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Wine Software Operating Systems Windows

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."
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Wine Goes 64-Bit With Wine64

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  • GCC changes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JohnFluxx ( 413620 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @05:52PM (#26113971)

    Hmm, it required changes to GCC.

    Anyone know why?

  • Wine64??? (Score:5, Funny)

    by brxndxn ( 461473 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @05:54PM (#26113997)

    How the hell are we supposed to know what that means?! I would've named it Beer.

  • LUK (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:02PM (#26114061) Homepage
    Wine introduces quite a big overhead when running memory intensive applications so I think Linux Unified Kernel [wikipedia.org] is what really needs attention. With this project you can use unmodified core Windows libraries thus getting the best possible compatibility.
    • Re:LUK (Score:5, Insightful)

      by QuantumG ( 50515 ) * <qg@biodome.org> on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:05PM (#26114097) Homepage Journal

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        Meh. You can use unmodified Windows libs in WINE too..

        Yes. Thank you for stating the obvious. However, like anyone who would fine Wine useful, Artem obviously cares just as much about speed and compatibility as he would being able to run a program without genuine libraries. As he stated, the overhead is a problem. From my experience, a 4+ second delay launching a single executable is simply not acceptable.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by JackieBrown ( 987087 )

          Really, A 4+ second delay?

          Wine is easy to setup now (winecfg is gui based.) Maybe you should check your setting.

          Programs usually open as quick or quicker than running it in windows (comparing from work and virtual box but I would notice a 4 second wait on apps.)

      • by nurb432 ( 527695 )

        While i agree, another advantage of Wine is that it also isn't tied to Linux, as is LUK.

        Plus it has a bit more history behind it.

    • Re:LUK (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:35PM (#26114379)

      you know what would be really cool? a linux distro that focused *only* on wine, and windows programs.

      i mean the absolute minimum you could possibly have to get a usable wine session - no underlying desktop environment, no python, no perl, no bsh/zsh/csh, no headers, just the kernel, wine, and popular windows freeware like 7-zip, utorrent, ffdshow, media player classic, dvdshrink, firefox.. a complete replacement for windows that actually runs software that people want and are already familiar with.

      no, i don't want to install a 4.5gb distro. i want linux without all the bloat from crap i'll never ever want nor need to run the windows programs i like, and not the painfully different and bizarrely bloated linux versions.

      i'd run this in a heartbeat.

      how sad and hilarious, right now i use nothing but open source software on windows, and my footprint is MUCH less than linux to do the same. i tried to install the smallest linux distro i could and still get a usable wine session.. 1gb worth of software later i'm up to the point that xp can do with 250mb.

      • Re:LUK (Score:5, Funny)

        by David Gerard ( 12369 ) <slashdot AT davidgerard DOT co DOT uk> on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:39PM (#26114413) Homepage
        Winux!
      • Oh do mod up! Shame that you feel obliged to post AC.

        You can quite quickly and easily replace XP+Office with something like Ubuntu and OpenOffice, though. Really not a bad substitute and easy to do, (I've done it for several people). Even the driver support and installation is getting much better.

      • Re:LUK (Score:5, Informative)

        by schnikies79 ( 788746 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @07:06PM (#26114631)

        ReactOS [reactos.org]

        The general idea is similar to what you are looking for. It's nowhere near finished and they have been working on for god knows how long, but who knows. Someday perhaps.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by sumdumass ( 711423 )

        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

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Godji ( 957148 )
          To restate that point somewhat succinctly, try Gentoo. Keep USE flags down to keep dependencies down, and you can make a very lean and mean system. Read the install documentation thoroughly.
          • Re:LUK (Score:5, Funny)

            by sumdumass ( 711423 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @09:08PM (#26115543) Journal

            I almost forgot about Gentoo. That's probably the best idea of all.

            Because of an almost masochistic love for a challenge. I think everyone should at least attempt to role their own kernel and desktop from scratch in an early Slackware type of way. But I think that is just me.

            • It's documentation is one of the bests among distros. They cover not only installation, but deep customization and administration too.

              Every Linux/Unix admin should read/install this at least once.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            Or, if you don't like compiling things for days, start with Ubuntu-minimal or Debian, and add packages you need. It will start barely bootable, and it's up to you to install the rest.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
        Why would you want that? If you want something that is like Windows then go for ReactOS, rather than taking a UNIX-like kernel and strapping WINE on top and avoiding all of the UNIX userland. I believe all of the software you listed runs unmodified on ReactOS, and so do a lot of Windows drivers.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      Recent development versions (1.1.8 and 1.1.9) had some improvements to memory management. Do you know if there still is "quite a big" amount of overhead?

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by mail2345 ( 1201389 )
      You can also go ahead and kidnap the software devs and force them to port the program. That won't have much memory overhead.
    • by Nursie ( 632944 )

      Yes, brilliant, lets all use our windows libraries that we obviously have lying around, obviously have licenses for, and obviously are permitted to by microsoft.

      No thanks, wine without windows is what we need.

  • Does it run (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:04PM (#26114085)
    ...Cygwin? Hah! Tricked you!
  • Huzah! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DoofusOfDeath ( 636671 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:05PM (#26114099)

    I was going to joke that a game I've wanted to work in Wine for a long time, Astral Masters [astralmasters.com], will still not work, but in a more glorious way.

    But that joke felt petty. The truth is, these guys have pulled of something pretty amazing. Congrats, guys.

  • I hope they eventually get Wine working for the PowerPC processors, so I can run some Windows only programs on my PS3...
    • by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:12PM (#26114159) Homepage

      Don't hold your breath, because WINE Is Not an Emulator. Unless you've got some PPC Windows programs around, that is. It doesn't emulate the x86, just intercepts the OS and library calls.

    • by rdwald ( 831442 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:14PM (#26114207)

      Getting Wine to run on a processor architecture not native to Windows would require emulating an x86 processor. Say it with me: Wine Is Not an Emulator.

      • Depending on the app, this might not be a big deal. If all of the interface gobbelty-goo of Word ran native through Wine I don't think that you'd notice much of a performance hit from the non-native bits. I presume it would be similar to the hit taken when running stuff in Rosetta on Intel Macs.

      • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        NT4 ran on the PowerPC, tho there weren't really many apps for it and support was dropped fairly quickly...

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You can use Wine's libraries to recompile Windows applications to run on other architectures, such as PowerPC. But you can't use it to run unmodified Windows binaries on those, since they are native x86 code and an x86-emulator is beyond the scope of WINE. It's chiefly is focused on implementing the APIs.

      • by Gyga ( 873992 )
        Could you run WINE inside a VM that emulated Linux/BSD on an x86 system? Or do VMs work differently than my current understanding.
        • You could. More interestingly was the work done by the Darwine project (which, sadly, didn't get very far) to integrate QEMU as a pure CPU emulator (not the full system mode). This would run the binary code in the emulator, but all of the WINE libraries on the host, compiled for the native architecture. Every call to WINE would need to go via a trampoline, but you'd still be running a lot more native code than emulated for a lot of cases (this is how Apple's Rosetta works, by the way).
          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Guspaz ( 556486 )

            I believe that this is also how Executor worked. It's a (now opensourced) Macintosh emulator that worked by translating Mac toolbox and quickdraw calls into native calls, and emulated the Mac's MC680x0 processor for the rest.

            In that regard, it's very similar to QuickTransit (Rosetta) or Darwine. While compatibility wasn't perfect, it was enormously faster than Basilisk II.

            Executor was eventually largely made irrelevant both by the continuing switch of the Mac to the PowerPC platform, and by the fact that ad

    • It works perfectly! It'll run your Windows NT PPC programs flawlessly!

      (This is actually as true as it is useless.)

    • by DrYak ( 748999 )

      As explained by other /.ers, running Wine on non-x86 architectures would require an additional emulator.

      Darwine [sourceforge.net] - a port of Wine to darwin/mac OS X, does indeed feature such an additional layer :
      it uses a special mode of QEMU initially designed to run linux-on-linux (i.e.: not emulating a complete virtual machine with a full OS running on it, but just run a program alone inside the emulator and pass it calls to the actual OS outside).

      The only problem is that now that Apple have moved to Intel hardware, the

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      You can run wine through qemu. I tried it on an old G4 mac. It was slow.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Matt Perry ( 793115 )

      You're looking for the Darwine project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/darwine/ [sourceforge.net]

  • by theshowmecanuck ( 703852 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:08PM (#26114127) Journal

    impressive compatibility list

    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.

    • by KasperMeerts ( 1305097 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:26PM (#26114305)
      So you want to destroy the very mindset that created Linux in the first place? The kernel is released often and early.
      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: (Score:3, Interesting)

        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.

        Oh, really?

        Here's an idea for a Slashdot poll: "how many binary closed-source Linux drivers do you use?"

        Then again, I guess nvidia & fglrx alone will be enough to make a majority of users.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          Then again, I guess nvidia & fglrx alone will be enough to make a majority of users.

          We're working on that, by the way.

    • by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <bert@NOSpaM.slashdot.firenzee.com> on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:42PM (#26114453) Homepage

      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.

    • You know, if businesses need some functionality in WINE to port their app there's nothing stopping them from paying someone to implement it. Even if it's not an app they wrote. Google paid to have WINE support Photoshop so they could run it on Linux...
  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:12PM (#26114169)
    It looks as though Linux users will have native 64-bit Windows applications before most Windows users.
  • I hope wine (both 32 & 64) puts a dent in microsoft's revenue and userbase...
  • FTA:

    The 64-bit variety is unexpectedly named Wine64.

    The author needs to get out more. If they'd wanted real unexpected, going for Wine9+4i would have been a true eye-opener. It's certainly going to be complex enough...

  • by rolfwind ( 528248 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @07:16PM (#26114729)

    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.

  • Thank God. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Samah ( 729132 ) on Sunday December 14, 2008 @07:22PM (#26114777)

    This is the only reason I gave up on Ubuntu 64. There was a strange bug in Wine to do with application focus that was causing WoW to lose sound occasionally. There was also a patch (which I had no problems applying), but of course I needed to cross-compile to get it to work. I'm really not versed in that enough and so I had no end of problems getting it compiling. My only choice was to wait until the next version of Wine was released and an awesome person would throw it in the Debian repository.

    I may give it another shot now if I can ever get push-to-talk working with Ventrilo. :)

  • by billcopc ( 196330 ) <vrillco@yahoo.com> on Sunday December 14, 2008 @07:24PM (#26114791) Homepage

    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.

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