I may be asking a null question here but bear with me....

Wine uses the win32 api to fake programs into believeing its windows...

Would it be possible to take as a base a no-nonsense distro say slackware(cause i kjnow it best) and incoporate wine into it and package it as a distro.

hmmm, what i mean is there anything stopping someone releasing win32 based linux distro that would run eg W32 games out of the box thru say xfce with the libs and dir structure already there. Obviously with a suitable kernel... eg only networking but nothhing else(other than required dds. No httpd, sshd etc jsut win32api plus nvidia driverrs or whatever....


Thoughts, critiscisms... anything???

Ronan

The main obstacle I can think of is licensing. Some of the components you would need to make a Wine setup functional (e.g. DCOM, IE) come with licence restrictions that could make redistribution legally dubious. However, you could ship the distro with a bare Wine setup and include something like winetools to allow the user to build a working system from scratch.

Having said that, I use a bare Wine setup to run the Windows version of Quake II, which enables me to play add-ons for which the source code or a gamei386.so was never released. It works well enough, but nothing beats Quake II running natively on Linux, of course!

yeah i agree the licensing could be a PITA to get around but the question was provisionally technical... ie would there be any major problems involved...

It would basically have to be a base linux distro but with the windows dir structure in /home i suppose i (slackware) could package up a working winex (altho from memory Adam Schreiber has these already) as a slackpackage.tgz then include the various drivers for sound etc.

This would be relatively easy using slackware + its tools to author a cd offering just eg a working CVS winex plus the nvidia drivers etc...

using all the kernels already here. The user would probably/ definately need to recompile a kernel for there specific system... but there's really notthing else to it...

How would the licenses affect the redistribution any differently than they currently affect the distribution of wine or winex???

R