WineConf 2004 Wrapup

IamTheRealMike writes "Well, the attendants are back home and the writeups have been written - WineConf 2004 is over, and Brian Vincent of Wine Weekly News fame has written a comprehensive account of the conference. Wine hackers the world over congregated in snow-covered Minneapolis to talk shop and try and locate the magic bullet to make Wine better, faster. Cheers!"

try and locate the magic bullet..

[osullish]

to make Wine better and faser?? I Run word 97 on my linux box and its 100 times better and faster! I think they're not looking for a bullet but a WMD :-)

Seriously though, Wine is one of the most impressive feats of software engineering I've seen, the ability to emulate a closed source platform is a real achievement.

Re:Believe me, I love it as much as anybody, but.

[IamTheRealMike]

Mods, please ignore this post, it's just a troll. Wine doesn't even have a TCP/IP stack, it (of course) uses the underlying hosts stack, ie the Linux/FreeBSD/Whatever stack. "Wait states for unsupported hardware" is entirely meaningless, Wine does not have hardware support, again that's delegated to the underyling operating system.

Of course, if the poster can show specific sections of code he feels have "fundamental flaws" and describe them satisfactorily then I'll take my words back.

Re:Believe me, I love it as much as anybody, but.

[jhunsake]

From his journal....

The Specious Project
09:45 AM February 12th, 2004 [ Add Friend | #61699 ]
Hi, thanks for reading the journal.

Any posts from this account are part of the Specious Project, which challenges the quality of the Slashdot moderation system by posting plausible-sounding, yet factually inaccurate comments to Slashdot stories.

Usually a simple Google search will reveal any errors, and anyone moderating Specious Project posts up are reacting only to the sound and tone of authority, rather that the actual content. We try not to talk to those people at parties.

Re:Still Not there...

[Dreadlord]

WineX can't just support every single game released for Windows, this is simply impossible, at least right now.

However, WineX supports the big hits pretty well, Call of Duty, Max Payne 2, Warcraft III, check out their list of supported games [transgaming.com].

If you are a subscriber, you can vote for games to get more support, and if the game is popular enough, they'll work on it.

WineX works great with supported games, and has dramatically decreased my Windows boots.

Re:Have a nice cup of flaming hot death!

[kalidasa]

You notice there aren't any projects to run Mac OS apps under Linux.

Au contraire [maconlinux.org].

Re:Win32 port anyone?

[Chris_Jefferson]

Actually there has been some work (its only on mailing lists, not public yet) of getting wine to run under cygwin, which is almost a win32 port.

Of course wine should also run cygwin (as it's a windows program), so eventually you will be able to run wine under itself :)

Re:WINE Windows Driver Support

[Derek Pomery]

Oh, no prob. If Windows does it, should be a snap for those Linux boys.
So, you wouldn't happen to have an NTFS spec handy? Maybe you could get one from MS?
So far, I consider Linux reading NTFS and writing verrrry carefully without changing number of blocks a file uses to be impressive given it is all reverse engineering.
But hey. There's a solution, maybe you remember seeing this posted on /., multiple times?
NTFS full write [slashdot.org]

Oh, and btw, WINE does work with 95 too. Check your configs and documentation.

Re:Legality question..

[MrNybbles]

WINE does not require a copy of XP except if you want to have good NTFS support. Many people who want or need good NTFS support already have Windows XP. If you want good NTFS support and don't have Windows XP then you are probably out of luck.

The Linux Kernel 2.6.x so far does not have very good NTFS writing support. With few exceptions I would suggest not using 2.6.x NTFS support until it nolonger says it is experimental. Also, I think the NTFS.SYS driver from WINE calls the Windows XP driver ntoskrnl.exe. The NTFS.SYS talked about in the article is part of WINE.

Re:I got confused...

[Nadir]

Alcohol volume in wine cannot go above 16.8% because the yeasts that attack the sugars will stop doing their thing at such concentration of alcohol.

Re:Is Outlook supported?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it is supported. You don't have to log into a domain unless you are trying to connect to an exchange mailbox. When that happens, Outlook pops up a login window and you enter your domain, username and password and everything works fine from there.

In theory you can run windows binaries from your NTFS partition, but there are a few potential problems. First, if the program you're running writes any kind of tempory data to disk, you're screwed (not a problem for FAT partitions provided your permissions are set correctly). The other major problem is any special registry settings libraries, etc added at the time of install that your Wine installation might not be able to see.

ALready is one, Bochs ...

[molarmass192]

Take a look here [sourceforge.net]. Granted it's not as polished as VMWare and not as speedy but it's progressing.

Re:try and locate the magic bullet..

[no longer myself]

Wow... I didn't realize they've changed their policy on that... I use a slightly older version of Wine (7/9/03) to run three win32 apps, and no I don't have a Windows partition.

And on a slightly different subject, what's with all the trolls in this area? Does Microsoft hire moles to go flood the halls of Slashdot anytime someone points out that you can run some Win32 apps without MS Windows? Is it really necessary to point out that it's not a perfect solution, or a magic bullet?

Hey, if you need to use several apps developed under MS Windows that badly, then STICK WITH WINDOWS!!! But if there's just a couple of things you'd like to keep when you make the leap to Linux, then Wine offers a potential answer to your prayers.

You know, I almost hate to admit this now, but if it were not for the Wine project, I would have stuck with MS Windows. But I got to keep three of my favorite Win32 apps, and that was more than enough to help me move into my new Linux OS. There were other apps that I had to sacrifice, but it was worth it.

And oh yeah... For anyone that's using Mandrake 9.1 and having trouble getting Wine to work, I humbly offer a tutorial [flush2x.com] on getting it up and moving without MS Windows. I know everyone's cousin has a how-to on this subject, but I've tried to make it step-by-step easy.

Re:I got confused...

[addaon]

16.8% is absolutely not a hard limit. Yes, most champagne yeasts poop out around 16%... but then, most ale yeasts give up before 12%. With a slow fermentation and a good yeast, a mead can easily hit 18%... and rice wines (which have lower initial sugar concentration, it's really a much more complex process) can hit 20%, 22% with skill.

Re:Perhaps this is an improvement?

[jsebrech]

man "How do I check my filesystem?" ... not really

That's because you're using the wrong command:

joeri@angelina:~$ apropos check filesystem
...
fsck (8) - check and repair a Linux file system
fsck.ext2 (8) - check a Linux second extended file system
fsck.ext3 (8) - check a Linux second extended file system
fsck.minix (8) - a file system consistency checker for Linux
...

man is for when you already know what you're looking for. apropos is for when you want a man page of something, but you don't know what it should be.