On Sunday February 17 2008 09:15:24 Dan Kegel wrote:
Now that Adobe Photoshop CS2 is running kind of well (there are bugs that need fixing, but I'm trying to look ahead a bit), what big app(s) are worth focusing on next?
Using http://wiki.winehq.org/LinuxApplicatonRequestSurvey, skipping Photoshop (which we should continue to fix up) and the ones that are either too hard, have native versions, or are probably something Codeweavers might already be doing, and adding in good old Framemaker (so close to working we might want to go for it just for the goodwill from all those tech writers), I think that leaves about seven big ticket apps, in rough order of popularity:
http://wiki.winehq.org/AdobeDreamweaver iTunes http://wiki.winehq.org/AdobeIllustrator http://wiki.winehq.org/AdobeFlash http://wiki.winehq.org/AdobePremiere http://wiki.winehq.org/AdobeAcrobatPro http://wiki.winehq.org/AdobeFramemaker
I've created wiki pages with trial download URLs for all but iTunes, and done a bunch of triage on them. Most of these could all use more triage and bugs filed. At some point the dust might settle, and it might become clearer which one(s) deserve to be focused on. I think Maarten is going to try iTunes, which would be great.
- Dan
What about support for Autodesk products (such as AutoCAD and 3ds max)? As far as I know there is two group of problems preventing them from working: copy-protection related and .NET related. This is true for most recent versions. However for not-so-new versions there is no .NET issues (just copy-protection problems). For example this is true for 3ds max 4, 5, 6, 7 (but I didn't check this personally). I heard that it is possible to get 3ds max 3 working on WINE but it's so old that this is useless today but it gives hope that newer versions of 3ds max will work if proper support for copy-protection used by Autodesk will be implemented. This is true for AutoCAD too (as far as I know AutoCAD and 3ds max are using same protection called C-Dilla). Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on this topic so I don't know how difficult to implement proper support for C-Dilla. But if it's implemented, it is very likely that both AutoCAD and 3ds max will work (as I said, because of .NET issues, most recent versions may not work but at least not so new versions will work; in future, when .NET support will be better, new versions will probably work too). In other words, proper support for C-Dilla is most important thing for AutoCAD and 3ds max support so it is possible to temporary ignore .NET bugs related to most recent Autodesk products for now. By the way, AutoCAD and 3ds max are very popular applications. It's easy to check how they are popular by using Google. For example, for AutoCAD alone you will get 43,800,000 results [1]. So there is a really a lot of people who depends on Autodesk products such as AutoCAD.
[1] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=AutoCAD&btnG=Google+Search&...
* * *
(Everything below is just my personal experience as a person who depends on Autodesk products so you can skip it if you don't like such stories). Because of above problems many people (who depends on these applications) just forced to use Windows. In fact, I wasn't able to "convert" to Linux some of my friends because of AutoCAD being unsupported in Linux. For now, I'm stuck with VMWare. But it doesn't support DirectX or OpenGL so working with many projects is a pain (therefore it's difficult to call use of VMWare "Linux support for Autodesk products", even worse, use of VMWare not only means use of Windows but it also means BAD performance in even not very big projects) but I currently havn't other choices. I depend heavily on Linux applications/environment/daemons so dual-boot isn't an option for me - virtual machine in Linux host is the only choice. I really tired from bad performance and bad integration of the VMWare, I really hope that WINE will support Autodesk products someday... However, I use WINE for many other application such as Photoshop CS, AVR Studio, XnView and many others, so I'm really happy that WINE exists and I'm really thankful to all WINE developers. AutoCAD and 3ds max are two last programs that force me to use virtual machine with Windows...