Hi there,
I've been lurking on the list for some time just watching proceedings but this mail interested me more than usual...
On Wednesday 15 May 2002 09:33, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
Hello All,
I have been reading over the Wine documentation but have not come across this yet.
I am interested in having a windows DLL that can access some functions native to Linux.
For instance, possibly an application under wine that allows me to add a new user to my Linux box.
I don't know enough of the wine internals to answer you with anything better than "I'd have thought so". However conceptually I think this touches on something very interesting - not entirely unlike VMware's ability to "talk-through" to the host-OS (ie. those dinky tools that let the mouse pass in and out of the guest OS, etc). It is interesting at another level - for years we have all put up with Micro$oft's "extend" policy towards standards, APIs, protocols, etc. In this respect Wine also suffers in some sense because it will always be chasing the various APIs and behaviours as MS mutates them over time.
Won't it be wonderful when some applications will actually work *better* under Wine than in native windows? Ie. under native windows, "click here" will just open IE or whatever, but under wine with a "talk-through" API, it could instead allow the browsing to be hosted either through the 'normal' windows API (presumably launching IE) *or* be passed out to a native browser of choice on the host system (mozilla, konqueror, whatever).
There's lots of stuff on *nix systems that would enhance a windows application beyond what you get in a windows system (expensive add-ons not withstanding). One merely needs to think of text-editors (Visual Studio inside wine could launch native emacs/vi editors perhaps?), protocol clients (ssh, telnet, audio/video streaming, wget), network applications (eg. use the user's native mail-client for mailto:*** URLs in win32 apps), etc. Ie. handing the full facilities of your host *nix system to the applications you run under wine. This truly would make win32 (or the illusion of it provided by wine) a better application environment than MS can or will make it.
Nice idea, I hope you have some luck with it.
Cheers, Geoff