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Wine Software

Win32-OS/2 source to be released 50

Posted by sengan from the no-firm-date dept.
In a recent e-mail conversation with Timur Tabi (of Win32-OS/2), I asked him about opening the source to Win32-OS/2 and collaborating with the Wine crew. For instance win32-OS/2 has some Direct X support, allowing Quake 2 3D-Now, and Destruction Derby II to run. And this was his reply: "We have already announced our intent to release the source code as well as use code from WINE. The announcement was made at Warpstock". Timur gave the Win32-OS/2 speech at Warpstock. update In related news, Wine 990110's out.
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Win32-OS/2 source to be released More

Win32-OS/2 source to be released

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  • bjwest wrote:

    [Windows application support] didn't help OS/2 much at all back in the early days of version 2. Although it ran Win3.1 apps better and faster than Windlows itself, people didn't flock to it as anticipated.

    Well, first of all, it didn't hurt. OS/2 version 2 sales were still suffering from the bad press generated from the disaster that was OS/2 version 1. In addition, IBM's marketting strategy for OS/2 was very muted compared to Microsoft's marketing behemoth. They focused on existing business customers, and almost ignored the consumer market.

    OS/2 Warp Version 3, on the other hand, really benefitted from its Windows compatibility. That was one of the reasons Warp 3 sold more retail copies in its first year than Windows 95 did. Most of Windows 95's sales, even in their first year, was OEM bundling contracts.
  • dattaway wrote:

    Just because Microsoft cannot develop a bug free implimintation of MFC, does not mean the open source community cannot.

    The trouble is a bug-free MFC just wouldn't be as useful. Many developers end up with code that depends on things in MFC that would properly be called bugs, with behavior that changes from implementation to implementation. This kind of problem is rampant throughout Wine.

    If you look at the source code to Wine, you see many functions which first check to see which bugset to implement, and then run the appropriately broken version of the function. If MFC were implemented, a similar approach would be needed.
  • I guess IBM is jumping on the OS bandwagon whole-heartedly, or at least mostly. First AFS a while back (which the offical announcement recently when it was "safe"), and now this. Isn't Lotus Notes being ported too?
  • The link only gives a list of presentations. I'd like to see a real announcement before I start cheering.
    ... Ami.
  • Things change quickly in this industry and Linux has a lot of momentum. If 1999 turns out to be anything like 1998, MS will be losing market share by year's end. These are my predictions:


    If IBM really backs WINE and a couple of other vendors jump on board, it could be working well by 2000. Clone shops will start to preload Linux just to save a few bucks on the Windows license (margins are really tight in that market).


    Guaranteed that every major Unix product will be available on Linux by year's end. Several major Windows products will follow. The games might still take a while, but they'll come.


    The only big problem with drivers is the "Win" devices. Several vendors will provide open specs by year's end. The hardware will still suck, but it'll at least work. Within two years you'll see as many Linux drivers shipped with peripherals as you Windows drivers today.


    ... Ami.



  • 1) Terminal serving. Like Citrix only much better/cheaper
    2) Memory management (if a program crashes the Kernel goes on)
    3) Multiple users (at the same time)
    a) Remote administration
    4) Everything that Linux does.

    And there could be more, I'm just doing this off the top of my head.
    ^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~^~
    ABORTED effort:
    Close all that you have.
  • This is true. I doubt very many people are using Wine to run IE for instance, but a lot of people are running Agent and similar software under Wine.
  • I don't care if Windows is OSS or not. It's a horribly overpatched and completely unreliable excuse for an OS that I can not and will not trust any farther than I can throw a sponge cake under water. The only reason I've got NT4 installed on my home system is that I often have to do MS Access development at home. Otherwise, I'd wipe that bletcherous OS-pretender from my hard drive in a second.

    Sorry for the flamage, but I'm quite steamed with Windows right now -- NT4 just garbaged the partition table on my hdb last night, EVEN THOUGH THERE ARE NO FAT/NTFS PARTITIONS ON THAT DRIVE! So, now I've got to fix that manually, or I've lost everything on /var, /home, and /usr/local.

    Silly me, I thought that my Linux installation was safe from Windows' meddling just because it was mostly on a separate disk from Windows. What kind of an arrogant fool OS writes to the partition tables on drives THAT IT DOES NOT OWN!?

    Feels awfully familiar, though -- MS seems to twiddle unnecessarily with the hard drives -- when I installed the MS Word 6 upgrade a couple years ago, somehow it fixed my system so that it could not recognize my hard drive until I did a couple power-off reboots. Pattern?
  • Yup, that's the conclusion I've come to as well. Let Windows mess itself up on its own box, and keep it isolated from the real world.
  • It's not worth the effort. You've have to ensure bug-compatibility with each different version of MFC. Furthermore there are multiple versions of MFC that have the same name (mfcXX.dll) and different bugs! Many application developers now include it in the application directory rather than the system directory, to avoid problems with different versions. It would not be wise for the WINE developers to over-ride these local copies.
  • Win-OS/2 support, which is probably what you were thinking of when you said "win-support in os/2 featured greatly in os/2's downfall," is based on the Windows 3.1 code -- Win32-OS/2 is based on Windows 95 API's. They're different, and Win32-OS/2 will not allow you to run Windows 3.1 programs.

    I think this will probably help us OS/2 users a bit more than the WINE developers, but I do think there will be advantages on both sides of the fence.

    Christopher B. Wright
  • Bullshit!
  • and Total Annihliation, Starcraft, Unreal (with 3Dfx support), Fallout and Fallout 2, and probably a lot of other games. DirectX games typically don't rely on weird advanced Win32 features, so they usually run well on Wine.
  • get the new release at MetaLab [unc.edu] i can't believe sengan didn't include that in this article ':P it's on freshmeat.net btw.
  • knowing microsoft they will try to stop this.
    could they sue for intellectual property of the
    win32 api? what other area(s) could microsoft try
    to keep this down?
  • I tried running Windows applications under OS/2 and found it to be an unmitigated disaster, even with 16MB RAM (which was a huge amount back then).

    Everything was just too slow.

    And I /really/ wanted to like OS/2, too, because I hated Windows 3.1 with a passion.

    To be fair, though, I think a lot of the problem was that OS/2 was a product ahead of its time in terms of memory use. Back then, 16MB was /a lot/ of memory. Now, of course, it's nothing.

    D
  • Why of all things would one want to do that? Quake
    itself (Q1) has been ported to Linux (I have it, I
    should know), and Q2 should be there as well.
    That's like saying there aren't any Q2 gamers on
    Linux, or that we all want to run wine to play
    such things as Quake.
  • you've struck on a very important thing...a massive rash of the latest hardware has been turned into "win" devices so that they can slim back on horsepower on the hardware and let windows take care of the rest...meaning a much cheaper product...
    porting these things wouldn't be impossible...but the real question is...do we WANT them...win devices slow down your computer since they use the main CPU for most of their processes...
    i think the slowest market to change will be the hardware market...alot of hardware companies have put alot of investment into win-devices and it will be hard for them to turn around and make real devices again...and until they see the profits of doing that they won't think about it...and i don't see any reason for them to see profits in it until fall or so of this year... i could be drastically wrong on this...but hardware will be the last boat to turn it's rudder...and until you get decent hardware it is hard to make "decent" games...of course i'm a fan of games that require thought instead of voodoo3 chips...but that is just a personal preference...most people want descent: freespace. or whatever.

  • i too just discovered DFM...right now i'm running a very slim profile with IceWM, gnome, and dfm... that is a pretty fast combination...and very usefull too...dfm is nice for those who are used to the macintosh file management system...as well as OS/2...one gripe i had with it...i couldn't find a way to print out the files in list format...just icon format...icon format is bulky...i'd rather an extended list format that gives me mdodes and stats...
  • you are correct, the average user really doesn't need 1/4 of the CPU that they purchase on their computer. But you need to keep in mind that most of the users that are switching over to Linux are already power users of some right and they in general are going to be more tasking to their system, and will notice sluggishness and be annoyed at it. I don't claim to use my CPU 100% all of the time, that would be a stupid claim with a PII 400, but i definatly do task it at times, and the times that it was tasked would be increased if i was using hardware that was feeding off of the CPU. call me picky, but i don't want my computer to be sluggish in any way. i'm sure many feel the same way, if not, then get a winmodem.
  • they have. just not as corel. it seems they hired another company to do most of the work. i forget the name though.

  • Good. (Score:1)

    by BBrox ( 13594 )
    > Firstly because the directX support will allow
    > better emulation of the windows platform for
    > games.

    Wine has had DirectX support for a long time now. It also runs Quake2 (with or without 3DFx). With some search on LinuxGames, you will plenty of screenshots.

    It has now also (basic) Direct3D support.

  • I think that we would use the open source code to port all of windows apps to Linux and MAKE them native linux apps using the winelib. Then after the source code was ported who needs windows? It woudl probably run faster if the code was ported too.
  • Publisher - You mean people didn't realize that they could just use MS Word about as effectively?
    Office - Good, but StarOffice does it just as well and it's free to us individuals.
    Games - You admit playing a game from MS other than solitaire, freecell, or minefield?
    Compilers - I should see if you can compile a Linux kernel with a Visual C++ compiler just for kicks. Maybe an install routine that installs Linux in place of the Winderz that compiled it. Hmmmmmm......

    I believe your drumbeats are becoming deafening.
  • I agree that "margins are really tight" in the PC hardware market. But I doubt whether IBM nor any of the clone makers will preload Linux any time soon. Linux will have to grow market share to more than 20% in order for clone vendors to even consider it.

    Windows still reigns supreme chiefly because of the so-called "network effect": it has more users, which has caused the establishment of a whole infrastructure around it, which has caused more users. It will take a while for that infrastructure (PC vendor support, software app vendor support, peripheral support, etc) to break down. Or it may never break down. Users benefit a lot from that infrastructure, so even if Linux is (almost) free, it is not easy for it to beat Windows.

    "The only big problem with drivers is the Win devices." This is the peripheral infrastructure for Windows at work. Peripheral vendors are unwilling to disclose their specs for fear of being copied by competitors. They would rather build their own drivers; but they still can't justify spending development dollars for Linux drivers, not until Linux has at least 20% of the market. So, for a while at least, there will be no driver support in Linux-world for new peripherals.

    C. Tapang
    www.genericwindows.com
  • i always test out a new compilation by running solitaire for a few minutes, which turns into about an hour, which occaisonally turns into 2. DAMN YOU WINE! =]
  • Personally, i think wine does more then you think. I would perfer that i dident have to run ANY M$ apps in linux, but since M$ has their hands on sooo many things it makes it hard. I do have a windows partition and i do use it. but not often. Windows so far has their hands in the gaming and office market. and believe it or not, where i go to school they accept homework via mail, the catch.. it has to be in office97 format .doc. This is where wine comes in, if it can get rid of the need to use windows all together, then sure i'll run M$ programs under linux, at least till my school starts using word perfect format, or all games get ported to linux.
  • This is good.

    Firstly because the directX support will allow better emulation of the windows platform for games.

    Secondly and more importantly, the argument 'Linux runs your windows apps as well' will help windows-users make the switch to linux easier, and let them get to the linux-only apps step by step.

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