Hi,
I just read the following in the WWN:
"The overall 'Wine Experience' was discussed next. As a whole everybody agrees that it is ugly. Winecfg is arcane, there are tons of nonsense fixmes, very little 'newbie guidance' and overall a small chance of success on the first try. Devs do care about this but its just not as much fun to fix."
Don't be so hard on yourselves! Remember when we had to write a text-based configuration file with no help other than documentation? What percentage of the computer-using public reads documentation?
I can say something like, "Diablo II will not run fullscreen on my computer. You have to set it to use an emulated desktop before you launch it or it will crash. You can do that using the 'Configure Wine' program on the 'Wine' menu," to my non-Linux-using girlfriend and she can figure out how to run Diablo II without additional help, and without knowing anything ahead of time about emulated desktops. It's just a checkbox and it just works.
You all are doing a great job! :)
Cheers, Eric
On Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:44:54 -0600 Eric Anopolsky erpo41@gmail.com wrote:
I can say something like, "Diablo II will not run fullscreen on my computer. You have to set it to use an emulated desktop before you launch it or it will crash. You can do that using the 'Configure Wine' program on the 'Wine' menu," to my non-Linux-using girlfriend and she can figure out how to run Diablo II without additional help, and without knowing anything ahead of time about emulated desktops. It's just a checkbox and it just works.
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=49
On Mon, 2008-10-27 at 17:07 +0000, wineappdb wrote:
On Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:44:54 -0600 Eric Anopolsky erpo41@gmail.com wrote:
I can say something like, "Diablo II will not run fullscreen on my computer. You have to set it to use an emulated desktop before you launch it or it will crash. You can do that using the 'Configure Wine' program on the 'Wine' menu," to my non-Linux-using girlfriend and she can figure out how to run Diablo II without additional help, and without knowing anything ahead of time about emulated desktops. It's just a checkbox and it just works.
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=49
Thanks, but it's not a wine bug. The problem is that xrandr doesn't think 640x480 and 800x600 are valid modes on my laptop so when I launch Diablo II I get a dialog box that says:
Title: "Diablo II Critical Error" Message: "Error 25: A critical error has occurred while initializing Direct3D."
I'm sure this will get fixed eventually.
Thanks, Eric
On 28.10.2008 22:33, Eric Anopolsky wrote:
Thanks, but it's not a wine bug. The problem is that xrandr doesn't think 640x480 and 800x600 are valid modes on my laptop so when I launch Diablo II I get a dialog box that says:
I guess technically it would be possible to emulate the modes. I recall that DirectDraw/Wine actually uses OpenGL as a backend, so just stretching up to a higher resolution would be trivial (though not it may not necessarily look good to everyone).
Anyhow, all that should probably go into a bug report if it's perceived as an issue Wine should deal with ...
-f.r.
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 12:44 PM, Eric Anopolsky erpo41@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
I just read the following in the WWN:
"The overall 'Wine Experience' was discussed next. As a whole everybody agrees that it is ugly. Winecfg is arcane, there are tons of nonsense fixmes, very little 'newbie guidance' and overall a small chance of success on the first try. Devs do care about this but its just not as much fun to fix."
The point was perhaps a bit over exaggerated. Wine isn't bad, we love Wine. However in this day and age we're working harder and harder to make all of Linux accessible to the completely computer untrained and illiterate. And unfortunately thus far Wine is a bit tricky for that population.
We hope to be able to do more in the future, and I think since that article we slowly have. There has been a bunch of discussion about changing winecfg and a number of patches submitted. There has also been a lot of work to silence noisy fixmes etc.
Don't be so hard on yourselves! Remember when we had to write a text-based configuration file with no help other than documentation? What percentage of the computer-using public reads documentation?
I can say something like, "Diablo II will not run fullscreen on my computer. You have to set it to use an emulated desktop before you launch it or it will crash. You can do that using the 'Configure Wine' program on the 'Wine' menu," to my non-Linux-using girlfriend and she can figure out how to run Diablo II without additional help, and without knowing anything ahead of time about emulated desktops. It's just a checkbox and it just works.
You all are doing a great job! :)
Cheers, Eric
-Zach
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Eric Anopolsky -
Frank Richter -
wineappdb -
Zachary Goldberg