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Wine Open Source Windows Linux

Wine 5.0 Released (bleepingcomputer.com) 60

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Wine 5.0 has been released today and contains over 7,400 bug fixes and numerous audio and graphics improvements that will increase performance in gaming on Linux. With the release of Wine 5.0, WineHQ hopes to resolve many of these issues, with the main improvements being:

-Builtin modules in PE format: To make games think Wine is a real Windows environment, most Wine 5.0 modules have been converted into the PE format rather than ELF binaries. It is hoped that this will allow copy-protection and anti-cheat programs to not flag games running under Wine as being modified.
-Multi-monitor support: Multiple displays adapters and multi-monitor configurations are now supported under Wine.
-XAudio2 reimplementation: XAudio2 libraries have been added back to Wine and will use the FAudio library for better compatibility.
-Vulkan 1.1 support: "The Vulkan driver supports up to version 1.1.126 of the Vulkan spec."
Here are the release notes, download locations for the binary packages (when available) and source.
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Wine 5.0 Released

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  • WINE (Score:2, Informative)

    by Neddies ( 4140129 )
    It's NOT an emulator.
    • Except it is. It's emulating a bunch of Windows APIs.

      Emulation DOES NOT mean "doing what some piece of hardware does". Emulation DOES NOT mean "pretending to do the exact same thing as something else".

      • It's not emulating them in any sense that emulation typically applies in computing. It's an alternative black-box implementation of the Windows API.

        It's all IA-32 and AMD64 code. There's generally no need for emulation.

        • IIRC the Windows API is a user mode implementation that calls into the kernel for most things. For most functions like DoAThing there's an NtDoAThing or ZwDoAThing that gets called under the hood.

          WINE is the user mode code with basic parameter checking, and it doesn't matter what kernel it calls into. As long as it does a minimal translation back and forth.

          That's why it isn't an emulator. It's a replacement user mode still backed by a kernel.

        • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

          Obviously they aren't doing hardware emulation but software emulation could be argued in that they aim for "bug for bug" compatibility.

      • By your definition, Android is emulating Java you insensitive clod. We've all figured out Larry Ellison's account on Slashdot!

      • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        "Emulation DOES NOT mean "doing what some piece of hardware does"."

        Not in common language no but in computing vernacular that is in fact what it means. You don't emulate an API in any case only produce a new implementation. The only thing separating wine from any of the millions of separate implementations of APIs with reference implementations is that they have to reverse engineer much of the API.

      • Except it is. It's emulating a bunch of Windows APIs.

        Emulation DOES NOT mean "doing what some piece of hardware does". Emulation DOES NOT mean "pretending to do the exact same thing as something else".

        WINE is a shim [wikipedia.org]. In a computing sense, emulation [wikipedia.org] involves simulating CPU cycles, which WINE does not do. Therefore, "Wine Is Not an Emulator."

        A Windows emulator would be something different. It would probably run more software on more platforms (ex. X86 software on ARM), but it would be bigger and more complicated, with performance and memory use disadvantages. An emulator would be overkill anyway; Simply plugging Windows programs into Linux APIs is sufficient for most programs (on the matching architectu

    • It's fine. But LIQUOR is quicker.
  • Impressive (Score:5, Insightful)

    by VisceralLogic ( 911294 ) <paul@@@viscerallogic...com> on Tuesday January 21, 2020 @05:54PM (#59642510) Homepage
    I'm impressed with their dedication, sticking with it for so many years and continuing to release improvements.
    • It is probably rewarding as there is always improvements to be made and new applications to run. Unlike working on the same hobbyist teletype operating system architecture for nearly 30 years, where we still can't figure out if backspace is ^H or ^?

    • Re:Impressive (Score:5, Insightful)

      by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @07:10AM (#59643828)
      They've got another reason to continue, which is that Wine is the only real version of Windows that's left now that 7 is dead.
    • by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

      I use WINE all the time. It has it's issues, but it gets the job done. Most notably, it routinely gets messed up when switching between applications. I have to hit the Alt and/or Ctrl key to get WINE to stop thinking they're pressed and making the app it's running do strange stuff. But the few Win32 apps I need to run otherwise work pretty well.

      That said, I'm running Kubuntu 18.04, and it offers 2 versions of WINE. A 'standard' version (3.0) and a 'development' version (3.6), which is the one I use.

      So,

      • by sad_ ( 7868 )

        Last time i checked WineHQ is offering the latest packages build for debian/ubuntu through their own repo's. So if you want to use the latest ones, you can always use that.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I only trust Certified Authentic Microsoft (TM) Windows (TM) Activated (TM) binary code for my innovative gaming needs.

    It's the proven way to have a Genuine Advantage (TM) over my unshowered adversaries.

    • Do you buy certified fair-trade bits?
      I bet you don't even know what field to platter means!!

      • by Shotgun ( 30919 )

        Organic and hormone-free non-GMO certified fair-trade bits are the only way to go. Makes my computer faster.

  • I wasn't aware it had reached 1.0 yet. I thought it has been at 0.99.xxxxxxxxxx for years.
    • Re:5.0? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by caseih ( 160668 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2020 @06:32PM (#59642608)

      Most version numbers are pretty meaningless. What would "1.0" mean in the case of Wine? Especially when Windows is a moving (albeit now slower) target. Depending on your point of view Wine is definitely not at 1.0 yet, nor will it ever be. So they've decided on an arbitrary version number scheme that simply marks progress. And they've made a ton of progress to be sure. I regularly run several windows apps with it, including the U-Blox U-Center control software for GPS units.

      If it weren't for the very few apps I need to run in Wine, I would probably get a Pinebook Pro. But for now I'll stick with Intel-compatible hardware.

      • What would "1.0" mean in the case of Wine?

        IIRC Wine 1.0 was released when a user could pop in an Office disk (Office 97, perhaps?) and reasonably expect it to work "out of the box". No fiddling with winecfg/dll's etc.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    What distros have wine 5.0? Every time I look the version of wine supported by distros is always laughably outdated. Do I just have to compile it myself? I've tried that a few times over the years and failed miserably.

  • Does office 365 run on it? This is what 90% of people would actually like wine for.
    • Isn't 365 partially browser based now? I think you can view stuff pretty reasonably on any device. it's not a complete solution, but perhaps that covers 90% of the 90% of people.

  • It's probably just me, but in 5 years of screwing around with WINE, I never really got it to work.

    I'm sure it's dandy for other people, but fuck all if I can get it to work for me.

    I finally gave up and installed Virtualbox and all the Guest VM stuff, and that worked. I can run anything in a Win VM, but how to get WINE to work is still a mystery to me.

    • by caseih ( 160668 )

      Interesting. Usually I just apt install wine (version 4, so it's older), and it works for what I throw against it. Nothing crazy. I've run quite a bit of shareware with it, various proprietary software for GPS units, and even an older 3D cad program. If you run an installer with wine, it will even put a menu item in the Linux menu to run it (which is good and bad).

  • wine-5.0 john$ ./configure
    checking build system type... x86_64-apple-darwin18.5.0
    checking host system type... x86_64-apple-darwin18.5.0
    checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
    checking for gcc... gcc
    checking whether the C compiler works... yes
    checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
    checking for suffix of executables...
    checking whether we are cross compiling... no
    checking for suffix of object files... o
    checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes
    checking whether gcc accepts -g...

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • ... on web ads being served through standard win apps like WordPad for Wine?

  • in the t2 Linux distribution: https://t2sde.org/packages/win... [t2sde.org]
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by ikhider ( 2837593 ) on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @12:37PM (#59644612)
    Wine is good for a couple of things. I am able to run audio programs like Reaper quite well, even though they also have a native Linux version. Why run a Windows version when you have native Linux? Windows based audio plugins, of course! Some very nice ones. There is also Carla-simulator, which acts as a compatibility layer for some Linux DAWs to bring in Windows-based plugins. Those work okay for some plugins I use. Games are improving. I am impressed when I can play quite a few older games. As for productivity, like graphics software, that has less success. I try to run versions of say, Quark, no success. I proudly use Libre software, but every now and then (I try to) run some proprietary tools to see what some companies are up to. Maybe I can try again.

A committee takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom. -- Parkinson

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