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!"

I hate to whine

[Anonymous Coward]

but wine still seems like one of those apps that need geek'ness to get things working. For whom are they aiming the product for these days, joe average?

I appreciate what they are doing, but at the moment would it not be better to go 100% unix or 100% windows.

Wine and DirectX

[SydShamino]

Next up, Tom Wickline put together a presentation about getting applications to run. Tom has worked quite a bit with Wine and CrossOver Office and had some tricks for getting things to work. The key to just getting something to run seems to be using native Windows DLL's. He has a copy of Windows 98 to copy things to and from. Generally he starts with CrossOver Office and adds the following things in this order:

* Internet Explorer
* DCOM98 (as opposed to DCOM95)
* MDAC.Type
* MS Scripting update (SCR56.exe)

Lately he's even added native DirectX 8.1 to the mix. Some form of this combination will get Wine to run about 85% of the applications and games he's tested.

That's cool and all, but DirectX 8.1 is outdated. EverQuest, for example, upgraded to DirectX 9 this week, breaking support for anyone who ran it in Linux.

I was about to move completely to Xandros 2.0 on a home machine, knowing that, if the included CrossOver Office wouldn't run EQ, WineX would. Now I'm comtemplating a dual-boot machine. But that doesn't work as well since our home file/print server is being booted into a new OS.

Unfortunately, most people only play the latest and greatest when it comes to games.* And to keep people centered on Linux when it comes to gaming, latest DirectX support needs to be a top priority.

* (Me, still playing EQ five years after its release, being an obvious exception.)

What can't

[Anonymous Coward]

someone invent an API,ABI,execution or whatever to work on all platforms.

You know one code to rule them all.

BTW I know of java, but really I cannot see anyone making doom 3 using java3d or premier using javamedia.

Sorry, excuess my ignorance.

WINE Windows Driver Support

[MrNybbles]

Jan had to reimplement about 300 functions in order to make the driver, NTFS.sys, work. Jan used four different methods to implement the necessary calls:

Pass the call straight through to ntoskrnl.exe (yes, the real WinXP ntoskrnl.exe)

It would be nice if someone worked on native NTFS support for writing to the disk that worked as well as it does in Windows. As far as I know the 2.6.x Linux kernels support writing that can't make a NTFS file larger on the disk.

What seemed to interest everyone was not the fact that the native NT drivers can be used for filesystem access, but how it could be extended to support other drivers. In particular, native Windows printer drivers, serial drivers, video drivers, and networking drivers may be able to be implemented using a similar method. All that special hardware using "Win" soft drivers might be possible to get working.

I hope they get some support for Win9x drivers too since I have only one program on Windows that WINE can't run because of some special drivers it installs and expects to work. At least that's why I think it's not running. That's one problem with Windows support: Windows is not one operating system.

Legality question..

[stratjakt]

If calls are being passed directly to/from drivers like NTFS.SYS and the actual WinXP kernel, does using Wine require a licensed copy of XP?

AFAIK you can't freely redistribute the XP kernel and system drivers.

Will we see WINE shut down at MSFTs whim one day?

Wine still a pain

[Apreche]

While win is great and all, and I hope it gets better it has too many problems that are not being addressed. The biggest problem is how much of a pain in the butt it is to configure. Wine needs some sort of easy or automatic configuration tool. I mean, when it's easier to set up xfree86 than it is to set up wine we have a problem.

The second and most obvious thing is that because wine exists then less software will be made for linux in the meantime. There is at least one person out there who said to themselves "why bother porting this windows app to linux, they can just use wine". Many many open source apps are ported to windows every day because we have tools like cygwin and minigw with which to recompile them. I think this is the biggest barrier to linux taking more market share. Many people I encounter wouldn't mind switching, but there is always one or two applications that they absolutely need that hold them back. Wine can help, if it works for those apps, because that person will be able to switch. But wine can also hurt because that app will never get a real port, especially if it is closed source. The fact that wine is hard to configure and that it doesn't work perfectly tend to make wine more hurt than help.

I'd like to know that too

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought crossover partly because I wanted to support Wine, and I have know idea if I'm actually acheiving that or not. Anyone got any info?

btw I've used Photoshop under the latest crossover and it ran fine, although ImageReady was pretty buggy.

ReactOS

[dcuny]

For me, the most interesting thing happening in Wine has been the ReactOS [reactos.com] project. Basically, it's an attempt to clone the Windows NT operating system.

There have been a number of attempts to clone the Windows OS in the past (i.e. Freedows and the Alliance OS), but most of them have self-destructed with no real product.

The ReactOS, on the other hand, has managed to get the core NT working, and has been added the Wine libraries to supply much of the functionality. Earlier last month they released a version with a functioning Windows Explorer clone [reactos.com], and they seem well on the way of reaching the goal of running OpenOffice and Mozilla by October, 2004 [reactos.com]. The target of a fully functional Windows OS replacement is only about a year away.

Re:I'd like to know that too

[jeremy_white]

We are only able to do the work that we do because of the money we receive from our customers, most of whom are single end users.

All of our work on Wine goes back to the public Wine tree. I think its fair to say that Wine runs MS Office 2000, XP, Photoshop, and a wide range of applications only because of the money our customers have sent us. So, yes, I think it makes a huge difference, and we greatly appreciate it.

Further, there is one misconception I wish to correct. We've actually changed our development process recently so that all of our Wine work goes to the public Wine tree as soon as our developer makes the change, without regard to CrossOver releases.

Cheers,

Jeremy White
CEO, CodeWeavers

Re:CrossOver

[timeOday]

Thank you Crossover. Of course, without free code from the community Crossover would never have gotten over the hump.

This makes WINE an interesting case study in the difference between the GPL and BSD licenses. (Wine is "lesser GPL" which allows linking to non-free software (eg MS Office) but requires source code distribution for the library (eg Wine)).

Re:CrossOver

[Short Circuit]

I don't profess to be an expert, but you could try something like SGML or LaTeX.

OOo and KOffice can print to PostScript or PDF, if you like.

True (both parents...)

[da5idnetlimit.com]

I didn't say Wine was useless...

Just, if you have that old 16 bits apps running on a dying computer, I'm sure you can find an old desktop somewhere, slap 98 or DOS 5 on it and keep it running...

I made the jump to full Linux less than 6 month ago, and now all my computers are Linux Based (Firewall is Astaro Linux, web/mail is E-smith, the rest (file server + desktop) is installed with Knoppix Cluster (debian))

Whenever I must do something Windows only, I ask my girlfriend for her keyboard, and later look for an alternative Linux solution.

Usually, I end up either with a multiplatform Java app, or with a Beta project from Sourceforge, and my need is fullfiled.

The problem is not with Legacy softz, for they will run on their old versions of whatever OS they need.

The problem is completing Linux's software portofolio so that Large Editors find it attractive to support their soft on Linux...

Choice, the cheap (as in free) against the best (as in payed-for version), until the free soft becomes better again, and so on...

Best Linux word processor

[mrm677]

The best word processor running on Linux is Microsoft Word.

In OpenOffice, I tried to create a simple numbered list, where I stop the list but then continue it at a later point in the document, but I couldn't figure it out.

MS Office on cross-over Wine is what I use and I am productive.

Re:I'd like to know that too

[jsebrech]

if a newbie can insert his windows app cd, run the installer under wine and have a application link inserted in a windows directory in the gnome menu that is already associated with wine and that app

Crossover office adds apps to the menu and desktop on my system (debian + kde). That's the diff between crossover and wine, you pay for the polish.

Re:I'd like to know that too

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading that has changed my opinion of CodeWeavers from bad to good. Next time I have money to spare I think I'll be buying a copy of Crossover Office...

Re:I'd like to know that too

[mazor]

>>> All of our work on Wine goes back to the public Wine tree

So where is the 6 months of work that Borland did on WINElib (with CodeWeavers, and paid CodeWeavers) to fix the multitude of threading and exception handling issues in the WINE sources? Borland submitted the fixes, but AFAICT, they were never accepted by the WINE maintainers due to "theological differences". Talk about a collossal waste of time and effort...

I'm not talking about WINE the binary PE file emulator that tries to run Windows code that was never intended for Linux but WINElib the native Linux .so library built from the same sources as WINE that Win32 API source can link against when recompiled for Linux.

--mazor