Wine Goes 64-Bit With Wine64 385
G3ckoG33k writes "Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a popular way to run Windows programs on Linux, and it has an impressive compatibility list. After 15 years of development it reached version 1.0 a few months ago. Now, Wine developer Maarten Lankhorst has succeeded in running 'Hello World' in 64-bit, natively! The 64-bit variety is unexpectedly named Wine64."
Re:LUK (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh. You can use unmodified Windows libs in WINE too.. the point, that you obviously missed, is that you can run Windows apps without Windows libs (or Windows) using WINE.
impressive compatibility list (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that impressive, unless all you want to do is game. If adding an application to its compatibility list is just a popularity contest, and it seems that is all that it is, of course the fan boys interested in games will vote the most. Others will just use the 'other' operating system to run applications that they need to use in order to make a living (since they won't be able to outvote fanatic gamers). Linux/Gnu has to relax more, not less, in order to allow people to NOT have to rely on some emulator or flaky reverse engineering to make business tools work. Relax on APIs so that it is easier to port business applications over to Linux. Until that time there will never be a 'year of the Linux desk top'. People just want to use their tools, not build them.
Re: impressive compatibility list (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's great! Because bugs are squashed so much faster and features are tested immediately. It's up to distributions to act like a "buffer" between this and the end users.
Besides, there are absolutely no ABI problems with open-source programs. And if you respond by saying that Linux needs this closed-source binaries then again, you would understand Linux wrong. We manage pretty good ourselves.
Re: impressive compatibility list (Score:1, Insightful)
Not only is it not impressive, it's not even a compatibility list. It is a list of applications people would like to run with Wine. That is, applications that currently do not run (well).
Re: impressive compatibility list (Score:5, Insightful)
Games are the most popular things for running in wine, because they are the biggest thing generally missing on the systems that run wine...
For most other types of app there are linux native versions which run better than alien binaries running under wine.
Re:LUK (Score:1, Insightful)
Isn't that pretty much what Lindows/Linspire was/is?
In the distant future (Score:4, Insightful)
most apps will run on most platforms without extra work. Or so I hope (desktop or notebook, don't see a way to make a destop app fit on a phone w/o work). They'll have an interpreted code, like lisp, which gets compiled (once, not at runtime) for whatever specific platform it's actually running on. It can be fast, doesn't have to be slow this way.
So it won't actually be like a script. Java tried to be this universal gateway, but it just never really took off for real apps like a language should. Various libraries like QT attempted to overcome the problem. Then there is the POSIX standard, which wouldn't be bad if it was really followed.
I just feel it's ridiculous in this day and age being tied to windows/unix/os x/some operating system because of an app made for it. It seems backwards. It's like being tied to route 66 because that's the only road your car will drive on.
Re:LUK (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know why they modded you as a troll. -1 ignorant maybe but I don't think you were trolling.
That being said, you can get what you want by doing a LFS or Linux from scratch. You will need at least one shell environment and most likely a desktop environment. It doesn't have to be the somewhat large gnome of KDE. You will probably need the kernel headers too seeing how you will need to compile a few things.
You can probably get already by doing an install of something like Mandriva or whatever and during the install, chose the custom, deselect the KDE and GNome environments and going with something like XFCE or something. Make sure none of the servers get installed and so on. Then install wine and go.
You should be able to cut that install down quite a bit. Especially seeing how when I do an install with a few of the servers up and running, I don't even read the 4-5 gig size unless your counting the swap partition.
My guess is that your pretty new to Linux. At least new enough that you probably rely on package managers and stuff. That's fine, there is nothing wrong with that. However, the more you start breaking away from that, the more you will realize that it probably wouldn't be that hard to role your own just like you wanted. It might even be easier if you stayed away from the vanilla kernels and went with one from a distro your already somewhat familiar with. My first Linux from scratch was a customer Mandrake 8.1 setup and I was able to keep all the drake.tools that I was used to using that made things a lot easier.
Who really uses it though ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time I read about Wine, I shrug and/or roll my eyes. I've tried many times to use it, but it simply does not work for the handful of Windows apps I actually need. I gave it another try just a few months ago, and I was again left high and dry, so I turned yet again to virtual machines. At this point, I have stopped caring about the project.
For the inevitable flamers among you, here's the short list of Windows apps I need, that Wine fails to support:
- Photoshop CS3
- Office 2007
- MSIE 6/7
IE6 runs, sure, but leaks memory like there's no tomorrow, so I have to kill -9 it after a few minutes lest I face a swap-spiral of doom. And don't try to tell me to use The Gimp and OO.o, I don't need "A photo editor" and "An office suite", I need those specific apps because those are the formats my peers and clients use. If it were just me in my little bubble, I'd be quite happy with unbranded alternatives, but my rent doesn't pay itself.
Now one would think that these major apps would be high on the priority list, as I'm hopefully not the only (commercial) web guy trying to use Linux as a serious desktop, and getting them to run perfectly would effectively make Windows redundant for a large number of people, not just web devs. I find it puzzling that Wine can run something like World of Warcraft, but not MS Outlook. Don't get me wrong, I loves me some Warcrack, but it doesn't pay my bills.
Re:Who really uses it though ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Office 2007 actually installs and run here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDmc4fG2AJM [youtube.com] and here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48SjVdUTwdo [youtube.com]
Re:bad move (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't agree w/ Eric on this one. The shift from 32-bit to 64-bit systems has been darn near seamless as compared to previous transitions. That's a far cry from the 8-to-16 jump or the 16-to-32 jump.
Honestly, most people can't tell that they've shifted from 32-bit to 64-bit. If there wasn't a dialog box or a sticker that told them they'd switched, they wouldn't know.
Now this wouldn't be /. without a bad car analogy. Going from 8-bit to 16-bit was like going from horse-drawn buggies to the early Model Ts--a big change. Going from 16-bit to 32-bit was like going from these early, slow cars to the more recognizable cars of the 30s onward. Cars that actually had starters and drove at reasonable speeds. Each step provided a noticeable difference in the travel experience and it brought with it a whole new round of infrastructure requirements.
Going from 32-bit to 64-bit is like going from a gasoline engine to a hybrid. Sure, it's a change in the underlying mechanism, but it doesn't fundamentally change the driving experience all that much.
Re:Thank God. (Score:2, Insightful)
in some ways this is typical of the solution to many linux problems - you "just" need to type these 3 random looking commands on the command line, twiddle 2 other random options and then your problems are "probably" fixed.
Linux users in general are quite happy to do this, but joe bloggs who just wants to play his computer game will go "wtf - this just worked when i had windows".
Linux is great when it works (and once things are set up correctly it stays working) but at times you need to be quite technically minded to get it going to begin with.
I feel that this is the biggest hindrance to widespread adoption of linux. The problems I had installing (3 different distro's live cd's didn't like my ide/sata drive mix; it took me a good portion of a weekend to get a working system) meant that my brother didn't bother looking at Linux, even when windows vista threw a bunch of problems at him.
Re:Who really uses it though ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who really uses it though ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Now one would think that these major apps would be high on the priority list, as I'm hopefully not the only (commercial) web guy trying to use Linux as a serious desktop, and getting them to run perfectly would effectively make Windows redundant for a large number of people, not just web devs. I find it puzzling that Wine can run something like World of Warcraft, but not MS Outlook. Don't get me wrong, I loves me some Warcrack, but it doesn't pay my bills.
If you can't use the Linux native alternatives to Photoshop CS3, Office 2007, MSIE 6/7 under Wine you should use Windows, or consider something like the VMware/Parallels simulators. That's what most Linux users I know do. If you simply can't stand the sight of Windows the only other alternative would be OS X where you at least get native CS 3 and MS Office. Wine is a third party implementation of the Windows API created without any help from Microsoft and even the repackaged versions like CrossOver Office [codeweavers.com] don't support MISE and Office 2007 all that well. This should not surprise anybody, for most Linux users Office 2007 and MISE aren't high on the priorities list.
Re:LUK (Score:3, Insightful)
Kudos (Score:5, Insightful)
For asking about something which you are unfamiliar.
Such an attitude is refreshing, usually you just run into folks like the AC below who are a-holes.
However the link provided down below in this thread is a great place to start reading. Have fun!
Re:Thank God. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:LUK (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:LUK (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows drivers tend to include far more crap than Linux drivers. Trivial example: Somehow, every printer manufacturer thinks they need their own special, branded, loaded-with-features control panel tab. On Linux, a printer driver is a PPD -- everything else is done in a printer-independent way. ...On second though, there's 112 megs just in kernel modules on my latest kernel, and it keeps three kernels worth of modules -- there's your 300+ megs right away.
Re:LUK (Score:3, Insightful)
Look, it's difficult to get a hard drive now less than 80 gigs. Even with an EEE PC, that's still a good 4-8 gigs. Oh noes, 300 megs -- that's enough to hold two Naruto episodes!
If that's what you're wanting, Gentoo isn't going to help you. LFS might, but it'd be kind of pointless -- you'll need much more space to download, compile, unpack, and assemble everything than it would take to simply install that Ubuntu-minimal.
I understand the point is to run a stripped-down system, but as Shikaku says, it's probably a lot of drivers -- in other words, a lot of code you won't necessarily need. The point of this exercise was to have something which would boot quickly and run quickly, not necessarily something that saves you a few megs of disk space.
Re:Who really uses it though ? (Score:3, Insightful)
This should not surprise anybody, for most Linux users Office 2007 and MSIE aren't high on the priorities list.
According to Codeweaver's Top Lists [codeweavers.com] Internet Explorer 7 has 294 votes and $3866.44 pledges (rank 3 and 11). Microsoft Office 2007 has 219 votes and pledges of $9026.44 (rank 5 and 1) respectively. I would not call that minor.
Re:LUK (Score:3, Insightful)
If, on the other hand, RAM is short but hard drive space is available, install Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux.
If, on the other hand, RAM is short and hard drive space is short, you need to find some way of compiling just the modules you need for that piece of hardware. Let me explain why those minimal installations are so big, they need to hold drivers for all possible hardware. Take my
Re: impressive compatibility list (Score:3, Insightful)
That's BS, and you know it.
They have not yet achieved 100% compatibility with Win32, and therefore it is natural and proper that they need to produce a compatibility list, because that's useful for people who want to know whether such-and-such a program works or not.
Your C++ analogy is nonsensical. C++ has a well-documented specification, and compliance can be proven by listing how well your compiler conforms to the specification; C++ programs are generally written based on the specification, and rarely take advantage of undocumented quirks of a single specific compiler. This is not remotely comparable to the situation with Windows.
And Wine is much more than a collection of application-specific hacks. I have successfully used it to run proprietary Windows programs that no Wine developer has even heard of; they don't all work, but many run flawlessly.
Re:or just use CodeWeavers CrossOver. (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that it doesn't. Let's check their compatibility database: