Fun With Wine 263
taviso writes "Ever wondered what would happen if you could compile and run cygwin under wine ? What about compiling wine under cygwin ? well these guys have, and are planning to nest the two environments as many times as possible to see if wine can take the strain, and not without good reason: 'Having such virtualization environments run within each other is an important milestone in the lives of these projects, it is a remarkable technical feat that requires a great deal of maturity'. "
What's this? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What's this? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What's this? (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean, WINE is attempting to perfectly imitate the Windows API. This seems to me like a breach of copyright. Microsoft create an API and its functionality is copied identically by another application? It actually seems like MS have a genuine case, for once, at legal action. Looks like WINE is doing to Microsoft what Microsoft have done to a lot of competitiors - steal their intellectual property.
Re:What's this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What's this? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why IBM produced Intel-like chips for such a long time.
And today, you can run a Windows or Linux system on top of either Intel or AMD chips. You don't need to install a whole other OS. Why? Because the AMD chip emulates the Intel interface.
Re:What's this? (Score:2)
Re:What's this? (Score:3, Informative)
Apple sued, but they lost [madcapps.com]., because Apple was not the inventor or the GUI interface. They borrowed the GUI idea from the Smalltalk project [smalltalk.org] which was created by Xerox and PARC.
Wonderful. (Score:3, Insightful)
But I still cannot run MS Office or Internet Explorer or most games in Wine. D'oh!
Re:Wonderful. (Score:5, Informative)
What are you talking about? Of course you can [codeweavers.com]
Re:Wonderful. (Score:2)
Yes, I can pay for an aftermarket Wine to run Office, but I can also run MS Office and Internet Explorer in Win4Lin, as well as Photoshop (which codeweavers can't help me with), so even paying $$, Wine comes out loser.
Re:Wonderful. (Score:5, Informative)
To make this clear, here are links for running MS Word [codeweavers.com], MS Excel [codeweavers.com], and MS IE [codeweavers.com] under Wine without paying any money to Codeweavers or any other company. You do pay with your time, though.
Re:Wonderful. (Score:2)
The point for me of getting away from Windows is the pay factor. If I've already paid for Office, why would I want to spend ANOTHER $55 to get it to work under Linux?
I might as well keep Windows and just run it there for the same price as I paid for it.
Re:Wonderful. (Score:3, Funny)
I to am frustrated at the difficlty of finding linux waerz :D
Re:Wonderful. (Score:2)
Word is the hacker/terrorist site www.freshmeat.net has lots of software to download. Do there before the feds do!
MODUP: Guide to running Photoshop, IE, Kazaa... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MODUP: Guide to running Photoshop, IE, Kazaa... (Score:2)
his instructions suggest there is anonymous checkout available without
a password.
When I tried it just now, it definitely needed a password.
Re:MODUP: Guide to running Photoshop, IE, Kazaa... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:MODUP: Guide to running Photoshop, IE, Kazaa... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wonderful. (Score:5, Informative)
MS Office and IE both run fine in Wine. IE of course only runs if you have an existing Windows install. And all the games I care about (like Warcraft III and Max Payne :P) work fine in WineX
Re:Wonderful. (Score:2)
Untrue also :) Jeez, looks like half of slashdot hasn't actually used Wine. I have IE6 running at work just fine, although I do have a dual boot system CrossOver isn't using anything from my XP installation. You just need to get the installer and install it as normal. Doesn't work perfectly, but it's good enough for web development which is all I need it for.
Re:Wonderful. (Score:2)
Re:Wonderful. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wonderful. (Score:5, Interesting)
But I can still not get the Office installer or the Inernet Explorer installer or the Photoshop installer to run.
I've even tried several times using Wine with the filesystem created by Win4Lin, which had an "already existing Windows install" containing Office and IE and PS. No dice.
Here and there (mostly on
If you have nice, step-by-step instructions for getting Office 2000 and Internet Explorer 6 and Photoshop 6 to install and run in Wine, please post them here! The Linux community will be very grateful, as this would allow a large number of people to migrate to Linux by using Wine to run their important applications.
Yes, you can buy Crossover Office for some increased (yet still limited) application support. And you can buy into the Transgaming situation for some increased (yet still limited) gaming support. And you could even buy WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux for a while, which used wine for some increased (yet still limited) application support. But that's a lot of $$, a lot of different installations of wine on a single system, and still no Photoshop 6!
Re:Wonderful. (Score:2, Informative)
As you can see from those screenshots, I've had success getting PS 6.0 to work from within Codeweaver's "Crossover Office". It starts & runs without issue. I also tried a few different filters, and they worked.
However, every time I attempted to modify the default user colors, it crashed without hesitation.
YMMV.
Your not alone (Score:2)
I also tried the codweavers plugin demo(for WMP, Quicktime etc.) That didn't go well at all on a stock Redhat 7.3 install. Quicktime kinda worked once in a while, but nothing else would install. They would download via the shell script and then nothing.
Bottom line is Wine is a crutch and a bad one at that. I'm hardly inexperienced with linux and if I think Wis a pain, I can hardly imagine what less experienced users must go through trying to get it to work.
BTW even when following the tips on Franks wine world the apps dont' work. I don't know what mojo he uses, but when I've followed the tips I haven't gotten fully usuable apps.
Re:Wonderful. (Score:2)
As for the previous complaints about Office2000, IE6 not working, I have yet to have any luck with either of those (I don't have a need for either; it is just amusing to play with wine). .
Re:Sch! God damn it! (Score:3, Informative)
Mozilla isn't slow, but it has a higher memory footprint than some
other browsers (Opera, for example) and a higher _apparent_ memory
footprint than IE, from the user's perspective (because the parts
of IE that are loaded at bootup time won't be considered as parts
of IE by most users). This means that on systems with marginal
amounts of RAM, Mozilla is more likely to push you over the edge of
your memory into swap, which of course is _noticeably_ slower. This
is the phenomenon most often meant when people say Mozilla is slow.
In my case, I've got 512MB of RAM, and after the OS (Linux) and GUI
(XFree/Gnome) take their hits the five apps I use most (Emacs, Gnus,
Mozilla, Gimp, and gnome-terminal) are welcome to most of the rest.
Once a day or so when I fire up something else large (OpenOffice,
for example) too, I dip into swap space, but most of the time that's
not a problem. But I'm a power user, and I specifically maxed out
the RAM on my system so that I could have [counts] fourteen windows
open at once (at the moment, 3 Emacsen, the 4 basic Gimp windows
(no actual images just now), one Mozilla (9 tabs), and 6 instances
of gnome-terminal (in 4 different terminal classes) for various
things (one for a MySQL client, two looking at directories where
I'm doing two different projects, one tailing a log (related to one
of the projects), and two sshed into another system). That's not
normal user stuff; most people _don't_ go out and spend extra money
on extra RAM, because they _don't_ need to have 14 windows open at
once. So for them, if the computer is anything like as old as mine
(January 1998 originally, though I haven't had 512MB of RAM that
long), Mozilla is indeed going to be "slow".
This is however not a _performance_ issue (from the programmer's
standpoint), but a footprint issue, and it will be fading in
importance, as new computers are coming with more hefty amounts of
RAM these days. (128MB is _way_ more than Mozilla needs, and
that's the least a normal system comes with these days.) Yes,
apps will continue to grab more of that, but since most users
only really run one app at a time... so app developers don't
have to _stop_ the growth in the amount of RAM they use, as long
as the keep it substantially _slower_ than the growth in the amount
of RAM that new computers have. By Netscape 8 timeframe nobody's
going to _care_ that it uses 48MB of RAM or more. The people who
_do_ run multiple apps at once (such as myself) can pick up a
little extra RAM; it's cheap these days. By the time Netscape 9
comes out, it can probably get away with using 64MB or more, since
three-year-old off-the-shelf systems (being sold today) will have
128 to work with en total, and new systems will be selling with
more like 512 or more. (Of course that number is guesstimated.)
Code optimization from the compiler doesn't really matter; it's
keeping it from swapping that will save your day in terms of
apparent performance. The difference between well-optimized code
and poorly-optimized code, in terms of CPU time, is subliminal;
most people need benchmarks to even determine whether there _is_
a difference. But if you run out of physical RAM and start using
swap space, the user can measure the delay with something no more
precise than an analog watch.
Re:Wonderful. (Score:4, Funny)
At last a perverse heterogeneous enviroment exists that allows developers to draw on the combined flaws and incompatabilities of linux, windows, cygwin and wine. Which (aside from the uber-cool element), is a boon for masochistic developers everywhere. Perhaps this will spur a new breed of coders that are the cyber-culture equivilent of flagellation cults.
Then again, I probably should go a little easier on the wine.
Re:COME ON.... (Score:2)
Just had to (-8
Cute title but... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Cute title but... (Score:3, Funny)
Knowing parents they'll stop the kids using the computer. Knowing kid's, (s)he'll whine.
*groan*
Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough... (Score:5, Interesting)
I read these stories of people doing absolutely astonishing things using WINE, but what the rest of us (who only have a need to touch WINE when there is something that they Must Have that isn't available for Linux-- in my case, it was the FightAIDS@Home distributed-computing client) really need is a good, central repository of "How to get Program X to work under WINE" mini-tutorials.
Anyone here work on WineHQ and can comment on this?
try winesetup (Score:5, Informative)
Now the standard (unstable) debian install comes with winesetup, which sets up a nice working wine installation (works a bit better of you have windows installed)
Try to install winesetup (a contribution from codeweavers)...
Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough (Score:3, Informative)
Actually the WineHQ site is being redesigned at the moment (I'm not a major contributor but am on the lists).
The best tip for using wine is simply - buy it. WineHQ wine hasn't had much effort put into end user usability, it's much like the raw Linux kernel, it needs wrapping up with lots of utilities and quite a few "hack patches" for it to do everything the users demand. I have 2 installations of Wine on my machine, CrossOver and Wine CVS. Guess which works better.
Often, a few little things can make a program work better if it doesn't work properly with a standard CodeWeavers install. For instance: WinZip works fine until you open a zip with a message in it. Why? Because it's missing a RichEdit control (wine has no replacement for it yet). You could fiddle with config files and make it use a native riched40.dll, but an easier way is to google for it, find allerasoft.com and download it from there. Run the RichEdit update .exe in Wine, and now you have the control and WinZip works perfectly.
The Apps DB is the best place to look for tips like this, each app that is known about in the database has a score and a comments section for users to swap tips.
Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough (Score:2)
A single guide for each and every program would be impossible to keep updated. Like most people, I have never heard of most Windows programs including the one that you mentioned above.
The next best thing is the Wine Application Database [codeweavers.com]. The appdb lists specific programs and you can add yours to it so others know how well or poorly the programs you are interested in work.
Tip: If you search for the message that appears when the program fails to run, you might get directions on how to install another program that is similar and does work with Wine. (Then again, you might not...can't say!)
The Wine FAQ [www.dssd.ca] has been updated reciently, and the Wine Knowledgebase [winehq.org] is still helpful.
Note: The Wine-FAQ link listed above may move.
Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough (Score:4, Insightful)
I was interested in your FightAIDS@Home cause, and looked up their website [fightaidsathome.com], but was really turned off by this excerpt of their webpage:
What exactly is included in "commercial tasks." It seems to me that if I'm donating *my* spare computer cycles, and *my* electricity, you shouldn't take advantage of that by profiting from it. Oh well...
Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough (Score:2)
LOL. .
Wine is not perfect, but it has come a light-years and frankly amazes me how much it can do!
No... (Score:3, Insightful)
'Having such virtualization environments run within each other is an important milestone in the lives of these projects, it is a remarkable technical feat that requires a great deal of maturity'.
No, it's a party trick. Milestones include running actual applications that matter and getting large numnbers of users to use the emulators as a bridge from one OS to anther.
FWIF, Since 1995-1996 or so I've had linux people telling me about how wine is close to obsoleting my windows systems. Hence, my skepticism. These emulators always seem to be amazing technical accomplishments, yes, but like Soviet televisions made of vaccuum tubes for sale at Best Buy, not ready for prime time by anybody but tinkerers. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that they are chasing a moving target..
Re:No... (Score:2, Redundant)
Just to start the pedantry rolling - WINE isn't an emulator, it's an API implementation.
Re:No... (Score:2)
That's from the Wine FAQ. It goes on to say that Wine doesn't attempt to duplicate the environment.
However, the simple fact of the matter is that I have a shit load of wine libraries on my computer designed specifically to emulate their windows counterparts. As such, WINE most certainly is an emulator.
Dinivin
Re:No... (Score:2)
The word you are looking for is "duplicate" not "emulate", both in everyday English and in computer terms. The latter is more specific in that "emulation" usually applies to hardware (GNU/Linux and Windows run on the same platforms in this case, there is nothing to emulate)
Anyway, it seems this is already "redundant", I am not sure what you are trying to prove. Is the WINE team mistaking in that they are not building an emulator? Do you, in fact, know better?
Re:No... (Score:2)
Re:No... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No... (Score:2, Informative)
"By the way, a lot of people think that the Windows API is too much of a moving target for WINE to catch up. As a Windows developer, let me say, this is rubbish. Almost every Windows app out there is tested on Win 95 to make sure it runs decently on the entire 32 bit Windows product line. If WINE could ever catch up to Win 95, they would be almost completely done. The target hasn't moved anywhere since August, 1995." -- Joel Spolsky [hethmon.com]
Re:No... (Score:2)
Re:No... (Score:2, Funny)
All of slashdot wants to know -- Are there girls at these parties?
Re:No... (Score:2)
The problem is that Windows is a moving target. I'm sure you can run the apps from 1995-1996 pretty perfectly, but the problem is to always support the latest and greatest stuff from MS.
Re:No... (Score:2)
My word! Do they have screens too?
Is this really all that important? (Score:2)
Re:Is this really all that important? (Score:3, Insightful)
>or applicable in the real world (ie >repetitively nesting cygwin and wine)?.
If you have to ask, you are missing the point.
Re:Is this really all that important? (Score:2)
I asked, so therefore I AM missing the point. The reason I asked was to be enlightened. Does this have a real-world application? Or is it just a simple, "Hey, look what we can do!" sort of thing? If it's the latter, I get it. If the former, then I don't.
Er... correct me if I'm wrong, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Compile & run Cygwin under Wine in Linux
This provides an a good test case for Wine. It is tough, but we do have the Cygwin source code, and we have a good chance to understand why it does not work.
So they have a good chance of understanding why it doesn't work?
Forgive me if I don't find that *overly* impressive :-)
Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
This reminds me of the time when I sshed to one machine, then telneted back to the machine I was on, and kept on telneting and sshing to as many machines as I could to see what would happen. Th results weren't as exciting but it was still fun.
Re:Wow (Score:2)
Re:Wow (Score:2)
Try this (Score:3, Funny)
Turtles, all the way down... (Score:3, Funny)
I gotta stop now. My head hurts.
Jack William Bell
Emulation Rush (Score:2)
Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Windows -> VMWare -> Linux -> Wine -> Cygwin -> Wine.
And finally, a stable, enterprise-ready solution for running my Windows applications.
Believe it or not... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Believe it or not... (Score:3, Interesting)
I only have this to say: (Score:2)
Why run the whole thing under x86? (Score:2, Funny)
I say, run The Sims under WINE under CYGWIN under WINE under {Linux Distro} under Virtual PC under Mac Os 9 environment under Mac OS X.
And not pay Microsoft a penny.
Re:Why run the whole thing under x86? (Score:2)
XBOXBochsLinuxWineWin98Virtual PC... (Score:5, Funny)
OR you could go out and have sex with a woman, one with breasts and everything.
wine on osx (Score:2)
Re:wine on osx (Score:2)
Re:wine on osx (Score:4, Informative)
winelib [winehq.org], however, is aiming for cross-platform compatability, so its possible you can compile windows software and link it with winelib for use on osx.
One day... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why? (Score:2)
If you can nest the environments ten times, what is to be gained (scientifically) by doing it one thousand times?
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
But things like this typically follow a scale:
1) does it work period? (i.e. can cygwin run under wine - 1 nesting)
2) does it work in the small-number case (i.e. 2-5 nestings, or thereabout)
3) does it work in the extreme case? (i.e. 10^(2-5) nestings) - which means that most inefficiency bugs are flushed out and the design scales well
Just about every system can fit into one of these categories - but only the most robust fit into #3. Example: Linux threading. Right now it passes 1 (you can multithread), passes 2 (having a number of threads/process under ~100 doesn't really change performance), but fails 3 (the 2.5 kernel developers are working on that one right now - but ~10,000 kernel threads will bring the system to its knees).
Emulator in emulator in emul... (Score:5, Funny)
Wine q&a (Score:5, Informative)
The first one is that Wine is hard to make work. Well, it's like Linux you know, if you go get a release from WineHQ it's like getting Debian or Gentoo, great for power users but it requires quite a lot of effort to make it work well. It's all there though, you can sit down and beat WineHQ releases into running Office or IE. It just takes effort and skill.
For the rest of us, companies like CodeWeavers are for Wine what RedHat is for Linux. They add bits, integrate it nicely, give you support. As a concrete example of what they add, they have a nice app (officesetup) which presents you with a list of apps that are installed a la "Add/Remove programs". If you use this program to install an app as opposed to running the setup.exe directly, icons will be added to your menus and desktop, and file associations will be automatically setup for you. Wine doesn't have this (yet).
Another thing is that WineHQ has no code for automatically performing a "reboot". Stuff like IE needs some actions to be performed when you reboot the machine (the RunOnce sections). WineHQ releases don't have any code for this, so you'd have to manually read the registry entries and files and do it yourself, hence the fact that most people fail.
WineHQ will get this code. One of the targets for Wine 1.0 is that it's easy to use. For now though, you need to buy CrossOver Office for the best overall Wine experience. It's unfortunate that you have to buy a separate product for games, but that's one of the perils of BSD licensing, it allows forks like that (fyi wine is now lgpl).
Another myth is that wine can never catch up with Microsoft. That actually isn't true, if anything we're moving as fast as, if not faster than Microsoft right now. There are a few large projects left and then Wine basically has a mostly complete implementation of the Windows APIs. Such projects include a richedit control (effectively a mini word processor), RPC (being worked on now), DirectX (an lgpl implementation, parts are available but d3d is only like 10% done), a WinHelp app and so on. After that, it's pure bugfixing all the way.
So what are Microsoft doing? Well they're working on .NET of course, the Windows APIs are horrible and .NET is a way of making them easier to use. But we have that covered as well with Mono, in fact for System.Windows.Forms Mono is using the Wine controls library. Mono is moving at an astonishing pace, it has lots of volunteers working on it. But it needs more developers as always (wine that is), and one problem is that getting Wine working well enough to hack on it is hard. Catch 22 in a way. Don't be put off though. Wine is cool, and remarkably advanced.
Crossover supports LGPL (Score:3, Informative)
Nothing stopping anyone from putting a propietary pay-only interface on top of an LGPL product.
That gives me an idea... (Score:2, Interesting)
how about running MySQL under Cygwin? (Score:2, Interesting)
How about linux from scratch (Score:2)
Cygwin Vs. VMware (Score:2)
On the topic of WINE thou, the only reason I use wine is for CounterStrike, and All-seeing-eye on linux.
Maturity?!? (Score:2)
I don't know about you guys, but purposefully playing with something until it breaks is not usually considered "mature" in my book.
LINE project - run Linux apps under Cygwin/Windows (Score:5, Informative)
Alcoholic processing (Score:2, Funny)
Re:doubts about future of wine (Score:5, Informative)
Uhh... perhaps you've been living under a rock for the last two years? They did change all of their APIs to make WINE obsolete. Here are the new ones: http://www.microsoft.com/net/ [microsoft.com]
Re:doubts about future of wine (Score:2)
Milestone target: Running .NET over Wine (Score:2)
Re:Milestone target: Running .NET over Wine (Score:2)
The .NET CLR runs on top of the Win32 API and is not a replacement. Therefore, in theory, a fully working WINE will allow .NET to run straight on top of WINE.
Do you think that the .NET license will allow that? If not, then you have to duplicate all of .NET in order to support .NET applications. In other words there is a whole new API that over time will make WINE obsolete. On the other hand, the Windows API was invented years before the WINE project started whereas Mono is only months behind .NET. So it is at least conceivable that there will be a complete open source .NET clone before there are even many popular programs that depend upon .NET.
Does not work like that (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Does not work like that (Score:2)
I seem to remember that the latest Office, version 11 ? will only run at XP and win2000. And since office 11 contains a brand new fileformat, that office xp and older offices cant read, they have defacto forced you to upgrade by breaking backwards compability.
Yes i'm aware that default wine doesnt run office.
Wrong Product (Score:2)
But that has nothing to do with REMOVING the OLD features from their NEW OS.
Two completely separate situations that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
Re:Does not work like that (Score:2)
Re:Does not work like that (Score:2)
Right. Breaking backwards compatibility is a bad thing. They couldn't, for example, just wake up one day and decide that the new version of MS Office will run on Windows XP and Windows 2000SP3, but not on earlier Windows 2000 releases, nor on Windows XP or Windows 95/98/ME [pcworld.com]. API backwards compatibility is there for a reason, right?
Re:doubts about future of wine (Score:4, Interesting)
They already have in a way. Wine is still working on the Win9x API, so software that needs the newer Win2k or XP interfaces won't run. This may not be a big deal yet, but MS already announced (sorry, I don't have the link handy) that Office 11 will *not* run on Win9x, it will be 2k or XP only.
Wine as a platform for running old apps will live on, but wine as a viable alternative to buying windows is stuffed, IMHO.
Re:doubts about future of wine (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:doubts about future of wine (Score:2)
Re:Is cygwin an emulator? (Score:3, Informative)
Cygwin is a UNIX environment, developed by Red Hat, for Windows. It consists of two parts:
# A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a UNIX emulation layer providing substantial UNIX API functionality.
# A collection of tools, ported from UNIX, which provide UNIX/Linux look and feel.
Basically it lets you compile unix programs on windows and run them with the cygwin
Re:Is cygwin an emulator? (Score:2)
Re:Is cygwin an emulator? (Score:2)
wrong (Score:2)
Re:wrong (Score:2)
Re:What the hell does this mean? (Score:2)
Re:Wine with or without Windows? (Score:3, Informative)
It used to be. When Wine began, it was basically a loader for the libraries that came with Windows to handle the Windows API calls. Now, Wine handles those Windows API calls itself so having a Windows partition around is not necessary.
That said, if you can't install a program under Wine does not mean that the program itself is incompatable with Wine. Having Windows around to install a program for Wine to use later can be useful.