For those of you just tuning in, CodeWeavers has had me working on a project called Sugared Wine. The plan was that I would implement a taskbar (complete with start menu, window switcher, and system tray) in explorer for Wine's virtual desktop and fix some virtual desktop bugs. Jeremy White would package it for sugar, and the result would be a usable Wine activity.
That didn't happen, but for my continued mental health I have to release something.
On http://wiki.winehq.org/SugaredWine there is a link to a Wine activity (.xo file) and a git repository containing the source code I used to build it (which itself happens to contain a set of patches to wine). This is, to the best of my knowledge, a functional Wine activity that you can download and run on any computer that has sugar. It has a taskbar, and the start menu has shortcuts to some Wine programs.
If you want to try the taskbar (it is nifty), apply all the patches except the last three or so (those are needed for the sugarizing) to Wine and start a virtual desktop. My plan remains to get this into Wine, perhaps before 1.2.
Getting Wine to actually work in that environment was harder than anticipated, and taking a desktop that (in my opinion) is good for Wine generally and dropping it into sugar did not produce something that works well in sugar. I've listed the sugar problems I'm aware of on the wiki page.
So if you care about the prospect of getting a taskbar into the Wine virtual desktop or of getting Wine into sugar, do take a look.
Vincent Povirk
Am 11.10.2008 um 03:03 schrieb Vincent Povirk:
Getting Wine to actually work in that environment was harder than anticipated, and taking a desktop that (in my opinion) is good for Wine generally and dropping it into sugar did not produce something that works well in sugar.
Judging by the photoshopped image you put an an Windows-like desktop designed for adults into a desktop designed for childs. Now, if you'd at least hide the original (sugar) desktop you'd re-gain precious screen space and wouldn't have to explain the childs when to use which of both desktops.
For me, I've always considered the strength of Wine to provide a seamless integration into the original operating system / desktop and _not_ to come with it's own taskbar / launch system. For the Windows- like experience, I'd always prefer an hardware emulator.
Sorry to have no more encouraging comments.
MarKus
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter http://www.jump-ing.de/
Hi Markus,
Judging by the photoshopped image you put an an Windows-like desktop designed for adults into a desktop designed for childs. Now, if you'd at least hide the original (sugar) desktop you'd re-gain precious screen space and wouldn't have to explain the childs when to use which of both desktops.
The photoshopped image is actually not how it works; the actual implementation does run in the whole screen.
For me, I've always considered the strength of Wine to provide a seamless integration into the original operating system / desktop and _not_ to come with it's own taskbar / launch system. For the Windows- like experience, I'd always prefer an hardware emulator.
Actually, it's interesting, because I have long been of the exact same opinion.
I had my mind changed by a somewhat startling event.
But first, let me digress. I sustain that there are two kinds of understanding: intellectual, and emotional. The example I always use is that when my wife and I went to buy luggage years ago, she reported that her friends told her it sucked to have black luggage, because everyone has black luggage. I agreed, so we looked for red or green, but they were out. All they had was black. So I said, what the heck, how bad can it be? And we bought black.
So I intellectually understood the problem.
But it didn't really *smack* me in the face until, tired and grumpy after traveling, I had to stand hyper vigilant in the baggage claim area, watching 5 separate people pick up my suitcase and put it down again.
After that, I *emotionally* understood the problem. I got it in my gut.
So, undigressing. I was discussing all of this with John Gilmore, a very smart man. He and I were talking about Wine, and why Wine was not of more use to the OLPC community.
Hashing through this, I suggested the mock up that is posted as a screen shot on the Sugared Wine Wiki.
John immediately lit up. He exclaimed: "Why hasn't Wine had this all along!?!?!"
Okay, I talked him down, and he did come to understand why a dedicated desktop was a stupid idea for a normal Linux user.
But the key point was that he immediately and *emotionally* was grabbed by the value of Wine.
And I've tried this on a bunch of people since. And it works exactly the same way. That one picture gets people more in their gut than any other explanation of Wine I've ever used.
I hate it - it's the exact same image that competitors like Parallels and VMWare use. And Wine is fundamentally different from and better than PC emulation technology. But the bottom line is that we're human, and our brains work in funny ways.
And the goal of the Sugared Wine project is to show people considering Sugar instead of a Windows XP based system that Wine is a viable option to consider. So getting them in the gut is a really important part of the project.
Once we've hooked them, then we can help work with them to package whatever application they need to run as a proper XO activity bundle.
Cheers,
Jeremy
You just jumped in and said most of the things I was going to say. :(
I would like to mention that my options are limited, as sugar integration goes. I can theoretically change the environment the programs run in to fit in better, but I can't change the windows programs that users will ultimately want to run. They are designed to run in an environment that has a hierarchical filesystem and a stack-of-papers window manager, and for a userbase that mostly knows how to read and expects save/open commands.
Of course, if you're porting an individual program with Wine, you can do a much better job. I don't think there are any technical problems that would limit a Windows program's ability to use sugar features and behave like a regular activity, though the program might need to be modified to change assumptions about its environment.
Vincent Povirk
On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 9:30 AM, Jeremy White jwhite@winehq.org wrote:
Hi Markus,
Judging by the photoshopped image you put an an Windows-like desktop designed for adults into a desktop designed for childs. Now, if you'd at least hide the original (sugar) desktop you'd re-gain precious screen space and wouldn't have to explain the childs when to use which of both desktops.
The photoshopped image is actually not how it works; the actual implementation does run in the whole screen.
For me, I've always considered the strength of Wine to provide a seamless integration into the original operating system / desktop and _not_ to come with it's own taskbar / launch system. For the Windows- like experience, I'd always prefer an hardware emulator.
Actually, it's interesting, because I have long been of the exact same opinion.
I had my mind changed by a somewhat startling event.
But first, let me digress. I sustain that there are two kinds of understanding: intellectual, and emotional. The example I always use is that when my wife and I went to buy luggage years ago, she reported that her friends told her it sucked to have black luggage, because everyone has black luggage. I agreed, so we looked for red or green, but they were out. All they had was black. So I said, what the heck, how bad can it be? And we bought black.
So I intellectually understood the problem.
But it didn't really *smack* me in the face until, tired and grumpy after traveling, I had to stand hyper vigilant in the baggage claim area, watching 5 separate people pick up my suitcase and put it down again.
After that, I *emotionally* understood the problem. I got it in my gut.
So, undigressing. I was discussing all of this with John Gilmore, a very smart man. He and I were talking about Wine, and why Wine was not of more use to the OLPC community.
Hashing through this, I suggested the mock up that is posted as a screen shot on the Sugared Wine Wiki.
John immediately lit up. He exclaimed: "Why hasn't Wine had this all along!?!?!"
Okay, I talked him down, and he did come to understand why a dedicated desktop was a stupid idea for a normal Linux user.
But the key point was that he immediately and *emotionally* was grabbed by the value of Wine.
And I've tried this on a bunch of people since. And it works exactly the same way. That one picture gets people more in their gut than any other explanation of Wine I've ever used.
I hate it - it's the exact same image that competitors like Parallels and VMWare use. And Wine is fundamentally different from and better than PC emulation technology. But the bottom line is that we're human, and our brains work in funny ways.
And the goal of the Sugared Wine project is to show people considering Sugar instead of a Windows XP based system that Wine is a viable option to consider. So getting them in the gut is a really important part of the project.
Once we've hooked them, then we can help work with them to package whatever application they need to run as a proper XO activity bundle.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Am 11.10.2008 um 16:30 schrieb Jeremy White:
But the key point was that he immediately and *emotionally* was grabbed by the value of Wine.
He grabbed _a_ value of Wine, but not the one making Wine unique, standing out of the crowd of countless competitive technology. Perhaps he even grabbed the wrong value, putting Wine on par with Qemu, VMware, VirtualPC, VirtualBox, and all the others.
And Wine is fundamentally different from and better than PC emulation technology.
Well, what "better" means can always be discussed. For me, emulators just work, running any application I throw at them. At the same time, Wine is making me headaches and often requires a lot of thinking. Also, Wine will always be somewhat behind Microsofts newest API creations by it's very nature.
The single most important app in my business runs flawlessly in an emulator since the first time I tried. Nevertheless, I've put a lot of efforts into getting it to run in Wine. Wine has strengths you can't see at a first glance.
But the bottom line is that we're human, and our brains work in funny ways.
Yes. You're teaching "If you want to use commodity apps, use Sugar. If you want to use more powerful apps, switch to Windows mode. If you want to share files between them, understand how these two work together."
Don't forget, young people don't have the brand recognition-like experience with the taskbar your John Gilmore has. Unless I miss something, there's no need to give it them, either.
MarKus
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter http://www.jump-ing.de/
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Jeremy White -
Markus Hitter -
Vincent Povirk