On Sat, 2008-07-12 at 19:54 +0100, James Freer wrote:
Having tried to learn about wine and virtual machines i've now found a sort of combination. One downloads version 2.7 .deb and then part of it is also running in Wine. This 'middleware layer' is perhaps something new and if anyone knows perhaps they could explain... maybe of interest to photographers amongst us!
No Wine is the middleware layer, Google just package a tested version of this with the windows version of Picasa for the Linux version.
Wine isn't an emulator or a virtual machine, it is a reimplementation of the windows API that wraps the Windows executable and translates all the system calls to linux ones, because the core architecture is the same this is possible and a full platform emulation isn't required.
Unfortunately because wine is a result of reverse engineering Windows it will probably never be perfect. What google have done basically is make wine a QA target as if it was another version of Windows itself.
It's not actually a bad solution for code that can not or will not be released OSS. I'd almost prefer running a tested against Wine application than a closed source native one. You can effectively chroot wine away from where it can do any damage and run any untrusted closed source applications safe in the knowledge that really all they can do is contaminate your wine environment which is easily repaired. With a close source installation of a native package you don't really know what it is doing to your system. It also makes one of the key "reasons" for not supporting linux natively a moot point. That being the argument that there are too many changing versions/api's to track. Just target Wine 1.0 instead.
thx james
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