wine forum

I will not apologise for asking what I know has been asked before -- any chance of a wine forum?

For many of us wine is our best chance at the moment for completely migrating to Linux. For others it is a great way of saving all that software that they have paid for from the scrap heap.

I notice in the post I was able to google out that some one noted that you did not have any tame 'wine gurus'. To my mind that is against the way forums work. A guru is great but a lot of the time it is joe & jane user *sharing* their knowledge. If I have figured out something you haven't I try & share it & hope you will do the same when I have a problem. All that needs is a place to happen - a forum.

Thanks for your time

Guy

At this point I don't think we have enough wine questions to warrant a dedicated forum. If this changes in the future we can reassess the situation, but for now putting wine questions in an appropriate forum like Linux - Software is probably the best option.

--jeremy

I feel that we really dont need a separate wine forum at LQ because the information at Franks corner and winehq website is sufficient for one to tackle issues related to wine....so, I got to agree with Jeremy on this...

If there are not enough people wanting wine answers I can understand that. However, the amount of wine documentation is not an issue. Given the amount of documentation available for Linux you could use that line of reasoning to argue every forum out of existence ;0)

Respectfully

Guy

Just to say excuse my ignorance - there is a wine forum at the Franks Corner website:

http://frankscorner.org/forum

I guess I'm the LQ "tame guru". Every so often I do a search for "wine" and go through answering questions. If you want me to pay attention to your post, mentioning the word wine (that's "wine" not "winex" or "cedega") is a good way to do it.

The wine-user mailing list is a good resource to ask questions and when nobody seems to know the answer, wine-devel is your last port of call. If nobody *there* knows the answer I'm afraid you're probably out of luck.

how about a wine subsection in linux software?

Yes there is a forum in frank's corner, but most of the time I visit there, I'm the only registered user - or the only user looking at the forum at that time. At least here, chances are someone will read your question immediately and would hopefully know the answer.

If there was a wine subsection, maybe more wine questions will appear

mhearn - thanks for the offer.

I do think wine is important. Once most or all Windows apps can be run under Linux, unless m$ reciprocate quickly, Linux will have the upper hand.

If you could choose between an OS that can run commercial windows apps but has lots of great free software (lets not be modest here Linux community) or an OS that mainly runs expensive commercial apps, comes with very little software 'out of the box' & is overpriced & over licensed, which would you choose?

Yup totally agree with you friendly_guy.

The presence of wine actually was one of the deciding factors for me to try linux because I knew I could use my old programs (though now, I've found better and free linux equivalents for most of them, but not ALL).

I also think wine should be treated as something or almost like another distro, because of the sheer number of apps that could be run on it.

A subsection would be nice. hint hint. And mhearn would only need to click on the wine subsection to find all the wine questions. I think all the ingredients are here (for that subsection), people like me who'll ask questions and a guru like mhearn to answer questions (and all previous wine threads could be moved there for easy reference)

Ok, so you don't have many WINE specific questions yet, but if you made the forum there would be a billion. Wine needs people sharing info and help, but sometimes you don't want to sign up to a mailing list and there is no forum for WINE that I know of. Make the forum, pop a post on the wine-users mailing list saying the forum is open and see what happens. If nobody uses it you can always remove it. WTWTCH (Whats the worst that could happen!).

Now how about a different suggestion!

I am just new to linux and have found my way around in computerland since 1985. With huge resistance i submitted to windows at some point in time and sticked with it ever since, that is until now. I always looked at linux and wondered many times if it was not a smart thing to change, but i guess we all now that changing OS is not the easiest of choices. So it held me off a long time until i took the plunge a few days ago. To my astonishment there is no such thing as an upgrade from windows section where you can find the guidelines or answers for problems most of us if not all are running into when changing OS. I even tried different bookstores and could not find a a single book on this subject. I firmly believe in the open source and the free sharing of knowledge, and i hate the monopoly of windows and those that try to make an easy buck from the misery of others.

So please please instead of a wine or other section make it an Easy Windows Upgrade section. I bet it will attract all perhaps more users you can handle. Thank you

spikeyklitske Wrote: So please instead of a wine or other section make it an Easy Windows Upgrade section

With all respect I think that there are two issues here. With migration the best thing is a native Linux program and what we are looking for here is equivalence. Use Open Office instead of Word etc. It is arguable that the 'Linux Newbie' forum can already meet this need.

Wine is specifically for running windows apps under Unix. For example, my daughter needs an encyclopedia on her computer (quite happily running slackware 10 BTW - no more 'Dad! fix this blue screen' etc) but I cannot buy a Linux one in the UK. I have installed & am running a windows encyclopedia on her slack box. Wine has saved the day. The same with my wife's cross stitch program & my electronic Oxford dictionary.

IMHO the two things are very different.

Strictly my 2 cents -- I've observed that these kinds of requests come up pretty frequently, and while a proposal to create a new forum for [fill in the blank] can often have a lot of merit, it's important to consider that there's also a price to pay in terms of site useability; namely, that beyond a certain point the introduction of any new forums can actually become a liability. In other words, having too many choices is just as bad as having too few, and if it is no longer clear where a new question should be posted, or where to look to find posts about a given topic, then in the long run a site's effectiveness will suffer.

As I see it, the most important consideration regarding changes to the forums' structure is simply whether sufficient demand and anticipated traffic exists to justify setting up a new one. In my opinion, having a group of forums that all pretty much serve the same purpose or audience only creates ambiguity and confusion, and similarly I would argue against splintering an existing forum into smaller subforums unless there is a clear and compelling reason to do so.

Naturally all of this is highly subjective, but at least from my point of view the forums today are in a relatively well-balanced state of equilibrium. At least as I see it, the idea for an "Easy Windows Migration" seems to overlap too much with Linux-Newbie, and similarly, "Wine" seems to fall naturally into Software as it appears to be too narrow a topic to support its own dedicated forum -- others no doubt would disagree. (As as side note, I think that for a website like LQ, there needs to be a certain "blocky-ness" or "chunky-ness" to the forums -- there should be clearly distinguishable differences between the stated purpose of "forum A" and "forum B", and lacking that and/or sufficient demand & traffic, I would leave things as they are.)

This is not to say that the site should never change, but only that changes should be performed only when there is widespread, clear support for doing so. While both the "Wine" and "Easy Windows Migration" ideas have merit, I'm not so sure that they are compelling enough at this stage to implement. Again I'll emphasize that this is just the way I see things, and I have no doubt that if sufficient demand becomes apparent for changing the site in some fashion, those changes will be put into place very quickly. -- J.W.

Ok, I found this thread by looking for 'running windows apps in linux' - if I KNEW that wine was the way to do it, I wouldn't have even done the search (fortunately, the search worked) - but is there somewhere a comprehensive (and comprehensible) list of Linux stuff that is searchable? One of my frustrations with Linux is just trying to find out what all the various 'things' are. It's fine if you KNOW that wine is the tool - then you can find out about it, etc etc.

The forums here are a great source of info on almost any Linux related topic. We are also building the LQ Wiki with the end goal of becoming the largest general-knowledge Linux repository on the web.

--jeremy