Hi all,
I'm just writing to "report" from WINE's booth during LinuxTag in Karlsruhe, Germany. Andreas Mohr and Uwe Bonnes were the developers staffing the booth. Generally, there was significant interest and high hopes for the WINE project, requests for application support was centered on MS Office (Word and Access mainly, also secondary MS apps like Visio and MS Project), Lotus Notes (but that one works quite well already, although we didn't demo it), WYSIWIG Web editors (Dreamweaver, Homesite) and DTP application (very common was support for PageMaker, which is the predecessor to Adobe InDesign). Illustrator and Photoshop were also common requests. The other notable application was Act 2000, which is some kind of Personal Information Management Software (and it did not work :)). CAD software was also commonly requested, though requests were spread on a lot of products.
We tried to analyze most of the problems - I hope I can put in some bug reports later. We were able to solve *two* problems - Rhinoceros 3D modelling software (Andi will mail the patch later) and some fixes for BuildCommDCB (for some special hardware development software).
A personal wishlist item: I'd like to have some overview documentation for the tricky areas in Wine, like Interprocess communication and window management (how to debug this, mainly).
We found out that the wine debugger doesn't really work that well yet :-) (for me, it only worked after setting it to not using an xterm/wconsole)
Marcus Meissner also stopped by and found out that most apps (Homesite, Dreamweaver, Adobe InDesign 2.0) were using encryption to protect their application file, we didn't get the decryption working. A lot of apps would probably start working if we could support "encrypted" binaries. I'll try to put in more detail later, however, you can download their trial applications and see for yourself :-)
Another area of consternation was installer support, however, most InstallShield-based installers worked with a native stdole32.tlb (maybe a message to the user that (s)he needs this would be a good idea while we can't generate the typelib file ourselves, or is there some rewind stuff we could use?).
About games: we showed Half-life, Diablo 2, Starcraft and Grim Fandango, we used winex for that, though. Reaction to the proprietary extensions of Transgaming (and sometimes Codeweavers) were varied. It was a bit sad that most non-game applications each had some flaws (the WordArt bug for Office, dibengine problems for MS IE, the non-working compiler backend for Visual Studio (could be a problem with the specific computer) and well... there weren't many more apps we could show because most didn't start up :))
Links to trial applications: (those I mentioned above) InDesign 1.5: ? InDesign 2.0 (PageMaker would also be interesting, get it from the same URL): http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/main.html Illustrator 10: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/main.html Act 2000: http://www.act.com/products/50/freetrial/index.cfm CoolEdit 2000: http://www.syntrillium.com/download/download.html?1 Homesite: http://www.macromedia.com/software/homesite/trial/ (note: registering should not be necessary, click on "continue w/o login" Dreamweaver: http://www.macromedia.com/software/trial_download/ Rhinoceros 3D: http://download.mcneel.com/rhino/2.0/eval/default.asp (this one works great with Andi's patch!)
(and those that were rarely or just once mentioned, and not mentioned above) Gandke & Schubert EAR and GS-Verein: http://www.gsn.de/download/default.asp Lemmings Revolution: http://www.gsn.de/download/default.asp Mindmap: http://www.mindjet.de/download/download.php?produkt=mm2002std-g (with registration) Q-Stat: http://www.q-das.de/homepage_e/produkt%FCbersicht_e.htm (no free download. contacting them via mail requesting a demo per snail mail should work) Xara X: http://www.xara.com/downloads/xarax/
Photos: We made few. I hope Andi will mail an URL with them to wine-devel later.
(I hope I can post some debug logs later and put some entries in the bug tracking system. No firm promises though, but you can always try most apps yourself)
Yours Malte #8-)
-
Malte Cornils