Google's support for Wine in 2007
As you might know, I work for Google, and part of my day job is to help improve Wine. Here's a little report about what we've been up to. Google uses Wine primarily as the basis for the Linux port of our photo management software, Picasa. In fact, the Linux version is exactly the Windows build of Picasa, bundled with a lightly patched version of Wine. Most of the work in that port was to improve Wine so it could handle Picasa, and that work is still going on. Codeweavers did the initial port, and Googlers Lei Zhang, Nigel Liang, and Michael Moss are improving Wine further for Picasa 2.7. Beyond Picasa, a few of us (Lei Zhang, Alex Balut, and I) have been fixing random Wine bugs in our 20% time. I've also been doing regular Valgrind runs over the Wine test suite, pestering developers who accidentally check in code that Valgrind doesn't like. Hats off to the Valgrind team for a great tool, and to the (non-Google) folks who work on Valgrind/Wine compatibility (Eric Pouech, Tom Hughes, and John Reiser, among others). Google also sponsored some work by Codeweavers to improve support for Photoshop ('cause so many people want it) and for Dragon Naturally Speaking ('cause even Linux users get RSI). While not yet perfect, those apps are a lot more usable now as a result. In particular, Photoshop CS and CS2 are quite usable indeed. (See http://wiki.winehq.org/AdobePhotoshop for details.) I also had the pleasure of hosting eight students as Google interns working on Wine throughout the year. Here are their names, and roughly what they worked on: Dan Hipschman: widl Evan Stade: gdiplus, Powerpoint Viewer James Hawkins: msi Jennifer Lai: win16 conformance tests Juan Lang: crypt32, iTunes Matt Jones: mono testing Mikolaj Zalewski: Photoshop, Limux Roy Shea: svchost, BITS So, you're wondering, what exactly does that all boil down to? I tallied all our accepted patches recently; the list is now up (along with the exact Wine source we use for Picasa) at http://code.google.com/opensource/wine.html I was pleasantly surprised at the size of the list. Separately, Google also sponsored nine Summer of Code students this year. Just to name two who remain active even after the end of summer: Alex Sørnes, who improved Wine's Wordpad, and Maarten Lankhorst, who solved tons of sound problems. (And oh, how nice it is to not have to change sound settings anymore!) All that may sound like a lot, and perhaps it is, but it pales compared to the work put in on Wine by the rest of the Wine developers. Thanks, everybody! I'm really looking forward to Wine 1.0 (which, according to Alexandre, is planned for sometime in 2008). Dan Kegel Software Engineer Google
On Feb 14, 2008 12:03 AM, Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
I also had the pleasure of hosting eight students as Google interns working on Wine throughout the year. Here are their names, and roughly what they worked on: Dan Hipschman: widl Evan Stade: gdiplus, Powerpoint Viewer James Hawkins: msi Jennifer Lai: win16 conformance tests Juan Lang: crypt32, iTunes Matt Jones: mono testing Mikolaj Zalewski: Photoshop, Limux Roy Shea: svchost, BITS
What's the status of getting the win16 tests into wine? 16 bit support broke a while back for many apps and is still broken. -Austin
On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 1:50 AM, Austin English <austinenglish(a)gmail.com> wrote:
What's the status of getting the win16 tests into wine? 16 bit support broke a while back for many apps and is still broken.
The sticking point is that most people don't have a 16 bit C compiler installed. The only good free one is Open Watcom. Unfortunately, you still can't just do 'sudo apt-get install openwatcom' on most distributions (see http://openwatcom.org/index.php/Installing_Open_Watcom_on_Linux ), and there were some hitches using the Linux version anyway, so win16test provides a shell script that installs the Windows version under Wine. (See http://code.google.com/p/win16test/source/browse/trunk/src/README ) And that's kind of heavyweight, so we can't just jam it into the Wine build system. Potentially, though, the Wine build system could notice whether openwatcom was available, and if so, it could build the win16 tests. For now, they're kept out of tree in http://code.google.com/p/win16test/ and I encourage others to try them out and fix problems they find. - Dan
On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 10:03:21PM -0800, Dan Kegel wrote:
As you might know, I work for Google, and part of my day job is to help improve Wine. Here's a little report about what we've been up to. ...
Nice work :)
All that may sound like a lot, and perhaps it is, but it pales compared to the work put in on Wine by the rest of the Wine developers. Thanks, everybody! I'm really looking forward to Wine 1.0 (which, according to Alexandre, is planned for sometime in 2008).
I hope you have not forgotten that you volunteered to be Release Manager ;) Ciao, Marcus
On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 7:11 AM, Marcus Meissner <meissner(a)suse.de> wrote:
Thanks, everybody! I'm really looking forward to Wine 1.0 (which, according to Alexandre, is planned for sometime in 2008).
I hope you have not forgotten that you volunteered to be Release Manager ;)
Not at all. Just being realistic about how much influence I can really have! - Dan
I just want to take a moment to personally and publicly thank Dan and Google. We have appreciated Google's support, and the work of all Google employees, interns, and SOC students very much; it has been a great boon to Wine. I also worry sometimes that Dan is overly humble. His direct technical work is brilliant and the untold secret is the amazing job Dan has done of stretching every tool and resource at his command at Google so as to maximize the positive impact for Wine. It's clear evidence that one person can truly make an enormous difference in the world. Thanks, Dan! Cheers, Jeremy
On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 9:14 AM, Jeremy White <jwhite(a)winehq.org> wrote:
I just want to take a moment to personally and publicly thank Dan and Google.
We have appreciated Google's support, and the work of all Google employees, interns, and SOC students very much; it has been a great boon to Wine.
I also worry sometimes that Dan is overly humble. His direct technical work is brilliant and the untold secret is the amazing job Dan has done of stretching every tool and resource at his command at Google so as to maximize the positive impact for Wine.
It's clear evidence that one person can truly make an enormous difference in the world.
Thanks, Dan!
Cheers,
Jeremy
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participants (5)
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Austin English -
Dan Kegel -
Dan Kegel -
Jeremy White -
Marcus Meissner