Munich now Open Source

[Byock]

Yeah, I have to agree. That crossover works like a charm! Running Windows Media Player, (just cause I can ), Office XP, and Photo Shop 7 flawlessly. I cannot tell the difference from running it in Windows.

[Pace]

Originally posted by leech
Gee, it's a shame that the mighty gurm thinks of it as emulation. Since Wine is not an emulator. It's an API layer. After it's installed, you don't even notice that you're running a windows app in linux. In fact Photoshop goes right on your menu (at least it did for Gnome 2.2 on debian.) I don't need windows on my system or anything.

Indeed Adobe will need to see that there is a reason to port it over to linux. If a lot of their customers start switching to linux, then they will do a native port, but until then, I think Codeweaver's crossover office will do nicely.

You've got to remember, that Wine doesn't emulate any architecture, since it's running on the same hardware as windows. (Of course Wine only works on x86 architectures)

It works quite fast, though I'm sure a lot of the speed would be different had I actual LINUX drivers for Parhelia! (yeah, so I'm getting a little impatient....)

Leech

Ok, just a curio - but is it therefore emulating the Windows API? I am presuming WINE Is Not an Emulator though...

How does PS7 run on WINE and Windows, comparitively...

[leech]

Well, it'd be a better test bed if I actually had a good working Parhelia driver for linux. But aside from that, I had it running in 1732x1344x24 and it ran pretty fast, though because of the Parhelia's poor linux driver, there was some screen corruption. There is a demo of Crossover office that you can download for free, go try it out.

It's not an emulation per se, it's just a different implimentation. Emulation I believe is more defined as actually using whatever ROM/BIOS file of the original machine, but since they (Both linux and windows) will run on X86 hardware, Wine doesn't need to emulate any hardware. For instance, I don't think they'd ever need a linux emulator for windows, they could just try to impliment the API's that it uses.

Leech

[Gurm]

WINE and all its cronies are emulators of one kind or another, despite the name. They can't reverse-engineer the API, so they're EMULATING each and every API call.

Is it fast? Sure. Is it a cop-out? HELL YEAH.

"Gee, nobody will make good software for Linux so we're gonna write a Windows API Emulator and run Windows software."

RE-tarded.

Then these selfsame people will tell you how much Windows sucks and how they don't need any Windows or MS software.

Yeah.

- Gurm

[runderwo]

Leech:

"You've got to remember, that Wine doesn't emulate any architecture, since it's running on the same hardware as windows. (Of course Wine only works on x86 architectures) "

Actually, WINE itself doesn't only run on x86, it's just that the Win32 executables tend to 99.999% of the time be x86 code. However, there is work on integrating QEMU, a x86 emulator for userspace code, into WINE, which would allow for running x86 Windows binaries on any Unix machine that WINE+QEMU could run on. Neat stuff!

"For instance, I don't think they'd ever need a linux emulator for windows, they could just try to impliment the API's that it uses."

That's exactly what Cygwin does. CYGWIN.DLL contains the win32-based equivalent functions of much of the GNU C library. So you can simply recompile your Unix C programs and run them under Windows linked to the Cygwin DLL which provides the needed Unix functionality in a Win32 environment.

Gurm:

"WINE and all its cronies are emulators of one kind or another, despite the name. They can't reverse-engineer the API, so they're EMULATING each and every API call."

It's not emulating anything. The WINE people actually do significant reverse engineering of the Windows libraries. They have to be careful to clean-room it, but it is done. The WINE API is just like any other API except that it provides a Win32-compatible one. It is an API just like Readline, Curses, or libdb are API's. It is a fairly fat layer on top of the system C library, but that's the nature of the Win32 beast anyway -- to put the kitchen sink in the system libraries. The only thing in WINE that resembles emulation is the executable loader -- take an EXE, resolve linker references and jump to an entry point. But there are different loaders for a.out, elf, coff binaries too that do the same thing to get a program image into memory and linked up, and those aren't considered emulation. So what is?

"Gee, nobody will make good software for Linux so we're gonna write a Windows API Emulator and run Windows software.
Then these selfsame people will tell you how much Windows sucks and how they don't need any Windows or MS software."

The people involved with WINE typically use and depend on Windows-based software themselves. They want to get rid of the OS dependency because Windows isn't meeting their needs for one reason or another, or because they feel like people should have a choice on what operating system they run their programs on regardless of what the programs were actually written for. The Cygwin project implements a GNU environment upon Windows and people support it; what's wrong with doing the inverse for Unix?

Unfortunately, nobody will bother writing native desktop software for Unix (or any other operating system) unless there is a demand for it. In order to create that demand, there must be a significant install base to where a return on their development investment can be made. One of the barriers for the free operating systems having a significant install base is the inability to run the plethora of closed source Windows software from the last 10 years. Sometimes there simply aren't replacements for a certain app. One by one, these dependencies get removed, install base grows and thus the risk gets lessened for a company to write software for e.g. teh GNU/Linux platform.

A lot of people are putting in sweat and hard work to try to make sure that a native Photoshop Linux port eventually would become a reality. Through removing barriers to people moving to the Unix desktop, the WINE guys are moving us in that direction. I wouldn't be so quick to knock them down.

[leech]

Sorry, I kind of forgot about Cygwin, but either way, I was right, Cygwin isn't an emulator either

As far as People using linux with Wine and then saying that Windows sucks... well guess what, they don't run Wine to run windows, they run Wine to run windows APPS. There is a HUGE difference. If there is an absolute NEED to run a specific application that has no equivalent in linux, then you either have to use Windows, which quite frankly a lot of people are starting to get disgusted with it. (I mean come on, let's just have EVERY program by default install in C:\Program Files\ and just slap it onto the Start menu in no particular orginizational way! I know how to find my programs a lot easier through Gnome/Kde with their menu system!)

Like I've always said, the Windows GUI and how you basically have no control over it (without installing third party apps) just pisses me off. When I first saw screenshots of WindowsXP and how they were talking about how you can theme it, I thought, "great, it's about time I can make the OS look like I want it to look, not how MS wants it to look." But guess what? If you want to change the themes except for just the color, then you'll have to buy/download a non-ms program to do it.

The Windows Operating systems are Ugly and just don't have a lot of the functionality of a Linux DE. Besides, Linux is free Granted, I'd much rather have a native port of Photoshop (the big problem I think with a lot of commercial apps for linux though, is that they always seem to use ugly tool kits for their widgets. Like the old Netscape using Motif. Yuck.) But hey, it works for now, so that anyone who uses it professionally and does not like windows will be happy.

Leech

[leech]

And I wasn't aware of QEMU, that's cool that they are going to try to integrate that into Wine. I know that was one reason why Wine wouldn't run on an Alpha, etc. because it wasn't coded to emulate any hardware, just software calls.

Leech

[dbdg]

Originally posted by leech
Like I've always said, the Windows GUI and how you basically have no control over it (without installing third party apps) just pisses me off. When I first saw screenshots of WindowsXP and how they were talking about how you can theme it, I thought, "great, it's about time I can make the OS look like I want it to look, not how MS wants it to look." But guess what? If you want to change the themes except for just the color, then you'll have to buy/download a non-ms program to do it.

Sorry Leech but I don't see the point to this whole idea of making the OS look pretty. I never see my OS, Generally either a game, 3DS Max, Dreamweaver or any other app is maximised across my displays

The odd time I do see my desktop it looks like this, no point with icons etc as I can't get to them when an app is maxed and the start menu works just fine.

Why I never posted in the whole what does your desktop look like thread, never ever bothered modifying what I don't see.

[leech]

It's not the point of making it look 'pretty' it's making it more functional (at least in my opinion, that's why I don't care for KDE, the widgets look too gaudy) But in Windows (even with the Clear Type enabled) the fonts don't look as good as they do in Gnome 2.x. It's much easier on the eyes. My desktop in windows looks about the same as yours, except that I have a few more icons, because muddling through that stupid start menu is a pain when you have too many things installed

I got sick of the 'pretty' look in Windows XP real fast, the first thing I do when doing a fresh install is to get rid of the default theme and go back to Windows Classic. It's a matter of control though. If you want to orginize your start bare, you can, but Windows does not do it by default, which in my opinion it should at least try to do some of the work for people who are lazy. How hard would it be to have a Internet, Office, Games, etc. entries on the menu by default? I bet if it were there, then companies would program their installers to use it.

Leech

[Slougi]

Gurm, wine is not emulating the windows api. They are reimplementing it. The only part you could call emulation is the wine loader that loads the binaries, as they are not in a linux compatible binary format.

[Gurm]

You can quibble if you want. The N64 emulators out there now don't REALLY emulate the N64 architecture. They take the same function calls and return the same results from those function calls. That makes them... not REALLY emulators. Just like WINE.

WINE has its place - but not on my machine, or any machine I have to touch.

- Gurm

[dbdg]

lol

[leech]

Originally posted by dbdg
lol

I can agree with that

Leech

[Pace]

Originally posted by Slougi
Gurm, wine is not emulating the windows api. They are reimplementing it. The only part you could call emulation is the wine loader that loads the binaries, as they are not in a linux compatible binary format.

To the end user, they are emulating the Windows platform. Whatever the true definition of 'emulation' is, most of the points still stand outside that particular debate

Now, can we talk about those issues instead?

I completely fail to see how running Windows applications in Linux is advantageous to most people. On my machine, Windows is the most irrelevant point of the computer. It is the applications I use that matter, and they are the usual causes of instability. So, will a flaky, badly coded, Windows app run better using WINE?

Also, PS7? How does it run!

[Gurm]

It runs... slower than it does under Windows. That's already too slow on most machines.

ROFL.

As for stability... a flaky, badly coded Windows app will, in THEORY, not crash the Linux kernel when running under WINE. However, it has been known to happen regardless, since Linux is nowhere NEAR as "stable" as everyone would like you to think it is. In fact, my Linux box will often crash for no good reason other than "Mandrake is having a bad day".

- Gurm