Wine 1.0-rc2 Released

An anonymous reader writes notes the availability of Wine 1.0-rc2. Binaries for major distros are up now.

Sweet!

[locokamil]

Wait, wait, wait.

Are you telling me that it is now possible to run Visual Studio 2005... IN LINUX?

See ya, Windows! I won't be calling you again. Ever.

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dosbox?

really getting good

[oever]

Even though using Wine for apps remains a hit and miss, I've had some very good experiences working with it. At work, I'm developing a closed source Delphi application. Even though the full Delphi 2007 development environment does not run in Wine, I can run the compiler and the resulting application which is very complex (lots of COM and OpenGL) runs for 95% in Wine. It's good to know that we can get this working if customers start asking for it.

If you want to help:

[Daimanta]

If you have a Windows installation

Go to this page : http://test.winehq.org/data/3c1c6172779510a7ed693d922fb3061948999ea1/ [winehq.org]

Click on the big alphanumerical hyperlink and download the exe.

Give an alias and run it.

This will do conformance tests on your computer and it is very important to the wine project.

Don't try to do anything usefull while testing since it will do a wide range of things including directX tests which will make your screen display colorfields.

If you get errors or crashes, just click on OK or close. This is part of the testing. I'm sure the people working on the wine project will be very happy with it.

Re:If you want to help:

[JoshJ]

Posting here so I can find the link in my profile when I boot into windows. Please disregard.

Re:Does Wine work...

[Anonymous Coward]

-Yes, usually.
-Yes, usually.
-Specific programs don't work, not general categories.
-Mostly. Go check out its entry on "appDB.winehq.org" for specifics.
-Wine isn't an emulator. For programs that wine works properly with there is no performance hit.

Re:If you want to help:

[Daimanta]

Look at http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/paulm/WRT/CrossBuilt/ [gla.ac.uk]. See the the exe at the bottom. That's the latest one and the one I have linked to. Also, if you sort http://test.winehq.org/data/ [winehq.org] to the "last modified" parameter, this one ends on top. Conclusive proof I reckon.

Re:Does Wine work...

[SanityInAnarchy]

- can you run a windows installer and then run the installed program ?

Integration is fairly good, for a single user. With the standard Ubuntu Wine package, you can double-click on EXEs to run them. Installers work fine, and at least on Kubuntu, they can install working shortcuts to your desktop, and the Windows start menu is under the K-menu, under "Wine" (so I can go K->Wine->Programs->Accessories->Notepad, for example).

- can you do this also if the installer puts some dlls in the windows system directory ?

Wine lives in ~/.wine, with a fake C drive at ~/.wine/drive_c (by default). So I don't really see any reason this wouldn't work -- the DLL would go in ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/wherever.

However, drivers won't work, for obvious reasons. In very few instances, there will be a separate project to wrap a DLL for Linux -- captive ntfs, ndiswrapper, etc -- but these are considered workarounds until a native, open Linux version can be written.

- what kind of programs won't work ? .NET ? ActiveX ? DirectX ?

DirectX works fine, but won't be as fast as OpenGL. Don't know about ActiveX, but you can run up to IE6 under Wine, and (last I checked) you can use the IE7 engine in IE6 -- and, going the other way, Wine can embed a Gecko engine for when an app requests a web browser via ActiveX (for example, the MOTD on Counter-Strike servers is HTML).

Haven't looked into .NET in awhile. If it's a pure .NET project, there's a separate project for that: Mono. [mono-project.com] Because .NET is compile-once, run anywhere, like Java, a .NET app running under Mono should do about as well as it does under Windows. Because .NET on Windows is so tightly integrated, and makes it so easy to call out to native DLLs, many .NET apps don't work under Mono, and never will.

I believe there are voodoo ways of combining Mono and Wine, but I don't know how to do that. I don't know if Microsoft's own .NET runtime works under Wine.

- Photophop ?

What's Photophop?

Seriously, look it up yourself: Most apps are listed at AppDB [winehq.com], and PhotoShop CS2 is listed as Platinum [winehq.org], which is the highest possible rating.

- How much of a performance hit do you take ?

Again, look at AppDB. It depends on the app whether it will run at all, and how fast it will run. Some apps -- even some games -- run faster under Wine than under Windows. Some run slower. Most, especially office apps, have no perceptible difference, so I don't usually care to benchmark it.

For me, by now, the procedure for testing a Wine app is to first, try it on a clean ~/.wine (or set WINEPREFIX -- I actually regularly keep multiple Wine directories around) -- if it works in the simplest way possible, I'll do that. Otherwise, especially if it's a game (and especially if it's a Blizzard game, which defaults to DirectX but can be coerced into OpenGL mode), Google for that app under Wine, and check AppDB.

If I find a workable solution, I use it. Otherwise, I boot a real Windows, either natively or in a VM. I'm not a Wine developer, and I don't want to be.

Re:Astounding...

[DuckDodgers]

If you read the website, Wine has some internal APIs it uses. For the previous releases, those APIs were subject to change. From 1.0 forward, they are expected to remain stable.

So from an end-user perspective, the move to 1.0 is not noteworthy as a release. But for developers, you hope that contributing to the project becomes easier with a higher likelihood of forward compatibiliy.