Day 4: Conferences: Wine: Windows on Linux

[picture]
Douglas Ridgway, talking about Wine

Alex was accompanied by two other people who work on Wine: Gavriel State who is paid by Corel to work on Wine, and Alexandre Julliard, the Wine project leader.

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From left to right: Gavriel, Douglas, and Alex

There was a lot said about wine:

The Windows API is really large and rapidly growing, partly because ms wants to keep its edge and prevent projects such as wine.
It's really hard to get binary compatibility with all the quirks, and applications for which you do not have source
Source compatibility is also hard because windows software has never been ported before
Windows applications may actually run better under wine, and should they crash, they can't take the OS down with them
About 3000 Win32 calls implemented or partially implemented, 42 Win16 DLLs, and 38 Win32 DLLs, but there is still much work to do
A big milestone that was reached is that the MFCs can be recompiled against Wine, and Corel has had success recompiling their apps against wine.
How well does TCP/IP work in wine? Some of it is working. Someone sent a snapshot of the wine website from MSIE
Printing works to some extent
Some games are running and some with sound

They showed the demo of Quatro Pro running under Wine:

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The windows binary of Quatro Pro running under KDE

In a nutshell, they did accomplish a lot, but the 10% left (or whatever it is) is going to take a lot of effort.

Rick Cook also wrote a review

Picture library

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99/03/10 (05:52): Version 1.0