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Wednesday, March 25, 2009

PlayOnLinux has a new server and website

Today I announce to you the transfer of PlayOnLinux to a new server. We have taken this opportunity to give the website a little makeover.

What's new? I hear you ask. Well, among the many wonderful new features, you will find :
  • A brand new front page, all made up and pretty
  • A complete, rewritten documentation
  • The forum has undergone some changes as well, with a search feature! yes, you read right!

At the moment of the server change, there may be a period of time when the website will not be available. Also, the domain name change may take some time for some of you.

Here is what the new front page will look like :


And here is what the scripts will look like:


Update: All the main configurations of the new server are now in place. All that's left is wait for a few optimizations and the server change will then take place.

Update: It seems that the scripts had stopped working since the site's migration. This problem has been fixed and everything should be back to normal now. We apologize for the temporary discomfort it may have caused you.

Monday, March 23, 2009

My struggle with Wine and Lord of the Rings Online

From Jeremy Whites Blog at CodeWeavers...

So I'm blessed with a wonderful wife. She helped support our efforts around World of Warcraft by playing WoW with me (up until I got sick of it at about level 40). Last summer, we decided we wanted to tackle Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO). That is, we wanted to bring the Windows version to Mac and Linux.

So we both got accounts, and started playing. The idea was that I'd be the perfect beta tester, so that as we worked to officially support it, I could be a lead tester.

Nicely, the game engine itself works great in CrossOver Games and Wine. Unfortunately, the launcher, the main program that does updates and gets things going, is a .NET application, and it doesn't work. It's really the key to genuinely supporting LOTRO.

Now you can get around that, with a variety of pretty tough work arounds. So I've been using those for the last 6 months or so, and she and I have been gaming happily. We're up to level 47 now, and are having a great time. (As a digression, I need to boast about my wicked cool rig. I've got a Linux box hooked into our 40" Samsung LCD TV, with MythTV for our TV. And then when it's time to play, I get to play this gorgeous game on this beatiful large screen TV. My wife is often quite jealous ).

Unfortunately, our work on the launcher has become a nasty 'Tar Baby' that is deeply frustrating. I've had 5 different developers look at bugs in the launcher over many months, and I've even spent several weeks myself.

This happens every now and then with Wine. We'll get one application bug that is just a humdinger and it takes us forever to break through it. I remember that Project 2003 took us over a year to find. But when we finally did, it was a one line fix. We're having a similar struggle with Service Pack 1 for Office 2007. This is just one of the most maddening things about Wine. We'll get it eventually, but it's deeply frustrating along the way.

But this has been a lovely dimension to my job; it's fun to have my extra curricular activities dovetail with my day job like this. Now just to find a kinship on Vilya...

Cheers,
Jeremy



Putty for Mac
Putty for Mac
$15.00

https://winereviews.onfastspring.com/putty-for-mac


CrossOver Games Mac 7.2.0 Review

This week we're going a little meta here. Today's focus is on CrossOver Games, by CodeWeavers. CrossOver Games is part of the CrossOver platform, which purports to let Mac users run PC programs as though they were native. I was full of doubt when I started out on this journey, and I have emerged on the other side a True Believer. CrossOver works. It just works. I don't know, it's magic. Why, you ask? Read on to find out!


CrossOver Games is a simple installation, even if its underpinnings is crazygonuts. Essentially, games (and applications for the CrossOver application) operate as though they exist within specialized environments contained within the Mac itself. CodeWeavers calls these environments "bottles". For example, the Guild Wars application lives inside the Guild Wars bottle. You can have multiple bottles for each game you want to run, and can configure each of them separately.

If you look at the configurable settings for bottles, it's apparent that what's going on here is pretty much an actual, discrete build of Windows that fires up every time you want to play that particular Windows-only game. There are separate controls for managing tasks in the Windows instance, and you can simulate a reboot for that instance. There's even the option for opening the C: drive and displaying its contents in the Finder, should you need to delve down into that level of software support. For people like me, that's unnecessary, as my Windows Fu doesn't extend to actually modifying registers or editing .ini files, but it's good to know that that stuff is there.

CrossOver Games creates a distinction between Supported and Unsupported games. Supported games include EVE Online, Guild Wars, Half-Life, Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine, Spore, and the Valve Software Steam interface. What this means is that CrossOver Games is ready to let you play these games (with the proper install CD or file) without any monkeying around. If you select one of these choices, you're given a small message recommending a particular flavor of Windows to use, or you can just go with what it suggests. From there, the process is painless. For Steam, as an example, you're given the option to install the client from the Orange Box CD, or download it directly from the Steam website. CrossOver creates the necessary environment, and suddenly you're looking at the ugly Windows interface.

Then it's just a matter of choosing which game you want to play. Opening a game opens CrossOver Games, and it all just functions seamlessly with the Mac environment. Venturing into the realm of Unsupported games, however, is a different beast. From the app: "CrossOver should be able to run many games that use Direct X 9 or any previous version of Direct X. However, there are sometimes problems with particular games." This is where being knowledgeable about Windows guts would probably come in handy.


When setting up the environment for an Unsupported game, you're given the choice of choosing one of four Windows versions for your bottle: Vista, XP, 2000, and 98. And no lie: when I saw that Windows 98 was available, my heart leapt with joy, because it meant that I could stop feeling silly for holding onto my The Neverhood CD for all these years.


Without allowing myself to hope too strongly, I slid the CD into my drive, created the Win98 bottle, pointed it to the CD, and crossed my fingers. Less than a minute later, the screen went black and the old familiar opening Neverhood indicia displayed, meaning I was in like Flynn.

There were a couple of issues: you can't play The Neverhood in a window, for instance. And all the video runs at roughly half-speed with a lot of skipped frames. But for the simple joy of being able, after over a decade, to play one of my very favorite games of all time, I could get used to a ton of even worse issues.

Of course, having successfully installed and played The Neverhood, I was unprepared for when I was unable to install Age of Empires 3, which runs on Windows XP. At some point in the install, I received the message "Error loading the PID Generator DLL. The DLL could not be found!" My tactic of staring at the screen until the message turned into "Oh, nevermind, I found it" completely failed, and that was my experience with installing AoE 3.

Note: If any of my readers understands what this is about, please drop me a line or leave a revealing comment. I fault nothing but my lack of Windows knowledge for this. CrossOver Games is still awesome.



How awesome? Awesome enough that not only can I play The Neverhood, but I can also play Guild Wars without having to restart into Boot Camp, which saves a ton of time. Because CrossOver Games runs Guild Wars, I'm going to assume it'll handle all the subsequent expansions as well; I'll find out sooner or later.

That brings me to something I've been wondering about, and hoping to see for a while now. If CodeWeavers can make Windows-only games run nearly natively on the Mac, is it too much to ask that Apple itself figures out a way to do the same without needing Boot Camp? Isn't this really kind of a proof of concept? What would Apple lose by this? All they'd need to do would be to add this as yet another bullet point in their Switchers campaign: You can run your actual Windows apps directly on the Mac! Steve, I know you're not doing Keynotes anymore, but this would make the ultimate One More Thing.



Putty for Mac
Putty for Mac
$15.00

https://winereviews.onfastspring.com/putty-for-mac


Tuesday, March 17, 2009

DirectX 10 coming to Linux through WINE and CrossOver

Most desktop Linux users have at least heard of the free application Wine or its retail cousins CrossOver Linux and CrossOver Mac.


If you haven't heard of these applications, you may want to give them a try. They allow users to run Windows programs in other operating systems (namely Linux, Mac OS and Solaris) without any virtual machines or other resource-intensive processes, as long as you have an x86-compatible CPU in your PC -- and let's face it, nowadays, who doesn't?

In fact, with WINE there's no need for Windows at all. WINE< creates an environment that responds to Windows API calls, so apps 'think' they are running in Windows, when in fact there's no Windows there at all.

The difference between the two applications is that CrossOver uses a proprietary, more up-to-date version of Wine along with some handy extensions. The two also differ as far as support; CrossOver is commercially supported by CodeWeavers while Wine relies on the community for support.

Last week Codeweavers' Jeremy White posted an update on the CodeWeavers website outlining what has been happening over the last eight months and giving a preview of what is to come this year for CrossOver and Wine.

As far as the last eight months, most of the development work has gone towards what White calls "under the hood" improvements and better support for the newer releases of Microsoft Office. Many of these changes are now present in the development version of Wine. Quite a few DirectX 9 games are well supported along with many other common applications such as Photoshop and QuickBooks.

What is more interesting, though, are the few details White gives about what this year has in store. It seems that this year will be focused more on the core functionality and user experience. Developers will begin working on adding DirectX 10 compatibility layers while improving support for Outlook, Quicken, Photoshop, QuickBooks, and many other applications. On top of that, CrossOver will get a user-interface makeover.



Putty for Mac
Putty for Mac
$15.00

https://winereviews.onfastspring.com/putty-for-mac



Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Google Summer of Code 2009 and Wine

It's time for another round of Google's Summer of Code (SoC). The SoC is an effort that first started in 2005 as an effort to get students involved in open source code development. Google provides a stipend to the student and to the mentoring organization that helps the student.

Kai Blin this week sent the application for this year's Summer of Code. Below is the email Kai sent to the wine-devel mailing list.
Hi folks,

I've just sent our application for this year's Summer of Code.
Could everyone please have another look at the proposed projects at
http://wiki.winehq.org/SummerOfCode to see if all the proposals are still current. Feel free to discuss new project ideas on the mailing list as well.

Cheers,
Kai
The deadline for mentoring organizations to submit is March 18, 2009 and Google will begin taking student applications on March 23, 2009 with the deadline for student applications on April 3rd. On April 20th, Google will formally announced the accepted student applications and then after a several week learning period students will begin coding their projects on May 23rd. The SoC coding then continues on until August 17th.

If you have an idea, please post it on Wine Developers mailing list so we can help you with your idea and find out if it's realistic or not. Showing initiative and willing to discuss your idea greatly improves your chances of getting accepted.

As long as you work hard and interact with the community and your mentor in a positive and constructive way you don't have to worry about not meeting all your goals.

For updates and news about Google's Summer of Code 2009 (SoC) and Wine keep a eye on the Wine (SoC) wiki page. If your interested in participating in this years (SoC) it might be a good idea to subscribe to the Wine Developers mailing list now and start the discussion.




Putty for Mac
Putty for Mac
$15.00

https://winereviews.onfastspring.com/putty-for-mac