Has anyone here ever had any experience of using Wine to run anything useful? I've tried installing it twice now on my Slackware 8.1 system. Sure enough, it runs solitaire (from an old Win3.11 disk I have) as claimed in teh documentation, but it chokes completely on anything and everything else that I've tried, specifically catalogue-CDs from the likes of Farnell, RS, Texas, etc., including one old one that I KNOW has been run on W3.1. I have wine-20030408 and kernel 2.4.18 on an Athlon 1000 with 256Mb RAM. I installed it using ./tools/wineinstall as instructed and running ./tools/winecheck gives a score of 85%+, so I think I've got at least most of the config right. Most of the error messages start 'fixme: ', which suggests to me that perhaps it isn't even intended to work.
I don't have a Windoze partition on either of my PCs, but my understanding of the Wine documentation is that I don't need one. A 500+ Mb package just to run solitaire (and, to be fair, winmine....) seems pretty useless to me. Is it really intended for running 'real- world' applications or I being really dumb here?
If it really is as bad as it seems, is there any alternative emulator (or whatever they're called) for running these catalogue-CDs?
Any help appreciated, thanks!
Gerald.
On 29-May-2003 Edenyard wrote:
Has anyone here ever had any experience of using Wine to run anything useful?
In practial terms, I think that Wine has been overtaken by VMWare. I know that Wine is free and VMWare is not, but VMWare works. AFAIK Wine never quite made it to proper functionality and VMWare does so much more at a very reasonable price.
From: raph@panache.demon.co.uk
On 29-May-2003 Edenyard wrote:
Has anyone here ever had any experience of using Wine to run anything useful?
In practial terms, I think that Wine has been overtaken by VMWare. I know that Wine is free and VMWare is not, but VMWare works. AFAIK Wine never quite made it to proper functionality and VMWare does so much more at a very reasonable price.
But then VMWare is not a replacement for the windows API but a virtual machine emulator. To run a windows app under VMWare you'd need to obtain and install a copy of Windows. AFAIK Wine is a complete replacement for the Windows API that runs under GNU/Linux.
Just after I installed Debian Woody I had a brief play with Wine and managed to get a couple of Office 97 applictions running reasonably. I know it's under active development so I expect it's even better nearly a year later.
Regards,
Keith ____________ 'I always use the word impossible with the greatest caution.' - Wernher Von Braun
On Thursday 29 May 2003 9:05 am, raph@panache.demon.co.uk wrote:
On 29-May-2003 Edenyard wrote:
Has anyone here ever had any experience of using Wine to run anything useful?
In practial terms, I think that Wine has been overtaken by VMWare. I know that Wine is free and VMWare is not, but VMWare works. AFAIK Wine never quite made it to proper functionality and VMWare does so much more at a very reasonable price.
The cost in monetary terms is reasonable but VMWare whilst not being "Free Software" also needs a MicroSoft licence to run Windows. Wine is afaia "Free" as in freedom and allows Windows programs to run without the MS licence. I know which I'd choose given the choice.
Cheers, BJ
On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 09:36:31AM +0100, John Woodard wrote:
On Thursday 29 May 2003 9:05 am, raph@panache.demon.co.uk wrote:
On 29-May-2003 Edenyard wrote:
Has anyone here ever had any experience of using Wine to run anything useful?
In practial terms, I think that Wine has been overtaken by VMWare. I know that Wine is free and VMWare is not, but VMWare works. AFAIK Wine never quite made it to proper functionality and VMWare does so much more at a very reasonable price.
The cost in monetary terms is reasonable but VMWare whilst not being "Free Software" also needs a MicroSoft licence to run Windows. Wine is afaia "Free" as in freedom and allows Windows programs to run without the MS licence. I know which I'd choose given the choice.
you call £187.50+ reasonable! (linuxemporium are flogging it for £255, and the old version at that!) I need to sell some of my junk on to you! ;)
although I will admit I have purchased every version of vmware from 2 upwards (atlhough I don't use it for running windows usually its for playing with BSD and other linuxes and things like plan9) and fortunatly got good discounts all the way. The total cost for me has been well under £70 quid a year.
Adam
Adam Bower wrote on 29 May 2003 09:55:
you call £187.50+ reasonable! (linuxemporium are flogging it for £255, and the old version at that!) I need to sell some of my junk on to you! ;)
I got VMWare Workstation 4 for free, since I participated in the private beta program. They even shipped a glass tankard all the way from the US as a special gift. :)
although I will admit I have purchased every version of vmware from 2 upwards (atlhough I don't use it for running windows usually its for playing with BSD and other linuxes and things like plan9) and fortunatly got good discounts all the way. The total cost for me has been well under £70 quid a year.
I did, however, pay the full price for version 3.x for Linux, and got the hobby price for the Windows version when they will still doing that many moons ago. I consider it a very good investment.
Regards,
Martyn
On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 10:12:28AM +0100, Martyn Drake wrote:
Adam Bower wrote on 29 May 2003 09:55:
you call £187.50+ reasonable! (linuxemporium are flogging it for £255, and the old version at that!) I need to sell some of my junk on to you! ;)
I got VMWare Workstation 4 for free, since I participated in the private beta program. They even shipped a glass tankard all the way from the US as a special gift. :)
OK, now i officially hate VMWare as i was on the private beta program and I had to pay for my upgrade!
/me goes to install bochs
Adam
On Thursday 29 May 2003 9:54 am, Adam Bower wrote:
you call £187.50+ reasonable! (linuxemporium are flogging it for £255, and the old version at that!) I need to sell some of my junk on to you! ;)
Okay Adam I'll give you £30 for the Vaio and £25 for the Zarus. :-) BJ ducks and runs <G>
I was thinking in the terms of what your average commercial software user has to shell out for apps. such as £400+ for Acrobat writer or whatever the extorsionate cost of Photoshop is and the mind numbing price of Autocad. £255 doesn't seem too steep when you compare with those and they do do an educational licence. However my point was that it isn't "Free" for that you have to look at bochs which still needs loads of work before it comes close to VMWare but give it time and the OS community developers working on it will I'm sure weave their magic and we will then have a "Free" alternative.
Cheers, BJ
Speaking as a professional, not as a student, I think that ca. �200 is reasonable when I think of how mucb time and effort it saves me. I need Linux and Windows booted up at all times. Without VMWare I have to have two machines running with a KVM switch between them. I share files with Samba, but I still cannot cut and paste between Linux and 'doze windows.
So, VMWare saves me the cost of a second box, the cost of a KVM switch and cables, and a lot of time. Cheap at the price.
Admittedly the cut-and-paste problem can be solved by using VNC from one box to access the other, but VNC still needs two boxes. So, �500 for the price of a box against �200 for the software. Take your pick.
On 29-May-2003 Adam Bower wrote:
On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 09:36:31AM +0100, John Woodard wrote:
On Thursday 29 May 2003 9:05 am, raph@panache.demon.co.uk wrote:
On 29-May-2003 Edenyard wrote:
Has anyone here ever had any experience of using Wine to run anything useful?
In practial terms, I think that Wine has been overtaken by VMWare. I know that Wine is free and VMWare is not, but VMWare works. AFAIK Wine never quite made it to proper functionality and VMWare does so much more at a very reasonable price.
The cost in monetary terms is reasonable but VMWare whilst not being "Free Software" also needs a MicroSoft licence to run Windows. Wine is afaia "Free" as in freedom and allows Windows programs to run without the MS licence. I know which I'd choose given the choice.
you call 187.50+ reasonable! (linuxemporium are flogging it for 255, and the old version at that!) I need to sell some of my junk on to you! ;)
although I will admit I have purchased every version of vmware from 2 upwards (atlhough I don't use it for running windows usually its for playing with BSD and other linuxes and things like plan9) and fortunatly got good discounts all the way. The total cost for me has been well under 70 quid a year.
On Thursday 29 May 2003 11:14 am, raph@panache.demon.co.uk wrote:
Speaking as a professional, not as a student, I think that ca. £200 is reasonable when I think of how mucb time and effort it saves me. I need Linux and Windows booted up at all times. Without VMWare I have to have two machines running with a KVM switch between them. I share files with Samba, but I still cannot cut and paste between Linux and 'doze windows.
VMWare and VNC will solve that; run VNC within Windows, within VMWare and use bridged networking between the two! Sounds convoluted but works iirc.
Cheers, BJ
On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 11:14:58AM +0100, raph@panache.demon.co.uk wrote:
Speaking as a professional, not as a student, I think that ca. ?200 is reasonable when I think of how mucb time and effort it saves me. I need Linux and Windows booted up at all times. Without VMWare I have to have two machines running with a KVM switch between them. I share files with Samba, but I still cannot cut and paste between Linux and 'doze windows.
When I look at how many bits of "cheap" software we have at work, that cost around 200 quid and you add up how much has been spent on closed software over the companies lifetime I think asking for cash for software is a bit cheeky really. Especially as I have been trying to use support contracts for some of our commercial software the past two weeks with no success.
Adam
On 29-May-2003 Adam Bower wrote:
On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 11:14:58AM +0100, raph@panache.demon.co.uk wrote:
Speaking as a professional, not as a student, I think that ca. ?200 is reasonable when I think of how mucb time and effort it saves me. I need Linux and Windows booted up at all times. Without VMWare I have to have two machines running with a KVM switch between them. I share files with Samba, but I still cannot cut and paste between Linux and 'doze windows.
When I look at how many bits of "cheap" software we have at work, that cost around 200 quid and you add up how much has been spent on closed software over the companies lifetime I think asking for cash for software is a bit cheeky really. Especially as I have been trying to use support contracts for some of our commercial software the past two weeks with no success.
Taking a purely pragmatic view, if a piece of bought software, or a book, saves me a couple of hours then it has paid for itself. I can then throw it in the bin.
Support on cheap software would be nice, but it is expensive to provide. I'm afraid that ultimately there is no escape from economic reality :-(
** raph@panache.demon.co.uk raph@panache.demon.co.uk [2003-05-29 09:07]:
Has anyone here ever had any experience of using Wine to run anything useful?
In practial terms, I think that Wine has been overtaken by VMWare. I know that Wine is free and VMWare is not, but VMWare works. AFAIK Wine never quite made it to proper functionality and VMWare does so much more at a very reasonable price.
** end quote [raph@panache.demon.co.uk]
VMWare is a virtual PC environment and costs $299(usd) plus the cost of the Windows license to run in the environment (there is also a version that will run Linux from within Windows - in fact I don't think you are limited to running Windows, you could run another Linux if you wanted). http://www.vmware.com/
WINE maps the Windows API calls onto Linux native calls, and is free. It is progressing, and does do pretty well considering it is aiming at a moving target controlled my Microsoft. http://www.winehq.org/
If you want to run Microsoft Office, IE, or a number of other Windows applications you could look at Crossover Office. This is a commercial product based on WINE (and I believe contributing back to the WINE project) http://www.codeweavers.com/
There is also Win4Lin which is similar to VMWare, but a bit cheaper (around $90usd). It also needs (last time I looked) a bit of kernel recompilation to get it working. http://www.netraverse.com/
Not that I've had direct experience of anything other than VMWare. I was planning to purchase a license and downloaded an evaluation a while back. It worked pretty well, but they went and changed their product range. IIRC they upped the prices and introduced a Lite version that only supported Windows 95 and 98 - since I didn't want to be restricted on the Windows version I could run I wavered on the new version - long enough for them to discontinue it! The price of the current version is way over the top for my requirements so I've abandoned the idea.
On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 08:19:16AM +0000, Edenyard wrote:
I don't have a Windoze partition on either of my PCs, but my understanding of the Wine documentation is that I don't need one. A 500+ Mb package just to run solitaire (and, to be fair, winmine....) seems pretty useless to me. Is it really intended for running 'real- world' applications or I being really dumb here?
500Mb?! that sounds a bit wrong to me. Unless you have all the source kicking around and have built it from scratch. There are packages that are around 35Mb (compressed tgz for slackware so admittedly it will be bigger when installed) maybe try one of them? http://www.winehq.com/?page=download is where I looked.
Anyhow I have used Wine to run Microsoft Office in Linux before, and I use it to run Digiguide for windows also, I think a couple of years back I also made Half-life work so it does indeed work with a fairly broad selection of applications.
Adam
"Edenyard" mail@edenyard.co.uk writes:
Has anyone here ever had any experience of using Wine to run anything useful?
I've had Starcraft working in single-player mode under Wine, and also PuTTY (but that runs under Linux natively now, if you want that sort fof interface to SSH). No idea if that counts as "useful" for you l-)
Has anyone got "Macromedia Dreamweaver Ultra Dev 4" to run under wine? My attempt went as far as right clicking on the installation exe file and saying open with wine, it actually started the install wizard but it hung pretty soon afterwards. As you can probably tell, I've never used Wine before and I haven't yet had chance to read the documentation. But if I'm fighting a losing battle I won't bother ;)
Or better still, does anyone know of an application that is native to Linux that is similar to Dreamweaver with a split source/wysiwyg editor and similar features and is free?!
Ben Francis
On Thu, 29 May 2003, Edenyard wrote:
Has anyone here ever had any experience of using Wine to run anything useful?
Word 2000, for the most part, runs nicely in wine 0.0.20020411-1, although the Office Assistant isn't happy.
I've tried installing it twice now on my Slackware 8.1 system. Sure enough, it runs solitaire (from an old Win3.11 disk I have) as claimed in teh documentation, but it chokes completely on anything and everything else that I've tried, specifically catalogue-CDs from the likes of Farnell, RS, Texas, etc., including one old one that I KNOW has been run on W3.1.
If they're anything like the catalogue CDs I've used, they rely on the presence of Internet Explorer. I've just checked, and although IE6 will run under wine (in the sense of a window appearing, with menus that will drop down,) it doesn't seem keen to do much. Also, as you don't have a Windows partition, I guess you'd need to install it. I have two nasty feelings about this.
1 Installing software under wine _might_ be a rather more difficult proposition than running software that's already been installed using "real" Windows.
2 The license terms for IE _might_ say something unsupportive, about installing it when you don't have a validly licensed Microsoft operating system.
Sorry I can't say anything more positive.
On Thursday 29 May 2003 9:41 pm, Dan Hatton wrote:
On Thu, 29 May 2003, Edenyard wrote:
Word 2000, for the most part, runs nicely in wine 0.0.20020411-1, although the Office Assistant isn't happy.
I would say that the lack of paperclip support is an added bonus. ;-)
If the authors of the catalogue cds used an open standard to sell their wares maybe they might get more business. One wonders if RS Components et al had a seriously large account withdraw their business because the couldn't read the catalogue cd with the operating system/browser of their choice things might be a little different.
Just my tuppence worth.
Cheers, BJ
On Fri, 30 May 2003, John Woodard wrote:
If the authors of the catalogue cds used an open standard to sell their wares maybe they might get more business. One wonders if RS Components et al had a seriously large account withdraw their business because the couldn't read the catalogue cd with the operating system/browser of their choice things might be a little different.
Before anyone starts a boycott on the basis of my post, I should point out that I don't know for sure that RS, or any of the other specific firms Gerald mentioned, do require IE for their CDs. I was just taking an educated guess at what might be going on. A subsequent check of the one of my own catalogue CDs (Guilbert,) on which I was mainly basing this idea, suggests that the guess wasn't that educated after all, i.e. this CD appears to provide its own browser, which, as far as I can tell, isn't IE. (In fact, the html on the CD seems to have some variable names in its most crucial <a href=""> tags, which neither Mozilla nor IE can understand.)
Sorry for sowing such confusion.
On Friday 30 May 2003 1:22 pm, Dan Hatton wrote:
Before anyone starts a boycott on the basis of my post, I should point out that I don't know for sure that RS, or any of the other specific firms Gerald mentioned, do require IE for their CDs. I was just taking an educated guess at what might be going on. A subsequent check of the one of my own catalogue CDs (Guilbert,) on which I was mainly basing this idea, suggests that the guess wasn't that educated after all, i.e. this CD appears to provide its own browser, which, as far as I can tell, isn't IE. (In fact, the html on the CD seems to have some variable names in its most crucial <a href=""> tags, which neither Mozilla nor IE can understand.)
Like I said these are obviously designed to run on Windows some of the CDs have Mac OS friendly stuff, but in general we are talking about Windows here. Now I have nothing against people who want to run Windows, they have the right to a choice. Also those who want to run an alternative OS should have a choice and by using an open standard such as HTML/XML these CDs would give that choice.
I'm not advocating anyone should boycott these suppliers just pointing out the fact that if a large customer did, we might just get a catalogue in a useable format for all. Which IMHO would benefit everybody, customers running the OS of their choice and the supplier getting the business of those who couldn't read the CD catalogue before.
Cheers, BJ
-
Adam Bower -
Ben Francis -
Dan Hatton -
Edenyard -
John Woodard -
Keith Watson -
Martyn Drake -
Paul Tansom -
raph＠panache.demon.co.uk -
Richard Kettlewell