RSSWine Reaches Beta - After 12 Years
By Ed Oswald | Published October 26, 2005, 11:00 AM
After twelve years of development, the Wine Project announced Tuesday night that its software to run Windows applications within Unix is entering the beta phase. The group acknowledged the program still has bugs, but asked those interested to download and test out the application.
"Wine is available thanks to the work of many people," lead coordinator for the Wine Project Alexandre Julliard wrote to the wine-announce mailing list Tuesday.
The group believes that Wine is what Linux needs in order to become a viable operating system for the masses. No Windows license is needed in order to run Windows applications with Wine. Instead, they run in an emulated shell, meaning Linux users can take advantage of programs from Microsoft Money and Internet Explorer, to popular Windows games like Diablo and Warcraft.
"Wine 0.9 marks the beginning of 'prime time' for Wine," Julliard said. "The application has undergone major redevelopment in recent months, reflecting the work of hundreds of developers around the world. Wine 0.9 is now a stable application with solid support for all Linux kernels."
The new version now has a completed 'winecfg,' which negates the need to create a configuration file in order to use the program. It also adds a full set of DLLs, and has better installer support to ensure programs install more smoothly.
In a related announcement, CrossOver Office 5.0 was released Tuesday as well. The program works with Wine in order to make Windows programs run properly in other operating system environments. The software will for the first time add preliminary support for Microsoft Office 2003.
Jeremy White, CEO of CodeWeavers, the company behind CrossOver Office, had words of praise for the news of Wine entering beta.
"I truly believe that Wine is reaching a critical turning point; the point where we start realizing the dream of having everything 'just work'," he said in a post to the company's announcements mailing list.
I'm part of what I believe is a large user category: users who don't like the cost of upgrading their Windows OS, it's unreliability, the restrictions on the number of changes you may make before having to re-validate the software and the validation process itself. However, I have faced two obstacles with my three attempts to use the Linux OS's that are available. The first is that I have dozens of Windows programs I have found that I cannot do without. The second is that when I have found a replacement program for use with Linux, the program compilers assume that I will have the technical expertise and ability to install the program without an installer. I have tried requesting time and time again for someone to explain to me (in a number of forums) how to install or remove a program from one of the Linux OS's and have never gotten a response. I look forward to WINE and believe it will be the tool I need to finally be able to migrate to a system that has none of the things about Windows that I feel are designed in such a way that they are "anti" user.
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Open a konsole window. cd into the correct directory (cd in bash works similar to dos's)... then
./configure
make
make install
works for most software Somethings you need others for. But I agree. All praise wine!
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LOL. U are so damn right (except for the "windows is unreliable" part)! Many open source software are just not designed with their users in mind.
Most software don't come with proper installer. And when they do, they don't set it up nicely for you. Normally, you can't even find the icon in the menu bar, desktop or any other panel that allows the user to run the newly installed application.
The thing I hate most is those missing library errors. Ugh!
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Well I am just glad that even most haters still have to fire up emulation of some kind because Microsoft has something of an edge or these people would not be working so hard on making Windows work with Unix. This is all them, has nothing to do with Microsoft.
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LOL
You don't have half a clue about what Wine is. It's not for running WINDOWS on UNIX, it's for running APPLICATIONS that RUN ON WINDOWS on LINUX.
Just incase you still don't get it, it can be used for thinfs like running Quicktime for Windows on Linux or ITunes, or Trillian, etc.
There are many cases where Windows is needed on Linux, *AND* for Linux on Windows for that there is VMWare, colinux, Win4Lin, Bochs, ETC.
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Linux users trying to run Windows applications... NONSENSE!
What a joke... You are just fooling yourselves.
Get a life! Get the real thing! Windows rules!
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Get a life. Get Linux. 'Nuff said.
BTW. I've been using Wine on Nix for a while. It runs IE as if I were running in on Windoze ^_^. Fast, and just as buggy as the real thing.
And games like battlezone 2, Doom, almost anything, works fine.
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I tried Wine for a little bit, but then I realized that its not necessary; Linux has all the software you could ever want :)
Firefox, OpenOffice, K3b, Gimp, XMMS, etc. etc.
'The Real Thing' is Linux software ;-)
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XMMS? Nah, Noatun! ^_^ OpenOffice? Nah! KOffice. Firefox? Nah! Konqueror.
PS. This point of this post is not to debate which of these products is better. It's to show how much choice Linux users have. Compared to Windows users, who hafta use IE for WinUpdate. Hafta use WMP for something. Hafta use office in some way.
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Can you do something as complex as this any faster, I think not. I mean just think about it, they are trying to make windows APIs run on a system that they were never meant for and I'm pretty sure that Microsoft did everything in their power to make em non-crossplatform compatible. Then they have to insure compatibility witht he software that's out their on the market on top of that so... All I can say is if you can do the job quicker go ahead and do it.
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They'll probably be done just in time for Vista to change everything.
Then they'll have to start over.
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Yea, leave it to Microsoft to screw stuff up.
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Only if the whole world moves to Vista. Hopefully it will work well enough by that point to allow for people to move to Linux and their current programs will work. Their new programs will then be designed for Linux and slowly everyone will move to open source - well we can hope :D
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There's been a number of web sites that have posted Vista B1 usage as about half that of Linux.
Given that Vista is unreleased and won't be for over a year, I'd say that Linux has a long way to go.
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12 years to come up with a Beta product.. Geez! Yeah, open source surely is the future of true and absolute inefficiency and marketing hype. Other than pure hype open-source stuff has nothing else. No real usability, no real code testing, no real optimizations. At the best average stuff can come from professionals when ordered to release a freeware product as long as some Company needs it to stay free to push hardware sales.
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Riiiiight. And when you and your buddies come up with a better way to get windows Apps to run outside their native environment, you just let me know.
K?
Thanks.
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Well, I don't necessarily agree with the open source business model, but I think you are wrong.
As a community project, open source model has been proven to be successful many times over.
Look at MySQL, Linux, and if you want to count donated stuff: Eclipse IDE, a few Apache projects, etc. These are highly competent software.
But I will give you this: most of them still belong to the domain of IT professionals. They are not end user applications, if that's what you mean by "real usability". But then again, have you ever tried Firefox? Go give it a try and edit your comment here. :)
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rflmao
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I think his point was that there's no need to run windows apps, because Linux, UNIX (BSD), etc HAS real usability.
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That may be true for some users, but not so for others. Some of the big players in the software industry are still yet to take Linux, or anything other than Windows, seriously. Adobe and Macromedia would be prime examples in this category. Some people simply need the applications by these companies, so Linux is not an option. Oh and no, some crappy Linux alternative of those programs won't do!
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Sure...if all you use your PC for is development or office apps.
Sorry, the gaming environment is simply no tthere yet...even *with* cedega.
Let me know when it is and I'll me more than happy to drop Windows like a brick.
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Beta is just a title.
Wine is more stable then most full version products (Windows for example). *wiggles to the tune he's playing on WinAMP, Linux*
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Adobe and Macromedia products work fine, but what's wrong with The GIMP? ^_^
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Reverse engineering an entire operating system is a task that is almost impossible. Really, it's amazing that Wine has come this far even if it did take 12 years.
By the way, I don't know if CrossOver Office 5.0 is based on this new Wine beta, but CrossOver Office 5.0 has some major problems. I tried running it under OpenSUSE Linux 10.0 and when CrossOver Office 5.0 simulates a Windows reboot it ends up restarting X Windows completely.
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When done properly, most Linux alternatives aren't "crappy", but work better than the product they are replacing. But I agree that there are a lot of big players that have not come into the linux field, such as the gaming industry. This is why I have Linux on one machine, Windows on another.
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