Wine 1.0 — Uncorked After 15 Years

pshuke writes "After 15 years of development, Wine version 1.0 has been released. Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix. While perfect windows compatibility has not yet been achieved, full support for Photoshop CS2, Excel Viewer 2003, Word Viewer 2003 and PowerPoint Viewer 2003 have been among the goals prior to the release. For further information about supported applications, head over to the appdb. Get it (source) while it's hot."

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Don't forget the main commercial sponsor

[cerberusss]

Don't forget the main commercial sponsor CodeWeavers [codeweavers.com]. Alexandre Julliard, one of the leading developers of Wine, now works for them. Their main product is CrossoverOffice, which regularly snapshots the Wine branch and then does bugfixing on it. Then they charge $40 for a solid and stable version, and include a GUI to make installing IE and other applications a cinch.

It's a small shop and very sympathetic. They also read Slashdot. Jeremy, the CEO, is active here as user jeremy_white [slashdot.org]. Befriend him [slashdot.org] to let his comments show up as +5.

Disclaimer: I'm just a happy customer since version 4 (about 5 years ago).

Re:What will interest me is

[cerberusss]

The chaps at Sparx Systems make software and have designed their UML tools to be compatible with Crossover Office, the commercial Wine variant: http://www.sparxsystems.com/support/faq/ea_on_linux.html [sparxsystems.com].

For others, I would advise to check whether your favorite application is in CodeWeaver's compatibility database [codeweavers.com]. This database is maintained pretty well.

Re:What will interest me is

[daveisadork]

REAPER [reaper.fm] already lists Wine as a supported platform.

Re:I would really like to try this out

[Anpheus]

Or using the compatbility modes designed for that purpose.

To be honest, I've only ever had to run one or two programs with those compatibility modes.

Re:I would really like to try this out

[Bob-taro]

Anybody know where I can get the Win32 binaries?

There actually is a win32 binary version of wine that runs in cygwin. They say it was created as an additional test of the code's portability, and for some other reasons that I can't remember right now. Funny but TRUE!

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[AndyCR]

If one of those days is a doc from your boss that either looks great on you computer and not on his or good on his and bad on yours. Could cause the question on why you are using that free crap.

If Office 2007 works anything like the previous versions, the documents will look completely different on different computers anyway. Document consistency from MSO to OOO is the least of your worries. Citing http://ancaluca.blogspot.com/2007/09/please-dont-send-me-doc-attachments.html [blogspot.com] , http://www.goldmark.org/netrants/no-word/attach.html#tth_sEc1.8 [goldmark.org] , and others.

Re:What will interest me is

[PRMan]

But Wine and Mono don't require a commercial license and virtualization does. So while it may "seem" the same while running the application, there is a cost difference (unless you are pirating Windows).

Re:Slightly offtopic question

[TheRaven64]

If you want a really ugly hacky 'solution', then configure your VM with a printer which prints to a file, and export this as a network share. Then set up two printers in CUPS, one which takes postscript input and sends it to the printer shared by the VM and another which takes the resulting file and sends it as raw data to the printer. It's ugly as hell, but it should work.

Re:What will interest me is

[SanityInAnarchy]

There's a cost difference with virtualization. There's also a difference in boot times (2-5 seconds with Wine vs a whole XP boot with virtualization), in performance (wrapped FS API is very likely faster than virtual hard disk on top of a real FS, for instance), and in RAM usage (duh).

Vista API technologies are not even on the radar, and have the potential to shake up the next generation of application development. (Search Channel9 on WPF .NET 3.5 SP1 for some interesting demos of how far WPF has already gone in just a year.)

If WPF .NET is the future, Mono is already on that job -- and Mono can, in theory, be better than Wine, as .NET was at least half-assedly designed to be portable.

Keep in mind, also, that there's a whole class of people who only need one or two killer apps to work. Sometimes it's something recent (Photoshop); often it's something like an old version of QuickBooks, or some obscure app that no one makes anymore. So if Wine runs legacy apps well, that's a very good start.

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[Ultra64]

Crossover pays the salaries of the people who work on wine

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[Ultra64]

That is a bug in X windows, it will be fixed in an upcoming release

Re:site is dead

[Rapidity]

Afraid so. Care to help me spread the link [sourceforge.net]?

Re:Quickbooks?

[technoid_]

Quickbooks now has web based Qucikbooks Online, which with IE4Linux, you can access.

This is the solution I found for my business.

technoid_

Re:Not really

[linuxrocks123]

Actually, the original purpose was dual: they wanted to provide a way to natively run Windows binaries, and also provide a method for porting Win32 applications to Linux. Both efforts are still ongoing, but there's never been much uptake for the porting approach. WordPerfect 2000 for Linux was the flagship success of the porting project, and it was years ago (and the native WordPerfect 8.x was better anyway). I think it's fair to say that the main goal of Wine at this point is to provide a method to run Win32 applications natively in Linux, and that a secondary goal is to provide a porting library.

Re:What will interest me is

[Koiu Lpoi]

I suggest you google "VMWare Fusion". It's a Mac VM designed to run Windows, fully, seamlessly, and (in the latest beta versions, which you can download for free (for the time being)), full support of DirectX.

Re:I would really like to try this out

[Doug Neal]

Remote desktop is kind of a joke in comparison.

Remote desktop is just better. Vastly more usable on low-bandwidth (or high latency) links and when your session drops out for some reason you can reconnect and not have lost everything you were working on.

If you haven't already, I recommend taking a look at NX [nomachine.com] (proprietary with free edition) or FreeNX [berlios.de] (GPL). RDP/VNC style remote access to Unix and Linux servers, but actually better and faster than both, especially on lower quality links. It uses a combination of SSH tunneling and X11 protocol compression. Very easy to set up and use, too.

Re:What will interest me is

[linuxrocks123]

Virtualization still requires running actual Windows, just inside an emulator. WINE allows running Windows programs without doing that.

OpenGL isn't in the Linux kernel right now; it's done through an X11 library. That could be extended if it's needed, but I'm not sure it is; it's possible to play Q3 in Linux while also running Compiz.

Re:I would really like to try this out

[joshv]

Remote desktop actually works over broadband/VPN. X11, even with compression, is virtually useless at any broadband speeds I have available.

Re:What will interest me is

[Hatta]

rTorrent. I don't know any others because I stopped looking when I found rTorrent.

Re:What will interest me is

[Baloo Ursidae]

ktorrent, and bittorrent itself.

Re:What will interest me is

[amrik98]

Deluge [deluge-torrent.org] works great and has a similar UI [deluge-torrent.org] to uTorrent. I used to use utorrent in wine until I found it and haven't looked back since.

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[Lumpy]

In a normal business year, 99% compatibility is much closer to 1 day something going wrong

Then Microsoft Office is only 85% compatible and stable to it's self. when we did a office 2000 to Office 2003 rollout we had at LEAST 10 failures a day. Images reversed, bad formatting, scripts not running, etc.... Office 2007 has even WORSE compatibility.

So the difference between OO.o and Office are the SAME as the difference between office and office and office.

So I'd rather spend $0.00 on OO.o and the rest on training than the insane $499.00 a license for Office 2007 (corp discount) and the SAME MONEY on training.

Re:I would really like to try this out

[pato101]

X is the worst way imaginable to do graphics (a giant frame buffer).

Stop trolling about what you don't know about!.
X is not a giant frame buffer. It has vector operations, combined with raster operations.
X11 is a wrong option over high latency links because it is designed to provide a very high performance at low latency ones.
For high latency links, use NX which is much faster than VNC + compression (being VNC a giant frame buffer, is faster than X11 because the latency issues).
NX does compression, but most importantly solves the latency issues by cumulating requests avoiding roundtrips.

Virtualization requires a Windows license

[Anonymous Coward]

People who say "virtualization makes wine obsolete" are mistaken. Wine represents freedom from Windows and the Microsoft tax. Running a copy of Windows inside a virtual machine represents continued dependence on Microsoft, and means continuing to pay the Microsoft tax.

Re:FINALLY!

[Lennie]

OK, I'll bite, straight from the Synaptic package manager (and I think it's a pretty good explanation):

Microsoft Windows Compatibility Layer (Binary Emulator and Library)
Wine is a compatibility layer for running Windows applications on Linux.
Applications are run at full speed without the need of cpu emulation. Wine
does not require Microsoft Windows, however it can use native system dll
files in place of its own if they are available.

This package includes a program loader for running unmodified Windows executables
as well as the Wine project's free version of the Windows API for running programs
ported from Windows.

  Homepage: http://www.winehq.org/ [winehq.org]

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[rmcd]

It depends on what you're doing and with whom you're working. For example, the equation editor changed [uwaterloo.ca] between 2003 and 2007. If you create a document with equations using the native 2007 editor, there is no way for a 2003 user to edit the document. It's not a matter of the file format, the ability to edit that kind of equation simply doesn't exist in 2003. And similarly, 2003 equations are not readily edited in 2007 unless you find the old editor and make it available. So it's a mess, but upgrading everyone is one way to get compatibility going forward. Keeping everyone in 2003 is another solution. But, I mean, WTF?? Who makes decisions like this? I read the blogs from the Microsoft programmers [msdn.com] about the new equation editor and my jaw hit the floor. They're goofing around with half-implementing things (such as equation numbering) that LaTeX nailed 20 years ago. They should be ashamed.

It's as if a kindergartner was in charge of the release process.

Re:FINALLY!

[dtremenak]

Have you considered using a distribution-neutral package format like autopackage [autopackage.org]? There are solutions written specifically for developers in your situation. Not everyone needs to build packages in native formats; really those are mostly for central repositories. If you're not distributing your app through a central repository, there's no reason not to use something like autopackage.

Re:What will interest me is

[bberens]

I can name 1 app that advertises that it runs under wine. It's called Picasa, and that's produced by one of the largest firms in the industry. Thanks for playing though.

Dear Mr. Gates:

[bondjamesbond]

I think Excel 2003 is swell. I even think there is a demand for Excel on Linux. Could you pretty please with a cherry on top port Office 2007 and below to run natively on my Ubuntu 8.04 box? Thanks.

Love, Tux

P.S.
I think you're swell, too.

Re:What will interest me is

[garett_spencley]

Virtualization still requires running actual Windows, just inside an emulator.

I don't mean to nitpick, but just for the sake of accuracy, emulation and virtualization are not the same thing.

Virtualization is the process of abstracting computer resources in order to hide it's physical characteristics from it's users. IE: running more than one operating system simultaneously by "virtually splitting" the hardware. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization [wikipedia.org]

Emulation is software "pretending" to be hardware. An emulator is a stand-alone application that loads the binaries, interprets them and translates the instructions to it's native hardware. Another example of emulation may be software that tries to mimick the behaviour of another application or system (xterm is a good example). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulation [wikipedia.org]

For further clarity: you can not run, for example, SNES games on an x86 system using virtualization because the games were not written / compiled for the x86 processor. You can run an SNES emulator, however, that understands the SNES instruction set and translates it to x86 instructions. For this reason virtualization is much faster than emulation since the instructions run natively and there is no translation involved (but there are other uses for virtualization as well, such as making one system behave as many for security purposes etc.).

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Re:1.0 premature, Wine does not work well

[LinuxLlama]

There is a program for linux called "Penggy" that allows you to use AOLs internet.

Irfanview as well

[cbhacking]

Irfanview (http://irfanview.com) also advertises that it works under Wine. From the FAQ:

Q: Can I use IrfanView on Linux?
A: Yes. There is no native-Linux version of IrfanView. However, you can use IrfanView in conjunction with Linux programs like WINE, Windows Linux emulators and Linux-based virtual machines.

It would be great to see more of this kind of thing.

No, I'm not affiliated with Irfanview in any way other than being a long-time user.

Re:What will interest me is

[TheNetAvenger]

don't see that this is true, you can open multiple OpenGL apps at the same time with no problems at all. OpenGL already enables sharing 3D GPU resources between multiple apps.

In your example, DirectX also does this...

However you are arguing that cooperative multi-tasking (applicaiton controlled locking) is just as good as pre-emptive multi-tasking (OS controlled scheduling/locking)...

I think most would agree that Applications 'self' managing themselves in a cooperative multi-tasking method is a horrible solution when compared to an OS controlled multi-tasking solution (ie. pre-emptive, etc.)

When you have EVERY application using 3D aspects or using GPU functions for the UI, for physics, to simple 2D acceleration through the 3D GPU side, which happens every second in Vista, then depending on Application yeilding like OpenGL and DirectX already provide would be a nightmare.

When you have every application dipping into the GPU, you need the OS handling the scheduling or things get ugly really quick.

Re:Office 2007 runs on Wine 1.0 too.

[David Gerard]

Buying Crossover is an excellent way to directly support the Wine project - they donate a lot of the code and directly employ a lot of the developers.