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Saturday, August 22, 2009

Bordeaux 2009 year end roadmap

I thought this would be a good time for us to share our next six months outlook for Bordeaux. Maybe I should start with whats taken place over the past few months then go over our future goals.

Over the past six months it's has been extremely exciting times around here, we shipped Bordeaux for Solaris and now its allot easier for Solaris and OpenSolaris users to use Wine to run Office 2003, Adobe Photoshop and other applications on their systems.

We also have a Bordeaux beta for MAC users and this is where allot of energy has been going lately. Once Bordeaux 2.0 for MAC ships it will be easy and inexpensive for MAC users to run IE 7 and Microsoft Office on their beloved Mac's.

We also refreshed Bordeaux for BSD and Linux twice thus far this year and added QuickTime Player and IrfanView support. fixed a number of bugs and tweaked the install scripts for cleaner installs.

In the next few months, we plan to ship Bordeaux 2.0 and this is where 95% of our work has been focused. We started off by re-writing our build and install scripts so they were portable across all platforms. Then we bundled in Cabextract, unnzip and wget to get a feel of the bundling process. And with bundling in these tools it makes life allot easier for the end user as they don't have to go out ad install each tool on their system. It's just there and it just works.

In the past Bordeaux was a run of the mill "Wine frontend" and while their is nothing wrong with being just a frontend to Wine this approach causes massive head aches. Wine is released every two weeks and over just a couple months their are numerous versions that need to be supported. Some people stick with the stable Wine 1.0.1 version that came with their distribution while others install the latest version just after each release. And if you have used Wine for more then a month you know that what worked in one release isn't guaranteed to work in the next release.

So it has comes the point to where we need to also Bundle Wine with Bordeaux. This way we can focus on one version and test all of our supported applications against it. and not have to worry about the next Wine release breaking a application or feature. It's also opens up the availability for us to add in hacks and tweaks so certain applications and games run, or in some circumstances run allot better then with just plain stock Wine.

We have a number of hacks and fixes in the works, a hack depends on how you look at the situation in our 2.0 build and one of these new features will be the unsupported DIB Engine. We know it's not perfect but it will allow our customers to use it if needed. We will be able to support IE 7 and Microsoft Outlook in the near future with our own Wine bundle.

After the Wine bundle is complete and all of our current applications and a few new applications have been tested and gone through QA test we plan to re-write the frontend and make it extremely simple to install any application or game through the new UI.

After the new frontend is complete we plan to have our own application and game database and then tie it into the UI so you can instantly see what other peoples success was with any given application.

Here is two recent screen shots of Office 2007 running on OpenSolaris 200.06



Sound now works on Solaris



IE 7 running on Linux (Gentoo).


If Bordeaux is something your interested in we would ask that you purchase the current 1.8.2 version to help fund the next release. All of the above changes take one of two things time or money. And with your support we can invest in more hacking hours and have Bordeaux 2.0 ready for release in just a couple short months.

Keep in mind if you make the purchase now you get six months of upgrades, so you will also get version 2.0 and any service releases.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Bordeaux now available at Payloadz

We have had some recent request for ways to purchase Bordeaux other then through PayPal. So as of today we have Bordeaux listed at Payloadz.com and can be purchased without the need of a PayPal account.

Payloadz will let you use your credit or debit card to make a direct payment and access to five downloads through their servers.

If you do prefer to use PayPal just go to our store and make your purchase there.







Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Bordeaux 1.8.2 for Linux Released

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.8.2 for Linux today. Bordeaux 1.8.2 adds support for Apple's QuickTime 6.5.2 Player, IrfanView 4.25 the extreamly popular image viewer and editor. This release aslo bundles in Cabextract, Wget and Unzip to remove external dependencies. Our winetricks script has been synced to the latest official release, Steam should now install and run once again, There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks.
Bordeaux 1.8.2 has been tested against Wine 1.1.26

The cost of Bordeaux 1.8.2 is $20.00. Anyone who has purchased Bordeaux in the past six months is entitled to a free upgrade. Bordeaux comes with six months of upgrades and support and of course a 30-day money back guarantee.

Supported Applications/Games:

  • Microsoft Office 2007
  • Microsoft Office 2003
  • Microsoft Office 2000
  • Microsoft Office 97
  • Microsoft Office Visio 2003
  • Microsoft Office Project 2003
  • Adobe Photoshop 6
  • Adobe Image Ready 3
  • Adobe Photoshop 7
  • Adobe Image Ready 7
  • Adobe Photoshop CS
  • Adobe Photoshop CS2
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer 6
  • Steam and Steam based Games
  • Apple QuickTime 6.5.2 Player
  • IrfaView 4.25 (Image files only)
  • Winetricks support

About Bordeaux:

The Bordeaux Technology Group is a software services and development company specializing in Windows compatibility software. Users of Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac systems from time to time find themselves in the need to run specialized Windows software. The Bordeaux suite enables access to these programs and data in a seamless and low cost manner without requiring licensing of Microsoft Technology. The Bordeaux Group also provides migration services and support for alternative operating systems specializing in Windows compatibility.

There is a multitude of software developed only for the Windows operating system and even when software vendors port their applications to another platform, generally it lacks features that the Windows version contains. The only solution these developers face is to have access to both systems for testing which leads to increased infrastructure demands, and wasted project resources. If you are vendor interested in supporting your application on Linux, BSD, Solaris or Mac OS X or a software user that needs to run a Windows application on Linux, BSD, Solaris or Mac OS X we can help.

Version 1.8.2 New Features:

  • Added QuickTime 6.5.2 Player support
  • Added IrfanView 4.25 support
  • Bundle cabextract, wget and unzip support
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Special thanks to Bar Chiu for building the 32 bit installers for us... :)

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Bordeaux The frontend for Wine

Juraj Šípoš Who maintains http://www.freebsd.nfo.sk/ wrote a nice review about Bordeaux on FreeBSD. The original review is at www.linuxexpres.cz and can be translated with google translate. Just choose Slovak to English or your language of choice, Here is a link to the English translation.

Here is a small snip of the review, Juraj also talks about WineTricks and CodeWeavers CrossOver Ofiice.

Bordeaux is a port area in the southwest of France on the river Garonne. Produces are high-quality wine. Recently it its name in English (wine) of each application and environment, which programs you run Windows on Unix without that you must have installed the Windows operating system.

Bordeaux - interesting extension for Wine

Wine is something totally different, what emulators as VMware or qemu in which the user must install the entire Windows environment. In practice, this represents money for the license and the unnecessary costs. Wine is not a emulator, which is confirmed by the abbreviation of the name in English - Wine Is Not an Emulator. Wine is a working environment without emulating the processor.

When the application interface Wine saw the first light of the world (even with Win32 supporting around 1995), had many shortcomings and remember the veterans, showed that, although with some difficulties to run 16-bit Windows programs, with 32-bit environment are still problems. In those times it was difficult to configure Wine and then of course to use it.