Hey guys, i just heard today that after 12 years of being in Alpha, Wine has finally made it into beta

I think its a great task those guys have undertaken, and i think actually reaching beta is quite an achievement in itself! I was just curious, since i havent used Linux at home lately (unfortunately need too many Win only apps right now for work) i was just wondering if anyone has any recent experiences with Wine they want to share?

From memory it didnt really ever seem to work, and nothing really ran all that well at all. Is Wine approaching the stage where people can seriously turn to it instead of duel booting for games / whatever.

Then again, do you think Wine can ever make it to that stage?

I havent posted here in a long time, hopefully il be able to return to spending more time with my dear Slackware box soon


EDIT - dont ask why its titled "Wine got Beta" - im clearly way too tired lol =/

I recently tried Wine for the newest iTunes, just to see if it would work. This was however w/ the debian etch version of wine(not the newest version).

I run Debian 'Etch' and use wine for a variety of programs, including First Class (an email/intranet program used at my University).

As far as running Windows programs goes, it works exceedingly well. However, one thing it still has a LOT of trouble with is Installshield. Unfortunatley for me, I didn't have a Windows partition on the comptuter I was using, so I had to install a few programs from the installer. However, with a little tweaking, you can get installshield to work. It pretty much just requires some reading into the workings/functions of wine. Or just search previous topics on this forum .

Anyway, the short of it is that I've been very happy with Wine lately, especially after getting it to work with installshield. There's very little it hasn't worked with for me.

how does one setup running a program from the windows partition? Wine created a "fake windows partition" on my machine.

It pretty much just amounts to mounting your windows partition from linux, and using wine to run the relevant program through the mounted path (e.g. wine winpartition/blahblah/blahblah/program.exe) It works very well for me, and I often find it more convenient than running an instance of Windows within Linux. I actually discovered this blindly a while back while running Knoppix on a Windows machine. (and as a disclaimer, I'm by no means an expert on these things, and it works for me but for all I know i run a risk of corrupting a windows program every time I do that )

I don't think you'll corrupt a windows program. Not unless you're writing to the winodws partition. I'll try that out. Thanks!

I don't think there's much risk of it either (except maybe in the case of logfiles or config files), but I still don't know for sure, so I wanted to make that clear before someone else tried it on my suggestion. Anyway, yeah, I bet that'll be a lot more convenient than booting into Windows every time you need to run a certain program!

except that iTunes doesn't work under wine.

Not even running it from your windows partition? Did you make sure that Wine is set to emulate to be Windows XP for itunes?

where do you set it up? I'm running the Debian Etch binary. I've got it configured correctly( I think)

I tried playing Call of Duty using Wine. Very impressive. Works perfectly! No framerate drops, in some cases faster, loads faster too. The only problem I have is that the gamma settings don't change the brightness and whenever you use a PunkBuster server for multiplayer it keeps saying Blocked O/S privileges and kicks me off the server (a hint that Linux is more secure, since the server can't see and modify system files on your computer). But other than these really trivial problems (I mean I don't need to change the gamma, and usually I tend to stay away from PunkBuster games because no matter what os i am using, be it Windows or Linux, it still kicks me off the servers often) the game works really, really well. All the graphics are there, the sound works fine, no crashes in any places. Try it out! It really works well. You gotta get the Loki installer though, cuz Call of Duty uses InstallShield and InstallShield sucks with Wine.

If you run winecfg, you can find options on which kind of Windows to emulate. It's usually on automatic, but that doesn't always work. But you can also add applications with the "add" button and then set what to emulate for them all the time. Since Itunes absolutely requires XP, this is - as I've read - one of the things you have to do to get Itunes working. You having a windows partition puts you at an advantage, because it's a PAIN to install, apparently.

ok so I tried that. I set the default emulation to Windows XP.
It's the newest version of iTunes by the way(6.0, maybe?)
I get this error when I run 'wine iTunes'
Suggestions?

Hey Sava, sorry for kindof hijacking your thread. Ooops! Sorry again

One thing to be aware of about the new Wine is that it relies almost completely upon registry-settings, set up by winecfg and during the initial setup. It does not read the ".wine/config" file at all! But the documentation, last time I checked, refer to nothing else.

My experience lately has been that 32-bit applications generally work well, but some important 16-bit things, like exception traps, are still mostly missing.

Altough It is Not and Emulator, Windows behaviour is very well emulated