How Far Has Wine Come ?

Sorry Jeep, your title was just waiting for another drop in *phrase* =) Warning: Wine in and of itself causes much debate, public drunkenness & heated discussions on the Internet and around newsgroups in general but it doesn't always have to be the case. There are emulators for many OS's OS's OS's ... I can understand both sides of the Wine Pros and Cons Long Living Debate and the affect ( negative or positive ) on the Linux World. That is not the point here. This is simply a POST concerning success running some apps on an emulator. period. It ( Wine ) has it's times of need and just plain ol fun when the most original looking and feeling software remake of your favorite game ( mine is good ol "Galaga" and "Asteroids" =) is windows only. Let's face it, Linux does not have three rows of software available at your local Computer Store. Check Jeeps post here which explains many angles on the Linux Desktop vs Windows that would also have an extreme affect as to why so much software is still only available for the Windows & Apple/Mac Platforms. I have been intending on posting this since the success I had running wine in the recent days. I am very impressed with the latest "wine" and would like to say a few words about it and keep in mind we can also post as comments to this post of course any apps we find that are running on wine IF and when we need to. Possibly to submit them to the wine database which is very handy for a quick look/see if a particular application you want to run is in the list or not and if so, possibly save you the heartache of a pointless effort OR a give you the information you need for a successful fast solution. I will start by saying in all honesty, I have tried wine in the past, lost faith and frankly, did not have the need to run any windows applications. Years ago, and when the project first started up I was always disappointed. Although many apps were and may have been supported at the time it always seemed that the one I wanted to run was either not supported at all or very limited. I gave them a thumbs up for trying so hard nonetheless. It has been probably 3 years since I have had a need or reason to run a windows application. Moving forward... I decided to give it another go earlier this year and was very pleased and surprised. I am happy to report that the all three different times I have had the need or want to run a windows application this year it has been a success. The original application can sometimes make life much easier. NEWS FLASH - All three apps I tried so far worked prefectly! *nod* to wine developers for "keeping on keeping on" as we say. 1) Wine & Wine-Tools installed perfectly on Slackware-11.0 ( plus updates ) 2) Each and every application worked almost perfectly. The only thing that did not work in two out of the three apps I have run succesfully on/under wine was window resizing. 3) Even this, amazingly, one the applications even went through it's "auto-upgrade!" This touches on another comment I need to post here The Windows Software I am running using Wine:

• PokerStars Free (Play) Money Tables for me! - for this site

NOTES: This one was an executable installation and went through the familar windows "setup" installtion windows perfectly and set it up in my ~/.wine/ directory as needed by wine. No root was needed at all. Although I did install wine as root system wide. PokerStars even went through a normal "auto-update version upgrade" with no problem at all right before I made this post tonight. hmm .. Interesting =) I think I should post a comment here to this affect as it could be possibly an answer to one of many issues concerning the Linux Desktop for the average Home user which is simply installing commonly used apps in in your ~ ( home ) directory ( FOLDER for windows users ) like OpenOffice.org for one of may examples and auto-update is np. Windows re-sizing does not work.

• Picasa for Windows

NOTES: Yes I also have Picasa for Linux which, by the way, is distributed with it's own wine server and depends on wine , not system wide but included, to run. I wanted to try both ways so I did and both work fine.

• Roland's BR Wave Converter 2.0

NOTES: Window resizing does not work. It sees the Roland BR-600 through which Linux sees as a standard usb-storage device with no problem and no special hand config was needed for it to read and write to the device. Thanks to Roland for making the device spec to UMS also. Wine has come a long way. Whether you agree or disagree with wine's "affect" or what it may do to the Linux community is not the issue. That is a long and heavily debated topic. The point I want to make is that it is working for more and more applications and it works well. I may have the need for a few more apps running under wine who knows? =) Anyone know of a original "look & feel" Galaga for Linux or Windows to download? =) Later people.

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