wine

[saquarrier]

In my oppinion in a year or so, everyone with any technical background will be running windows apps with wine, and cuting M$ out of the equation entirerly.  The latest realease of wine is quite stable.  With a bit of monkying a freind of mine has Half Life running (faster than on windows) on wine.  He is using the windows dlls unfortunaly, but I am still haveing reasonable luck without them, providing that the app isn't too direct x dependent.

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by saquarrier:
With a bit of monkying a freind of mine has Half Life running (faster than on windows) on wine.

What have you run under Wine other than Half Life?  I've tried wine many times throughout it's history (although it's been a good 6 months since the last time) and although it seems to have gotten better as the releases came, it was *far* from being very usable in my exerience, and very slow.  Don't get me wrong, there is nothing more I would like than having a free open source way of running Windows apps.  

Maybe you have some wine insider information about them making much more headway and have a shortened expectation when it will actually be ready for prime time. Won't Half Life run natively under Linux?  I used to run all the Quake versions under Linux natively (with some downloads from idSoftware).

When it will run RealFlight G2 then I'm there!  I like VMWare because most Win apps run under it (except G2), but that is because it actually runs a full fledged copy of Windows in a Virtual machine.

RealFlight has nazi like copy protection and reverse engineering protection and it will not run because it thinks there is a debugger running, maybe VMWare has an option to fix that but I don't know of one.  I have to actually boot Win natively to run that simulator.  Everything else runs perfectly.

The bad thing about VMWare is it is not open source and it costs a fair amount, and it requires a copy of Windows which means legally you need to pay MS for that copy.

Another good thing about it, you can install other OSs under VMWare.  I have two copies of Solaris 8 x86 and a copy of Win98 running at on my RedHat 7.2 box, all at the same time!  And they all scream!  Of course I'm running it on a 1.6Ghz Athalon with 512MB of RAM.  I set up two Solaris virtual machines because I needed to play with some NIS/DNS client/server configurations.  While I was at it I set up Samba, Apache, and a bunch of other crap so in Winblows Network Neighborhood on my home network you see 4 machines all actually running on one.

I would much rather move to Wine in the future because VMWare appears to be making some deals with Microsoft and then I'm outta there.  There is another alternative that looks like it could also be better is "win4lin" (see http://www.netraverse.com).  Like VMWare it is a commercial product but I think they also have a free download and possibly a free version.  I've not tried this yet but I have read some good reviews.  

VMWare is by far the best but does cost and does not free you from Microsoft.
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UNIX is not easy because it has so many things to configure.  
UNIX is better because it has so many things to configure.

[ December 13, 2001: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

[billy_gates]

does redhat linux 7.2 come with wine? and if so, how do you start it?

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by Billy Gates:
does redhat linux 7.2 come with wine? and if so, how do you start it?

It's on the RedHat 7.2 disc 2 CD, not installed by default so you'll need to install the wine* RPMS from that CD.

As far as how do you use it, that's a much more in depth issue.  You'll need to look at the wine DOCs. It's not the easiest thing to get going, especially if you are new to Linux and I would suggest looking through the docs in "/usr/share/doc/wine-20010822" directory after you install the RPMS.  Wine is not a graphical "Windows" interface, but it allows you to run windows apps under X.  

VMWare on the other hand is a virutual machine that emulates a processor, memory and hardware.  With VMWare you actually install Windows in it's own Virtual Machine, then use Windows as you normally would in it's own little world.  Wine does not do that. But Wine is free and open source, VMWare is not so I hope wine matures rapidly. You have a lot more issues to deal with wine.  I haven't installed it on RH72 yet myself so I don't know how much better it is than the last time I tried it.  I actually got Visio to install and run under it 6 months ago although it crashed easily at that time.