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Wine Software

NYT covers WINE 67

Posted by CmdrTaco from the mainstream-coverage dept.
Oopy writes "There's an article in Monday's NYT all about WINE. Seems pretty good. " Comments on application compatibility (and mentions that Star Craft has a 4.6). How many apps do you need besides that anyway?
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NYT covers WINE More

NYT covers WINE

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  • Anonymous Coward wrote:

    However, I don't like Wine because it removes some of the incentive for companies to port their apps to Linux. I'm afraid the attitude of "if it works in Wine, why bother do a Linux version?" might prevail. If it does, then you have MS leading the way with that klunky directory structure of theirs.

    Wine offers developers an incremental approach to Linux support, which will help bring developers over who otherwise might be too unsure to take the plunge. First, before the company acknowledges Linux, Linux users run their programs under Wine. Wine will never be perfect, since the Windows API is a buggy moveing target. Some of these Linux users will write the developer requesting a native Linux version. Eventually, the company will acknowledge Linux.

    Then, they need to figure out how to support Linux, and Wine comes to the rescue with Winelib. This allows Windows developers to produce native Linux software with minimal impact on their source code, and minimal training of their developers.

    Lastly, assuming Linux is good enough (and I'm confident it is), they will actively embrace Linux, and start using native toolkits.


    I have found many GNOME/GTK apps to work just as well under Linux as similar apps under Win95, and better than those apps under Wine. I would much prefer companies port their stuff using GTK.

    I would prefer that too. However, I'm realistic, and I know many companies won't want to learn a whole new GUI API just to support Linux. Winelib gives these developers a Windows API on Linux.
  • And no, not to use. Purely for comical reasons.



    ----------------- ------------ ---- --- - - - -
  • The best drive I've ever had (and still do have) is a Quantum Fireball 2.1 gig. That bastard has been running non-stop for a hell of a long time. Not a single problem from it.

  • Half-Life (Score:1)

    by Fict ( 475 )
    Hey folks,
    I was just wondering if anyone knows when wine might be capable of running half-life -- when it is, I don't think I'll ever have a reason to reboot. BTW, have you noticed that Quake2 framerates seem consistently higher under windows than linux? (at least with my voodoo2) I assume this is attributed to better optimized gl drivers in windows or something... Anyway if anyone knows when half-life is gonna work with wine post below :)
  • Has anyone gotten Starcraft to work under WINE without a FAT drive or any Windows files at all? I have tried several times, and every time I end up with some error telling me it can't find some file like "fonts.prf" or something (I don't remeber what it exactly is now, but I know that it doesn't seem to exist anywhere in the Starcraft directory, or anywhere on anyone's computer I've tried for that matter.) This is copied right off my roommate's W95 PC, where it works just fine... Would grabbing the contents of his C:\WINDOWS directory help any? I'd really like to play Starcraft on my own computer :)
  • Okay, it's true that they messed up. Wine Is Not and Emulator, but it's not an emulator for a rather technical reason that the target audience of the piece both don't care about and wouldn't understand.

    You have to lighten up on mainstream information a bit -- they can't always be 100% technically accurate because they're writing for everybody. If this were an ACM publication, I'd be upset. It's not. They have a lot of info to impart and very little space to do it in (as well as limited reader attention span).

    I mean, what if stories on astronomy focused on complex physics equations rather than on cool photos and a simplified description? I'd stop reading 'cause I don't care about physics. Same deal here.

    ----

  • They'd have a dozen other backups, both on tapes and on other systems around the world.
  • Well, you kinda have to let the NYT off the hook on that one, as the Wine FAQ does say Windows Emulator...
  • I finally got unreal to work with the latest snapshot after many moons of defeat! Kudos to the Wine folks! It runs full speed with 3DFX and sound (albiet staticy at times)... I am absolutely amazed!
  • Posted by Michael Wyman:

    Some programs made for windows are good pieces of software, but many of us don't care for windblows and its bundled junk. Installing 100+ Megabytes of crap we won't ever use, just to run StarCraft and a couple others, isn't that pleasant a prospect... Besides, I don't care to enrich Billy G and associates by the "measly" ~$100 windoze costs...

  • kinda. Many programs crash in Wine due to either unimplimented, or wrongly implimented things. Wine might crash once in a while too. FreeBSD doesn't crash when running wine (nor linux or whatever you use, but I've not tried them) but the programs crash more often if possibal.

    In other words M$ windows will run most programs better then wine will. When running in Wine your OS will crash less often (unless you have hardware problems) but the programs will crash more often as wine doesn't quite work like windows. Its a trade off.

    Scary, I just realised i'm defending the statements of a M$ drone. Still, unix can stand on its own merits, not on FUD against the others.

  • The most promising comment was that other software developers are looking at helping with Wine. If two or three large vendors get their own software working using Wine, the others will fall in line like dominos (just like the database vendors). Wine could be perfect by year's end.


    ... Ami.
  • The funniest thing along those lines, which didn't happen to me, but to my (then) housemate, concerned a Quantum Fireball hard drive (the name's quite ironic). Basically, the main controller chip fused, turned into a short circuit, and started melting its way out of its casing (it was nearly there after 1second of this). Basically, we spent good hour or two going through the system working out where all the smoke came from :-).

    I had a 160Mb quantum that was barely used, and died. Basically, dont buy maxtor, dont buy Quantum.

    And BACK UP OFTEN.

  • Amen (Score:1)

    by On Lawn ( 1073 )
    I wish you used your name to post this, but this is the wisest thing I've read in slashdots posts in a long time.

    Given the variety of articles mass media news gets, a writer gets probably no more than 3.5-4 hours of time for background research on any given story (especially of this caliber). Thats definately something to consider when reading the newspaper or especially when watching the 6oclock news.

    "News is the first draft of History..." --Walter Cronkite
    ^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~ ~^~
    ABORTED effort:
    Close all that you have.
  • I was reading the Internet Explorer license a while back, and is states the the program may only be used on a Microsoft OS. If the othere MS apps such as Word, Excel, and others are the same way what happens to Wine?

    Obviously running Internet explorer under Wine is against the license, but thats not much of a problem, since theres netscape and others. But can the creaters of Wine be sued? This could be interesting.

    dave
  • It's very clever PR work, you gotta give 'em that. If you compare Microsoft to the Titanic and Linux to the iceberg, the last few hours of Microsoft's sinking will NOT be spent with musicians playing "Nearer, my God, to Thee" as on the Titanic; it will be spent with the crew running around trying to persuade the passengers that the ship ISN'T sinking and those irresponsibles getting into lifeboats are just going to get lost at sea without the mighty M$itanic under their feet.

    Anyway, I was going to comment on the particular piece of FUD here. "The applications that are of the most interest are Windows applications," he says, conveniently forgetting to mention that until recently ALL applications released (from commercial sources, at least) were Windows applications. (Well, there are some scientific packages being sold for various Unices, but I'm thinking about the business realm right now). And "the most stable and reliable environment to run Windows applications in is Windows" is so slick. He might even be able to argue convincingly that it's true: after all, an emulator is usually chasing a moving target and Windows will always be able to run Windows apps. But of course he conveniently fails to mention the fact that what runs *underneath* WINE, whether it be Linux or FreeBSD or something else, is vastly more stable and reliable than the Windows kernel.

    Why am I giving FUD-analysing lessons on Slashdot? What a waste of bandwidth. Sorry for wasting your time pointing out stuff you already knew, everybody; I'll shut up now.
    -----
  • Apart from the nominal cost, the drawback of Windows is that one would need to reboot in order to use even a single Windows application. Running it under Wine allows you to keep your uptime record and save yourself some hard drive space at the same time.

    So it's not only the expense - it's the hassle of rebooting that we won't have any more.
  • Hey, don't wig out...

    To answer your question, the Wine developers aren't limiting themselves to Win9X. Indeed, the project started as only having Windows 3 API calls, but has since extended to include all flavours of Windows.

    Additionally, they're not "emulating" or even "simulating" the APIs as you seem to think, but re-implementing them under Linux. Makes a lot of difference, that.

    You'll also find that many people use Wine successfully without having fully-working services or security stuff in there, so your IMHO isn't worth the phospur it's printed on, IMHO.

    (For instance, thousands only keep Windows partitions to run games, so it's hardly "a joke" that they need to reboot just for that.)

    There's no benefit in slagging Wine off just because it doesn't do everything you, and you alone, want it to. Recognise that others may find it useful, or be quiet.
  • Well....

    "With emulation the last 10 percent of effort takes 95 percent of time"

    Ed Muth seems to be having read the Wine-README

    Hehheheh

    BTW I got Excel working quite perfectly. Font looked ugly but hey... Word had some shit, I gather it emulates crashes too well. ;-)
  • From my point of view WINE is stunningly pointless. Any time spent on WINE would be better spent writing native GNU-Linux applications. Stop the maddness. Drop WINE.

    Emulators for classic games are cool, however.
  • Meanwhile I've had a WD drive running for 3.5 years without a single bad sector.

    I have a different experience with WD drives. Since the beginning of 1998, I've gone through probably 5 WD drives for my 3 development machines. It might have been a bad batch (we bought a case), but between 3 and 4 months of use, they'd start collecting bad sectors and become garbage fodder. Fujitsu has been pretty crappy too.

    My Maxtor drive has been good so far (about 5 months now) and I've had good luck with Quantum.
  • In reading this thread it makes me believe Quantum's study a little more. They are incorporating into their new drives some mechanism to prevent shock damage during shipping where the drive heads hit the disk during shipment. Apparently they did a study and found that the majority of dead drives were caused by this. They also found that the drive failure can occur months after the damage. This seems more likely than 3 out of 3 bad drives shipped to the same person.
    The other common denominator would be the UPS guy handling the package.

    It will be interesting to see what happens over the next year with the new Quantum drives that are shipping with this protection.

    Dastardly
  • Offline newsreader simply isn't Linux/Unix
    way of doing things.
    Better to have one small program to fetch
    news , another to manage spool and yet another
    to read them.
    I got my news downloaded at 4a.m when
    per minute charges are minimal and quite happy
    with it. How would you do it with GUI client?

    All that these people need - just simple tcl/tk
    script to subscribe/unsubscribe and
    newsx/suck/leafnode installed by default.

  • Gidday there,

    So, I'm walking to school, in Ottawa, Ontario, and I pass by the tall building with a big sign saying Corel Computer. Hmm...... then I catch a ride on a bus towards the west end, and next to the freeway is a big building, covered in gold tinted glass, with the word.. Corel.

    Then, I look up in the sky, and see a couple of balloons rising from Carleton University (located in Ottawa), each with the Corel logo.

    Once I get to school, (Engineering at Carleton, Ottawa), I sit down at the Corel Centre for Linux.

    In Ottawa.

    Strange amount of activity for a company based in Toronto.

    Joshua Lamorie
  • Ugh, this was so full of errors. Did they even bother to visit the wine homepage, or did they look at the name "wine" and say...well the "win" part must be windows, and the e, well hell that's emulator gosh darn it. Wine is not an emulator. :)


    On another note, I have wine installed on my FBSD system...but have yet to get StarCraft to run. Anyone tried this? What options/switches do you give wine in order to get it to run? I wish that on the page where it shows compatibility it also showed HOW it was run.
  • There isn't any reason that continued innovation won't come from this. For one, free software that is produced by individuals will continue to increase in volume and quality as more users move to GNU/Linux. And they won't choose the incredibly mangled Win32 API, preferring the simplicity and efficiency of free libraries like GTK.

    Also, we have to look at the possiblity of new APIs added onto the Wine team to address needs from developers who do want to work on Win32. One the most likely candidates would be implementing a commonly used subset of Win32 on top of GTK, so code could be ported from Win32 and still have that great GNU/Linux look and feel.

    Remember, free software births innovation. If more people rely on Wine, then the more people will want to change Wine to be what they need it to be, and then their contributions could then be folded back into the Wine base to enhance the Winlib platform. That's the way this whole shebang works.

    As for corporations, they can do what they please. If thier software falls behind others in features and stability, as would any code just slapped onto Winelib and recompiled compared to a more native version, then they won't sell any. Easy as that.
  • I think he is talking about the BSOD and reboot features built in to every copy of M$Windows 9x/NT that don't exist in Wine.
    --Dast
  • Do you really think they are going to show the ones who answered correctly? No, because then it would be a borring segment. Don't judge a country's occupents as seen through a TV show going for a laugh.
  • I've killed (unintentionally, of course) about 5 WD drives (never again!!) and 2 Conner/Seagate drives (ditto!).
    I've talked to a few recovery places and they said those two manufacturers were the ones they saw the most followed by a close 3rd, Maxtor.
    From now on for me it's IBM drives. Those are supposed to be pretty solid and hey, they invented the technology.
    I also have Fujitsu and Samsung drives. Nothing to write home about, but they're still humming away.
  • I'll second that. I had my first Maxtor drive die at 9 months. The free replacement 2 months after that! My second free replacement has been in for about 8-9 months. I'm crossing my fingers.

  • It appears to me that the outcome of the DoJ v. MS antitrust trial more and more in doubt. I think it would be a good idea, if instead the DoJ simply asserts that if MS wishes to produce both applications and the windows/dos OS, that MS should _fully_ produce all the specs for the Win32 API. I would think this, if presented properly, would be very hard for MS to fight. It would simply mean that other software developers would have a chance to compete on equal footing against MS. MS could still produce their applications, just so long as they don't continue to wield their influence to push (or rather force) their applications on OEMs and the like. This would also dramatically aid the Wine development effort, as their main obstacle is lack of information on the windows API. I think this would be rather effective.


    On another note, does anyone know how to install Starcraft using WINE alone, or any other method within Linux. I don't run dos/windows on this box at all.

    Feedback on either of these issues would be greatly appreciated! ;P
  • I've never read the technical reasons behind why WINE is supposed to stand for Wine Is Not an Emulator, but I think it is something of a half-truth. The thunks that are used to mitigate between a windows app and the linux OS are something of an emulation IMHO. I would be more disappointed if they had not later explained (albeit briefly) this point later in the article.

    I doubt any of the articles in the PC rags ever did a very good job of explaining NT's WoW (Windows on Windows) from a technical standpoint, and I don't think most users would have cared anyway.

    I'm just happy they got halfway decent mainstream press at all.
  • -----Snip-----

    If anything, Muth maintains, the Wine effort is a backhanded compliment to Microsoft's Windows. "The hype around Wine demonstrates the applications that are of the most interest are Windows applications," he said, "and the most stable and reliable environment to run Windows applications is Windows."

    -----Snip-----
    Is it just me or is everyone else also laughing at his comment about windows being "stable" and "reliable" !?


    // Cthu

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