (Score:2)
Re:Not as hard as quote suggests (Score:2)
I disagree. There are lots of people who need Windows for some purpose, but in order to accomplish that purpose, they need more than one app.
For instance
Re:Not as hard as quote suggests (Score:2)
I disagree with your analysis. Your first flaw is that you ignore the requirements of your formula. The 90% of all apps working under Wine are not chosen at random, they do not have equal "weight", they are chosen by p
Good clone (Score:5, Funny)
That's what I get from WinXP on a regular basis, so I guess I could stand using Wine.
ABRs of OSS (Score:5, Interesting)
So WINE might have good reasons (eg. moving Microsoft target) for remaining relatively "immature", incomplete, or buggy. But once they revised it on feedback from people outside the WINE development team, it is beta, regardless of what they call it.
This is not a semantic argument. It's a very important point about how development/testing patterns affect code quality. Incorporating the "social" aspects of development, and their constructive/destructive effects on projects, makes development more productive. This is especially true of OSS, as projects often lack the discipline that comes with keeping the code hidden from "outsiders". Without the proprietary discipline, the alpha/beta/release discipline lets OSS projects have more flexibility, and therefore more productivity when used right. Without even the alpha/beta/release discipline, OSS projects need another to produce quality, or fail to do so.
Re:ABRs of OSS (Score:2, Informative)
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_stage [wikipedia.org]
Alpha: The alpha version of a product still awaits full debugging or full implementation of all its functionality, but satisfies a majority of the requirements. It often lacks features promised in the final release, but demonstrates the feasibility and basic structure of the software
Beta: A beta version or beta release usually represents the first feature complete version of a computer program or other product, likely to be unstable but useful for
Re:ABRs of OSS (Score:2)
Re:ABRs of OSS (Score:2)
As for my "authority", the answer is "it works". Which I have found in the best-run projects duri
Re:ABRs of OSS (Score:2)
I thought that was Google?
Re:ABRs of OSS (Score:2)
Re:ABRs of OSS (Score:3, Interesting)
50% Troll
50% Offtopic
TrollMods: that's a Flame, not a "Troll". Look it up before you mod.
Re:ABRs of OSS (Score:2)
Re:ABRs of OSS (Score:2)
Is it just me? (Score:2)
One thing that is nice to see, the group developing Wine have no illusions, and freely admit that you might have problems using the software. Despite that, I know many people who use Wine so they don't need MS operating systems
Re:Is it just me? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Or do others feel that multibillion dollar companies get away with selling alpha software? As far as I can remember, most companies put out alpha and beta software to let users test it in production environments. I could name a few here, but we have all probably dealt with this issue."
One word: marketing. That's how you get away with selling alpha software. You market an alpha-qaulity product to look like something that works as good as it should, and if your marketing campaign successfully ropes in eno
Re:Is it just me? (Score:3, Funny)
Or, you could perhaps look at the software to see if it meets your needs, and not get so excited about the release name / revision. Considering that there are not a lot of ways to make Windows executables run on Linux, even a pre-that-thing-before-alpha sounds better than nothing at all.
And no, virtual machines running windows isn't the same thing as runni
Enough is enough... Call the FTC (Score:3, Insightful)
It should require M$ to publish all of its APIs now and verify that all M$ applications are written to those published APIs. Moreover, it should require that all communications between the application development portion of M$ and the operating system portion of M$ are public domain.
Is there an analogy to doing that? (Score:2)
Re:Is there an analogy to doing that? (Score:2)
Easy. The telephone system in the US went through exactly this process. It was once a monopoly. The phone company even owned the phone lines within your house and the telephones: you just rented them. You had to get your equipment from them and have them do all the service. Of course, this meant no competition and it suppressed innovation since depending on the case it was difficult or impossible to add third-party equipment to the system. Now, in contrast, there is competition and you can hook anything u
Even better analogy (Score:3, Interesting)
(I worked for a business analysis company special
Re:Is there an analogy to doing that? (Score:2)
Property rights are a social construct. (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the primary function of government is the protection of non-subsistence property rights, it is sensible to charge a use fee for those rights. Note, I said "non-subsistence" property rights. The point here is that house and tools of the trade are protected from confiscation under bankruptcy law precisely because they are subsistence assets. Where government does not exist, subsistence properties are typically defended by the occupant, whose life is sustained by those assets. Government brings precisely the property rights we associate with civilization -- assets beyond home and tools of the trade.
Given the relatively liquid nature of civilization, it makes sense to define "non-subsistence" in some dollar value of assets. Various ways of defining the dollar value are all approximately equal:
- The median price of housing a person plus the median price of capitalizing a job.
- The threshold used by the SEC for "qualified investor".
- The level of savings insured by the FDIC.
- Or, for the historically inclined: The market price of 20
arable acres in the Confederate south, a mule, a plow and a small house
on such land.
Until a citizen accumulates the subsistence net asset level, they should pay no tax and then pay tax only on the net assets they own above subsistence.Assessment should be by the owner, thereby establishing a "fair market value" for the exercise of eminent domain. Net assets only would be taxed and would be calculated by subtracting the fair market value of debts against the estate from the self-assessment of the occupant.
Other forms of taxation could be eliminated in a revenue neutral way if net assets, in excess of subsistence levels, were taxed at the risk free interest rate [google.com] (approximately the interest rate on the national debt).
Indeed, given the centralization of asset ownership that has resulted from the subsidy of non-subsistence property, a subsidy inherent in civilization, it may be the failure to use this tax base is the ultimate cause of the repeated decay of civilizations from ancient times.
Re:Property rights are a social construct. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm assuming since you have a geocities.com address that you reside in the U.S. As such I'm basing my comments on the purpoes of the US Government. That being said, you're off your rocker with the above quoted statement.
There is absolutely nothing in the US Constitution that deals with "non-subsistence property rights". I'm not even sure what that phrase means, to be honest. What exactly are property rights t
Re:Property rights are a social construct. (Score:2)
Yes it does.
As I already pointed out, the government could simply not exist at all, and people would still have the "right" to "keep and bear arms", to "free speech" etc. All the bill of rights does is delineate areas of subsistence rights that the government is most likely to usurp once it is taken over by an oligarchy or tyrant. The entirety of the rest of the Constitution has to do with powers of th
Re:Property rights are a social construct. (Score:2)
Yes it does.
"Yes it does." Isn't a valid response, either logically or grammatically to my statement. Beyond that the rest of your post comes across as nothing more than rantings. I see you used the term "subsistence rights". Last time it was "non-subsistence rights". Not only do you make up illogical phrases, you can't even remember which phrases you've used. So is your version of the US Government pro
ReactOS and WINE (Score:5, Interesting)
This means that both Windows drivers and applications will work natively without any changes. They seem to have come on leaps and bounds in the past year with many applications working straight away (OpenOffice, Abiword, mIRC, Unreal Tournament, InfranView, PuTTY as some). Once they start implementing some of the security features then there will be another viable alternative.
In the future I can imagine ReactOS coming on a CD with OpenOffice, Apache etc, much like Linux distributions do, which creates an easy migration path:
Windows + Apps -> Windows + OSS Apps -> ReactOS + OSS Apps then then off to a Linux or *BSD varient if you want.
Re:ReactOS and WINE (Score:4, Informative)
Networking is the next big leap for the 0.3.0 ReactOS Release. Some parts work quite well already.
Re:ReactOS and WINE (Score:2)
I hate to post it, but I'm afraid that by the time reactos is anywhere close to NT4, it will be much too late to be of any practicle value. Like freedos or zeta, it will just be a curiosity.
Re:ReactOS and WINE (Score:2, Informative)
ReactOS is still Alpha Software, and as such, is incorporating elements from later Windows NT iterations. Some Winsock 2 API's have already been implemented, that came in Windows XP. Even some Windows 2003 Functionality, like Guarded Mutex, is present.
0.2.7 shipped with a 2 major bugs that have been largely fixed (touch wood)... 0.2.8 is due out in a few weeks, with 0.2.8 RC1 already out on their Sourceforge Page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/reactos [sourceforge.net]).
Once it's got t
Re:ReactOS and WINE (Score:2, Informative)
Wine? (Score:3, Funny)
In other words...it aged for 12 years?
Re:Wine? (Score:2)
Actually, this is an important observation. It tells us that WINE is a red wine. Nobody would age a white wine for that long.
Re:Wine? (Score:2)
Totally off-topic, but I have been to Slovenia last year, and the proud employee of a wine cellar ("We even export to France!") showed me their long-term white wine cellar; some of the bottles there were 50 years old.
He told me the old whites were very pleasing to the taste buds, and in the dictatorial 'communist/socialist' age many a bottle has been poured down the throats of party officials.
WINE on Windows (Score:2)
Somebody should port WINE to Windows, so then you wouldn't need Linux to run Windows applications.
<EmilyLitella>Oh, never mind.</EmilyLitella>
-Don
I guess that means... (Score:2)
Someone clear this up for me, please: (Score:2)
Are they talking about Wine here or Windows?
So, when does MS-Windows Leave Alpha? (Score:2)
By that definition, I'd ask if MS-Windows has ever been out of an Alpha development state.
Re:Welld duh its written in C (Score:2)
C++ on Windows != MFC (Score:2)
Re:Welld duh its written in C (Score:3, Informative)
Quit making shit up. Seriously.
Gtk+ and by extension Gnome is object oriented and always have been. So are parts of Win32. Both use C, not C++. It is very possible to do object orientation in C. The earliest C++ compilers took C++ code and turned it into C, then passed it into a C compiler. It would still be possible to do a modern C++ compiler th
Re:Welld duh its written in C (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know about Gtk+ and Gnome, but I believe Win32 is only object-oriented it the sense that your application can create display objects at run-time that are subclassed from standard Windows display objects. That's not the same as saying that the Win32 source code is C written in an object-oriented manner.
"It is very possible to do object orientation in C."
Yes, you can write object-oriented code in C or even ass
Re:Welld duh its written in C (Score:2)
A handle is really just a pointer. I don't see anything OO about it. In any case, the issue at hand is the value of writing OO style source code using C instead of C++. Surely one can implement a run-time environment that has object-oriented features in C using only K&R style c
Re:Welld duh its written in C (Score:2, Funny)
Well, duh. His account's listed URL is a LiveJournal. :)
Re:Welld duh its written in C (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Welld duh its written in C (Score:2, Informative)
Arash
Re:Welld duh its written in C (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that I agree with the original poster, you can certainly emulate C++ in C.
Re:Welld duh its written in C (Score:2)
Re:No WINE Before Its Time (Score:2)
(1) it appears to be mostly a complaint about the legal drinking age in the USA
(2) "No WINE before its time" is more of a reference to the fact that certain wines are aged greatly and that aficionado's won't drink the wine before it has had sufficient time to age. The title was a reference to the age of the wine, not to the age of the wine drinker.
Overall, it would have been a not very joke had the title been referencing drink
Re:AWESOME!!!! (Score:2)