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Wine Software

New Competition For CodeWeavers: Aclerex 218

Posted by Hemos from the competing-together dept.
Shisha writes "Linux Planet is running a story about a new Wine offspring. Basically the Canadian company Transgaming decided, that their version of Wine, WineX, is good not only for running games, but for other Windows programs too. So why not try to sell it? For marketing reasons they're selling it to corporations under the AclereX name. Their website has a datasheet with more details about what they are actually offering. Unlike CodeWeavers, they don't seem to be targeting individuals at all, they'd rather sell to corporations. So no downloads available, sorry. Still it could speed up Wine developement, which is always good. Wine Weekly News discusses some of the reactions of the original Wine authors."
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New Competition For CodeWeavers: Aclerex More

New Competition For CodeWeavers: Aclerex

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  • Aclerex (Score:5, Funny)

    by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Monday September 01, 2003 @11:31AM (#6844936) Homepage Journal
    Aclerex? Why have they named it as if it werea cream for clearing up acne?

  • huh, isn't transgaming still not giving back? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01, 2003 @11:32AM (#6844939)
    Last I heard, they still hadn't kept their promise to give back to wine stuff they did...
    • Interesting, last I heard the Wine folk decided to change the liscense basically forcing WineX to go its seterape way. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with going from Open Source to Free software, just that it seems the wrong way to handle that situation.

      WineX has a fairly complete version available from CVS. I'm sure there are plenty of stuff they did in that. Intaller and some of their more impressive feats are still proprietary I think, but I would imagine as DX9 becomes the focus, DX8 st
      • Not that there is anything inherently wrong with going from Open Source to Free software,


        Going from a non-copyleft license to a copyleft license is just going between two forms of open source/free software. (Open source and free software is basically two different groups' descriptions for the same thing.)

        (..and I promised myself I wouldn't nitpick any more...)

        • (Open source and free software is basically two different groups' descriptions for the same thing.)

          No, the distinction between them is pivotal to Wine. Under an "open source" license, transgaming can base their product on Wine, enhance it, and sell the modified version without sharing their improvements. Under a "free software" license, transgaming would have to open their enhancements back to Wine.

          So which is better? Ultimately, whichever one is consistent with the Wine developers' desires. But I

          • No, the distinction between them is pivotal to Wine. Under an "open source" license, transgaming can base their product on Wine, enhance it, and sell the modified version without sharing their improvements. Under a "free software" license, transgaming would have to open their enhancements back to Wine.

            Your confused. Even RMS agrees that the BSD licence (and similar) qualify as "Free Software" even though it's not his prefered licnese. The ONLY difference between OSS and FS is the ideals/priorities of t
            • Why don't you read this [gnu.org] and get back to me.
              • It really appears like it's you who haven't read it.

                And how about reading this [gnu.org] (which says that the BSD-license is a free software license) and this [gnu.org], which argues for using a copyleft free software license like the GPL rather than a non-copyleft free software license like the BSD license)? (Emphasis mine.)

                And how come that both the GPL and the BSD license is on the OSI's list of approved licenses [opensource.org]?

                It's because free software and open source are meant to describe the same thing. The two terms are used by tw
    • Well, it was a kind of tricky promise. What they promissed what that when they had xxx subscribers they would release the source. Do they? I seem to remember that they picked a rather high number, and I fully expect that by the time they actually reach that number (if they do) that the promise with be both irrelevant, and kept. But don't hold your breath.

      (OTOH, some of the stuff in what they sell is proprietary to other people, and they'll never have the right to release that. And this info was also i

  • OEM emulation layer? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by heironymouscoward ( 683461 ) <heironymouscowardNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Monday September 01, 2003 @11:33AM (#6844943) Journal
    Allowing Windows software firms to package it with their stuff and say "Runs on Linux"? Is this the point?

    • Re:OEM emulation layer? (Score:5, Informative)

      by robson ( 60067 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @11:40AM (#6844969)
      Allowing Windows software firms to package it with their stuff and say "Runs on Linux"? Is this the point?

      Here's the main blurb from their site:
      AclereX is the industry leader in cross-platform portability enabling Windows applications to run on the Linux desktop. If your organization is considering a move to the Linux desktop, AclereX can provide seamless and transparent support for your enterprise applications.
      Sounds decent enough. "If your business is sick of Windows but dependent upon Windows-only applications, we can make those applications run in Linux."

  • Speed up Wine development? Are you sure? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01, 2003 @11:35AM (#6844951)
    I thought Transgaming took Wine code before the LPGL change, and haven't gone back.

    Do they still contribute to the mainline WINE effort? Has ANY of their code made it back?

    or are we just plugging a closed-source commercial product here?
    • they have returned some stuff, but codeweavers is still a better choise if you want something back in wine. things that wineX donated include SDL frontend, installer support, dcom stuff, some directX stuff every here and there and their experimental shared memory wineserver.

    • You're plugging a closed source product... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Svartalf ( 2997 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @12:10PM (#6845120) Homepage
      Much of what Transgaming is selling is proprietary. Perhaps legitimately so (like the copy protection support...)- but it is still closed source all the same. In some areas, they're ahead of WINE, in others, they're behind.

      Keep these things in mind when you think about all of this, though...

      They were going to only go after the stuff that wasn't getting active ports and actually encourage native porting work. They turned around and came up with that bastardized "port" of The Sims and Kohan- which had issues out of the box in both cases. The Sims WAS going to be a native app and Kohan WAS a native app that had lost the porting company (Timegate got the rights to the Loki port, but they didn't want to wait and find out it's fate- they went with Transgaming.).

      They were going to only work at making Linux gaming possible. Now, they're making game "ports" for Windows and MacOS of console games, but NO Linux versions of the same.

      Would YOU trust this bunch?
      • I've used both CodeWeavers's CrossOver and CrossOver Office products and Transgaming's WineX and I have to say that WineX just sucks in usability compared to CrossOver. CrossOver works very well and is easy enough to use that most average users could figure it out. WineX is troublesome to use and seldom lives up to the promises of Transgaming. It does play some games but not enough to be worth hassling with unless your desperate not to use Windows and desperate to play your games. Last time I tried WineX ha
    • Actually what happened was, was Wine went to the GPL, Transgaming got pissed because it would screw up their buissness model, they got a bunch of OSS developers, who forked Wine and called it Rewind.

  • I don't understand. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Alethes ( 533985 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @11:36AM (#6844956)
    Doesn't encouraging WINE use prevent or at least slow the development of native versions of applications for Unix/Linux? Doesn't it keep people from quickly adopting a different and open application that runs natively? As long as people can comfortably run MS Office in Linux, doesn't that mean they won't bother learning OpenOffice.org? As long as users can run Windows games in WINE, what will encourage game vendors to create native versions of their applications? I could understand if this were a system being used to facilitate migration to open-source solutions, but it seems that quite the opposite is true.

    Give me a clue if I need one.

    • Re:I don't understand. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by HermanAB ( 661181 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @11:46AM (#6844998)
      There are many reasons to use wine. In a business case for instance, a company may have all applications for Linux, except for one or two tax or payrol related thing. In cases like that, wine is a good tool to facilitate migration to Linux.

    • Re:I don't understand. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AvantLegion ( 595806 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @11:51AM (#6845037) Journal
      >> Doesn't encouraging WINE use prevent or at least slow the development of native versions of applications for Unix/Linux?

      No. Tiny market share prevents/slows development of native versions of applications for Unix/Linux.

      • >> Doesn't encouraging WINE use prevent or at least slow the development of native versions of applications for Unix/Linux? No. Tiny market share prevents/slows development of native versions of applications for Unix/Linux.

        ...and to improve on the market share, you need something to get people over to linux.

        its extremely hard for companies (the money holders) to go cold turkey to a completely different OS (than MS-Win).

        Personally I'm only writing stuff for unix/linux and working on transit

    • Re:I don't understand. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nmos ( 25822 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @12:01PM (#6845076)
      Doesn't it keep people from quickly adopting a different and open application that runs natively?

      Lets say we have 2 users, A & B and both would like to move to an Open Source operating system such as Linux however:

      A: Has 1 Win app that they MUST be able to run for one reason or another and is able to run it perfectly under Wine so they they switch to Linux and open source for everything but that 1 app. When it comes time to acquire new hardware or apps. they are asking hardware and software venders for Linux support and are investigating open source applications.

      B: Has 1 Win app that they MUST be able to run for one reason or another and is NOT able to run under Wine so they they keep using Windows. When it comes time to acquire new hardware or apps. they are asking hardware and software venders for Windows support and are ignoring open source applications because they have no experience with them.

      Which one of these users do you think is adding to the demand for OSS software in general and Linux in particular?
      • And user C (me) has 1 Win app that they MUST be able to run for one reason or another, and is NOT able to run under Wine, or under WineX, or Under Win98 et. seq., but only under Win95. And the computers don't support Win95 properly anymore. (It's probably dirver issues.)

        ARRGH! (Well, so I buy a used computer for Win95, and pray that Wine or WineX will get good enough before I can't buy any used computers that will still work. Two projects gives me two chances. I'd prefer Wine, but the odds aren't good.

    • Re:I don't understand. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dcuny ( 613699 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @12:24PM (#6845181)
      There's also Mono [go-mono.org], the Open Source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework.

      The original idea was to implement the Windows.Forms library with some native toolkit. But since it's so dependant on the Microsoft windows model, it turned out they would pretty much have to write it from scratch - or use Wine.

      There's also React OS [reactos.com], an Open Source implementation of Windows NT. They've spent most of their effort over the last couple years working on the core functionality. Now that most of the core is working, they can use Wine libraries as the basis of much of the higher level functionality, instead of writing it from scratch.

      Hrm... the ReactOS site seems to be offline at the moment. From the Google cache of the announcement of stuff due at the end of Augusy:

      • Amongst other features and fixes, this release will include a greatly improved win32k.sys (better, windowing, keyboard support, more routines completed overall), the beginning of an explorer.exe, more controls ported from WINE for user32 (menus, messageboxes and dialogs), greatly improved performance for the standard VGA driver and further work on the NDIS driver.
      More options are better. An Open Source version of NT is certainly a Good Thing(tm).
      • Back in the olden days of DOS and raw VGA graphics programming, the graphics device was simply an area of memory where you set bits. The Windows API along with the Java Swing (Sun) and Java SWT (IBM/Eclipse) seem to have busted this simple thing into three things, the properties and boundaries of which never get properly explained. As far as I can tell they all have an equivalent to 1) a graphics object that allows high-level drawing operations (no setting bits, or if you can it is one bit at a time and v
    • Quite honestly, I've tried OpenOffice on my 800Mhz 64-MB PC, and it is so slooow, that I uninstalled it.

      Koffice is faster, but crashes regularly. I understand, I'm using the older KDE (2.x), because I'm on Debian/Woody; but I had installed KDE 3.0 before, along with it's KOffice, and I was still getting crashes.

      So there is no version of Office for Windows that I am aware of that works well. As long as that is the case, WINE is good for OSS, not bad. That is, if they can get Office working successfully.

      • Re:Until you have a work Office, I'd say no (Score:5, Funny)

        by ErikZ ( 55491 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @02:18PM (#6845577)
        Here's 50$ kid, go get yourself 512MB of RAM.
      • Quite honestly, I've tried OpenOffice on my 800Mhz 64-MB PC, and it is so slooow, that I uninstalled it.

        I was pleasantly surprised with OpenOffice.Org on my Mac G3 "Wallstreet" PowerBook running Yellow Dog Linux 3.0. I don't have tons of RAM (192MB) and the proc is only 233MHz (Basically equiv. to a 466MHz PII) but it ran acceptably.

        I haven't played with KOffice but since OpenOffice works I might not even put any Redmond crap on the PowerBook. OO.O will indeed open/save any but the most complex MS Offi

        • FWIW, OO.o doesn't handle anything that's dependant on VB. This has both it's good and it's bad points (I'd much rather they used Python or Ruby as their scripting language...or at least allowed one to choose them), but it definitely means that some of the projects I wrote at work have no chance of porting successfully. (OTOH, VB is an atrocity looking for a chance to comit itself. So it's easy to make a decent argument against it. But don't say that OO.o can handle all but the most complex MSOffice doc
        • Well, I'm glad to hear that it will work with more RAM. Really. It still won't help me a ton, for a few reasons (abyssmal contracts don't pay squat; computer is a Packard Bell with their own proprietary RAM format, and Packard Bell is defunct) but I'm glad to hear that it really does work. Blah.

          Nor is the Mac advice particularly great for me, though again it's great to hear: We have a PB3400cs (192 MB RAM max, 233 MHz), PB1400c(300 MHz; 16 MB), and PB190c(not PowerPC). We technically don't have our P
          • Well, I'm glad to hear that it will work with more RAM. Really. It still won't help me a ton, for a few reasons (abyssmal contracts don't pay squat; computer is a Packard Bell with their own proprietary RAM format, and Packard Bell is defunct) but I'm glad to hear that it really does work. Blah.

            Packard Hell. My condolences. I mean, really. They made the worst computers ever made. I feel for you.

            Anyway, here's the skinny on your Macs. Yellow Dog Linux will install on your PB3400. As far as the the 1400s

            • I wasn't thinking of getting Office X source; rather, I was thinking that the conversion package (like WINE) from OS-X to Debian might be a ton easier and more reliable. That being the case, one might be able to install a more reliable version of Office X than of Wine+Office ME/Office XP.

      • So what do you think will run faster: MSOffice ($300) or StarOffice on a new processor and a gig of RAM (less than $300). I don't need to remind you that there are other advantages of taking the second option...

    • Doesn't encouraging WINE use prevent or at least slow the development of native versions of applications for Unix/Linux?

      No, the more people who install Linux, and who have no reason to dual-boot into Windows, the more financially viable it is to release software specifically for Linux.

      Look at it this way - best case scenario is everybody in the world switches to Linux and WINE, largely because it runs all their Windows programs they can't live without, what then? Do you think companies will still wri

    • Free Software is about freedom. You are free to use Wine or not. You are free to support it or not. If you don't agree with the project, it probably won't do anybody any good for you to tell them about it; just use or develop Free alternatives to the proprietary Win32 programs. Even RMS doesn't knock the Wine project (there have been debates about the license, which were resolved), though its goals clear conflict with the FSF's.

      I, like you, prefer to use all Free Software. Since there is Free Software to f
  • Seems like there are already plenty of adequate ways to run Windowz apps under Linux. Just none of them are free software! Will the vanilla Wine ever catch up?
  • I wonder if it will be any better than Crossover's Office and Plugin products.

  • GPL? (Score:3, Informative)

    by teklob ( 650327 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @11:38AM (#6844964)
    Are they allowed to do that when the majority of their code they didn't even write? They have been making it harder and harder to get WineX code too. First they removed it from debian and then Gentoo, and I haven't been able to get the source from CVS since then. I'm not sure what license wine was using when they forked but I dont think that this is allowed, is it?

    • Re:GPL? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01, 2003 @11:47AM (#6845008)
      The Wine source did allow it. The fork was caused by the WINE core group choosing to switch to a GPL license--something TransGaming couldn't allow. The BSD-licensed WINE is still maintained, called ReWind. Some new WINE patches are dual licensed so they get put in here, but the gap is growing. TransGaming occasionally syncs against ReWind and allows WINE to pull anything they want out of it (it is BSD licensed, so you can relicense it under GPL if you like).

      The packages pulled from Debian and Gentoo is an interesting issue. Basically, Debian and Gentoo are allowedto create packages by the license, but if they do so, TrangGaming will stop contributing to the ReWind project, so everyone loses. It's a tight balance and they've been accused of licensing their code (to ReWind) on a license they don't really mean.

      But technically, so far, they're in the clear. The ReWind tree is missing some of the more interesting TransGaming bits--SafeDisc support, for example--which they're afraid of releasing because the US might do to them what they did to Sklyarov next time they have a booth anywhere in the US.
      • I just looked over the rewind CVS on Sourceforge, and the most recent entry I saw was over a year old. Most were over 2 years old, and some as old as 4 years old.

        Either it's working nearly perfectly, or "occasionally" means when a piece of code is becomming irrelevant. Or they just aren't doing much development. Take your pick. (Or come up with a different reason.)

    • Re:GPL? (Score:4, Informative)

      by i.r.id10t ( 595143 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @12:02PM (#6845080)
      Hard? Just for grins, I decided to try Wine(X) last night for the first time in a looong time to see if a Windows game my 3 year old likes would work. Took 2 commands and some wait time for download.

      cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.winex.sourceforge.net:/cv sroot/winex login
      cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.winex.sourceforge.net:/cv sroot/winex co wine

      Straight from the webpage you get afer the license agreement.

  • Modern company names (Score:5, Funny)

    by random_rabbit ( 647072 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @11:39AM (#6844967)
    Why does every new company or product have to invent a new word? "Aclerex"? What was so wrong with "Wine Ecks and Sons, Est. 1832, Purveyors of Fine Software and Noted Not-Emulators"?

  • The All In One comment (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Telex4 ( 265980 )
    Just to save everyone lots of comments... ;-)

    WINE is bad because it will discourage people from writing native applications. Native applications are important because they provide a reason for people to use GNU/Linux or *BSD wholesale, rather than flit between a Free OS and Windows. They also mean more innovation and more investment in Free Software, and more Free Software available. Will The GIMP just drop off the map once Photoshop is reliably supported? Will we no longer see native ports of games, with

  • AclereX/ActiveX lawsuit? (Score:3, Funny)

    by rollingcalf ( 605357 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @11:43AM (#6844990)
    It won't be long before Microsoft sues them over the name similarity...

  • Aclerex? (Score:5, Funny)

    by SlashChick ( 544252 ) <erica@e[ ]a.biz ['ric' in gap]> on Monday September 01, 2003 @11:45AM (#6844994) Homepage Journal
    For some reason, my brain keeps wanting to make this name into some variant of "Accel-".... as in Accelerex. At least then the name is a sort of verb... but "AclereX" sounds like some sort of weird drug. I mean, ACK-luhr-ex? With a capital X? I don't get it. Why must open-source products be plagued by such terrible marketing?

    Oh, and on their front page, they've titled it "Enterprise Migrationware." Please, for the love of God, hire a marketing staff. This sounds like a bunch of geeks getting together and saying "What would PHBs like? Oh, I know, let's make a new buzzword! How about 'enterprise migrationware'? Because, see, it has 'enterprise' in it... and we've added 'ware' to the end..."

    No. Please do not name your product with the dot-com bullsh*t generator [dack.com]; it's not supposed to be used in the place of a marketing team. Take this one back to the drawing board.
    • my brain keeps wanting to make this name into some variant of "Accel-".... as in Accelerex

      Yeah, same thing here. Bizarre Latin-sounding names went out of style around May 2002, this is just terrible marketing. How much did this name cost them? Sheesh. There is a perfectly good industry-standard IEEE-approved naming technology, the TLA.

      Besides, I still can't figure out who this product is meant for: companies trying to move other people's software to Linux, or companies that make Windows software?

      Per
      • I would say it is for companies who have spent a bundle making Windows software for in-house use and now wish to run it on Linux.
        • Cool, this might work for our company. All we would need is emulation for COM+, ASP, VBScript, MTS, IIS, SQLServer and oh, there is also a little Win32 thrown in there too. Well, at least we didn't write the whole thing using MSWord macros, as I saw one of our (ex)clients doing. Using the French version of MSOffice, with all the macro names translated. Would AcleretX ^h^h^hAccelerX ^H^H^H AccxexxxX (aaagh, my brain is dissolving!) help... perhaps I'll give them a call.

  • It's got to be said - (Score:5, Funny)

    by (void*) ( 113680 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @11:47AM (#6845009)
    Old WINE and new bottles. Nothing to see here, move along folks.

  • woopty-doo (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Stinking Pig ( 45860 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @11:50AM (#6845027) Homepage
    CodeWeavers: nice folks with a strong customer service orientation. They produce a product that is generally quite reliable, they'll give your money back if it won't do what it's supposed to, and they have a decent support system.

    Transgaming: MIA, zero customer service orientation. The product worked for one of the fifteen games I tried with it, the support forum is very difficult to use, and the emails I sent trying to find a human went unanswered.

    I'm sure that some people have had opposite experiences, but after my attempts to deal with these two companies I have no interest in giving money to Transgaming. I'd buy a Crossover Games though.

    • Re:woopty-doo (Score:4, Informative)

      by jfunk ( 33224 ) <jfunk@roadrunner.nf.net> on Monday September 01, 2003 @01:05PM (#6845332) Homepage
      I have the same experience. Everyone at Codeweavers are amazing and they actually listen to their customers.

      Transgaming is a different story. I bought a year's subscription and went out and bought Civ 3 and Black and White, both of which are "officially supported." Neither worked acceptably and their support guys closed my support requests without actually helping me.

      Basically, I bought a year's subscription without having used their product for anything. I was seriously ripped off.

      I've heard from other SuSE users that WineX won't run at all on SuSE 8.2 and that TG doesn't seem to care. I'm sure that kind of attitude will go over really well with their "business" customers.

    • CodeWeavers is helping Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      In fact, in my opinion, CodeWeavers may even be working with Microsoft.

      CodeWeavers' most promoted product is Crossover Office, which allows MS Office to run on Linux.

      Does this help Linux and hurt Microsoft? No . . . quite the opposite, in fact. Microsoft wants Linux users running MS Office, because that keeps them locked in to Microsoft file formats while Microsoft prepares the .Net version of Office.

      On the Xandros home page [xandros.com], the main heading states:

      > Xandros Desktop now runs Microsoft Office XP
      • Notice how they don't say "for running Lotus Notes," or "for running Windows applications." They only talk about MS Office.

        Sure because the majority of Windows users feel (rightly or not) that MS Office is a must have for them. Even a lot of people running MS Works or Word Perfect THINK they are running MS Office.

        Or if they hacked the calls, why hasn't Microsoft sued CodeWeavers under the DMCA

        On what grounds? Unless MS has started encrypting their Office CDs I don't see what legal leg they'd have t
      • Microsoft will never port Office to Linux (never being a very long time) because if they do, it gives legitimacy to Linux, and it also allows businesses to switch easier (some people can't get by with OpenOffice b/c it's not 100% compatible.)

        Microsoft most certainly does not like Wine, or the ability to run Windows programs in Linux. They even threatened to sue some Wine people who wanted to demo Visual Foxpro (iirc) running under Linux in Wine, because it demonstrates the feasibility of running their sof

  • Extra commas? (Score:3, Funny)

    by abischof ( 255 ) * <alexNO@SPAMspamcop.net> on Monday September 01, 2003 @11:54AM (#6845048) Homepage
    Basically the Canadian company Transgaming decided, that their version of Wine, WineX, is good not only for running games, but for other Windows programs too.
    Why is it that some authors, decide to insert commas all over, the place? ;) (admittedly, some of those commas are necessary, but not all of them)

  • Speeding up development how? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @12:04PM (#6845095)
    Still it could speed up Wine developement, which is always good.

    Or it could hopelessly fragment Wine even further. I've run the commercial version of Wine, and it behaved completely differently from the open-source version, which I found to be massively broken(impossible to get set up correctly). It --appears-- that from a useability standpoint for the end user, none of the commercial stuff has made it back to the open-source project. Why would Aclerex have any interest in fixing the open-source version of Wine to work better? Talk about conflict of interest...

    • Yes, that hit the nail on the head.

      It seems that Wine will forever be in a state of "not quite there" and all the missing pieces of the jigsaw to make it actually work will be proprietry extentions.

      Aclerex is not the real competition for Wine. Real competition is when some bright spark codes all the missing pieces as open source. However, I'm in two minds about this since Codeweaver's product is not really that expensive and it solved a problem for me. I absolutely had to get Windows Media Player to
      • Oh, Wine will get there one day. It basically boils down to a matter of manpower. More to the point, with a bit of elbow grease you can improve Wine to the point at which it can run nearly any app - this isn't so great for end users who aren't developers and who want to use Linux at home, but it's often an acceptable scenario for businesses who want their custom software to run on it, and can afford a hacker for a bit.

        Most of the problems people have with Wine these days boil down to one or two "hotspot"

        • The way I do it is: buy one license of CrossOver Install one machine the way I like it, and than take the "fake_windows" directory as a template for other machines. In windows all the big fuss installation boils down to: "what is your registry like" well that one is prepared by CrossOver.
          Also a regspy On native windows can do the trick for many applications. That and the files from Program\ files (and system32) so you see CrossOver is good for learning and then Original wine is good for the rest of the hous

    • Re:Speeding up development how? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Codeweavers returns all their code to Wine. Not all changes make it back in since some stuff is way too hacky. That doesn't mean that you can't get their changes, they offer a source version of crossover (without their tools ofcourse).
    • none of the commercial stuff has made it back to the open-source project. Why would Aclerex have any interest in fixing the open-source version of Wine

      Do you realize that you are complaining that Wine, a program to run closed-source Windows binaries, isn't completely open source?

      RMS would be proud.

  • Sounds like... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Saberwind ( 50430 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @12:05PM (#6845099)
    ...the latest designer drug name

    Warning: Women who might be pregnant should not take Aclerex, or handle broken tablets...

  • A customer's take (Score:2, Informative)

    by ThoreauHD ( 213527 )
    I have paid transgaming for about a year now. I've been testing their software and seeing how they operate. Since transgaming's stance on packaging the source code of winex has come to light, I have since neglected my subscription.

    I was able to play, in 1 years time, WarCraft 3 on 1 particular version of WineX. I don't recall which one, but the successive version broke even that. I tested all the games they purported to support. I have alot of games.

    Their forums are forums.. nothing spectacular. The

  • Could make many migration plans "fall into place" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by WoTG ( 610710 ) on Monday September 01, 2003 @02:36PM (#6845648) Homepage Journal
    This seems like a good idea to me. There is bound to be a market for quick, specialized, porting services to Linux. A lot of companies are looking at moving to Linux on at least some of their desktops but in many cases there are one or two in-house or 3rd party niche software products that will prevent migration from happening. For in-house products, it might not make financial sense to rewrite the program. And smaller niche software houses often don't have the time or the Linux market size for their products to justify a "proper" port.

    Enter a firm like Aclerex who comes along and says "we can port this for x dollars", suddenly a lot of migration plans fall into place.

    Of course this all depends on the cost and effectiveness of the folks at Aclerex.
  • "Still it could speed up Wine developement, which is always good."

    Really? Did I miss something? Has Transgaming ever released their source to the open source community?

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