Bordeaux 2.0.0 for Linux Released

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.0 for Linux today. Bordeaux 2.0.0 marks major progress over older releases. With version 2.0.0 and onward we bundle our own Wine build and many tools and libraries that Wine depends upon. With this release we bundle Wine 1.1.36, Cabextract, Mozilla Gecko, Unzip, Wget and other support libraries and tools. We have improved support for Microsoft Office 2007 (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) and preliminary support for Internet Explorer 7 in this release, there has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks on the back-end.
The cost of Bordeaux 2.0.0 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 7
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6
• Steam and Steam based Games
• Apple QuickTime 6.5.2 Player
• IrfaView 4.25 (Image files only)
• Winetricks support

Version 2.0.0 New Features:

• Bundle Wine 1.1.36
• Added Internet Explorer 7 support
• Improved Microsoft Office 2007 support
• Bundle Mozilla Gecko
• New shell based installer
• New Progress Bar
• Updated to the latest Winetricks

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.

Screenshots :

Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) in Steam with Bordeaux

Is Cedega Hanging in There?

In one of my past articles I made a bold assessment that it appeared Transgaming might be dropping support for their Cedega Wine software. However it now appears that Cedega might be hanging in there - After more than a year of silence there was finally an update posted in Cedega's "Den" (announcements section). The post promises the certification of two games, Torchlight and Defense Grid: The Awakening, that happen to work well under their "recently" released 7.3.3 engine (The latter of the two pleases me greatly, I had purchased DG on Steam over the holidays and it does not function properly under Wine/CXGames as of yet). Also provided is a very vague "Development Update" that promises better OpenGL performance and mentions that at some point in the near future we should see a more detailed development plan - Alas two weeks later and still nothing.

In the end what does all this mean? Maybe nothing, but then only time will tell. I'm hoping that Transgaming gets around to posting development updates faster than they have been about fixing their application voting system (which has been non-functional for close to two years now). If Transgaming want's to save their Linux product they need to get on the ball - and quick. They are no longer the only big player in the world of commercial "Win-on-Lin" for gaming. Codeweavers has already posted their plans for development in 2010 and since they already support L4D2 (one of the most recently released hit PC titles) Transgaming is going to be hard-pressed to play catch-up.

Now the really Cool thing is if you enter : TOM23 as your deal code, coupon offer you will receive a instant rebate of 20% off the regular price. Yes you read it here first! For a limited time new CodeWeavers CrossOver customers can purchase CX Games for only $29.96 and CX Pro for only $52.46.... If You or a friend, relative etc.. ever wanted to try CrossOver Games or the Pro version this is the time to do it.

Bordeaux 2.0.0 for Solaris and OpenSolaris Released

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.0 for Solaris today. Bordeaux 2.0.0 marks major progress over older releases. With version 2.0.0 and onward we bundle our own Wine build and many tools and libraries that Wine depends upon. With this release we bundle Wine 1.1.36, Cabextract, Mozilla Gecko, Unzip, Wget and other support libraries and tools. We have also added preliminary support for Microsoft Office 2007 (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) and Internet Explorer 7 in this release, there has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks on the back-end.
The cost of Bordeaux 2.0.0 is $25.00. 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 7
• 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 2.0.0 New Features:

• Bundle Wine 1.1.36
• Added Internet Explorer 7 support
• Added Microsoft Office 2007 support
• Bundle Mozilla Gecko
• New shell based installer
• New Progress Bar
• Updated to the latest Winetricks

Here is some Screenshots of Bordeaux on OpenSolaris 2009.06

Bordeaux Menu in Applications Menu

The New Install Progress Bar

Internet Explorer 7 on OpenSolaris

Adobe Photoshop 6 with Bordeaux

IrfanView 4.25 with Bordeaux

Apple QuickTime Player 6.5.2 on OpenSolaris

Canonical to bundle CodeWeavers CrossOver?

In a official post on the Ubuntu Forums, user Matthew (a official Canonical employee?) asks users to complete a survey with the applications they would like to see in the upcoming versions of Ubuntu.

Among the applications one can find: Spotify, Pandora, Hulu, Skype, WoW, Picasa, Adobe Photoshop, Apple iTunes, CodeWeavers and a couple more applications.

I'm wondering if Canonical has plans to bundle CodeWeavers CrossOver with forthcoming releases? Most of the applications CodeWeavers already supports and the one or two apps they don't officially support will already run as Unsupported apps in CrossOver now. The only change would be for CodeWeavers to officially support the apps in a upcoming release.

So ask people what Apps/Games they would like to see running on Ubuntu then ask if they would also use Codeweavers..... I suppose if enough people say YES to the CodeWeavers question we just might see a bundle between the two companies.

Here is is the post, and link to the survey :

Please help the Canonical and Ubuntu leadership
We are trying to gather preferences for the apps that users would like to see in upcoming version of Ubuntu. While we all believe in the power of open source applications we are also very keen that users should get to choose the software they want to use. There are some great apps that aren't yet available to Ubuntu users and Canonical would like to know the priority that users would like to see them. This list is indicative not definitive and we would love to also read your suggestions in the free text box.

They are also requesting that anyone who has comments please do so here.

Note: there has been some confusion that I would like to clear up--this is not about applications to be included by default, but merely things that we may attempt to make more easily available for Ubuntu users to install for themselves from official repositories.

ReactOS Arwinss to use more Wine code

All,
Today I would like to officially announce the (sub)project I was working on for the last half a year, and make a call to developers to participate.

ReactOS has been around for about 11 years, and it's been growing each year since then. The demand for an open source Windows-compatible operating system is huge: geek, servers, netbooks, accounting, point of sales, CAD... The list could go on and on.

Time goes by, new versions of Windows operating systems are being released. ReactOS usability still has not reached any significant value. Not to say ReactOS didn't even officially enter the Beta stage. Separately, there are many achievements: audio support appeared, bootloader is able to boot real Windows, some Windows binary drivers could be loaded and work in ReactOS, networking is being improved every day, the kernel is being actively worked on too. But all of that does not really matter for the end user. For a user it's important that a web-browser loads websites, instant messenger client connects and works, [Microsoft/Open] Office shows documents, email client gets new messages.

This bare usability is what's still missing, and if it continues to be like this, I am afraid our project won't be of much use in another 10 years. Certainly, I became very concerned and started analyzing situation. Being opensource project without major commercial sponsors, there are certain limitations as to what could be done to improve the situation, so mainly it's a matter of picking right priorities and properly managing (motivating) existing human resources.

The part of ReactOS which plays major role in compatibility and usability is Win32 subsystem. Right now, it's a huge monster which requires a lot more human resources than we have now. It's very hard and time consuming to reach even Windows 2000 level of compatibility with current amount of participating developers, and high entry level.

I came up with something which could solve this problem: Arwinss. To better explain what it is, I made a special presentation (URL to slides in PDF format is in the end of this email). Please imagine myself talking through it as I didn't perform/record it.

Now, after you read through the presentation, I would like to make a proposal to all developers (even newcomers, who never worked on ReactOS before). Let's make an Arwinss week, or Arwinss month. Every developer could definitely find a few hours during a week to hack Arwinss. Entry level is rather low, there are some basic docs about Arwinss in the wiki, and I am happy to consult about details.

If I could make this new subsystem out of nothing (out of Wine and ReactOS) almost alone (Kamil and Smiley help is very valued and appreciated!) within a few months, imagine what we could do all together?

With the best regards,
Aleksey Bragin.

The presentation: (links to further information are in the presentation too)
http://www.reactos.org/media/docs/2010/arwinss.pdf
http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Arwinss
http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Arwinss_technical

Briefly, what was done:

• gdi32.dll - source code is nearly unmodified from Wine, but compiled in ReactOS tree, into a real PE DLL.
• user32.dll - source code is nearly unmodified from Wine, but compiled in ReactOS tree, into a real PE DLL.
• What about Wineserver, you would ask? SERVER_START_REQ and related macros are rewritten to perform a syscall to win32k.sys (more about win32k.sys below). Server protocol is the same, but of course many requests aren't need.
• winex11.drv - this is the one if you want X Server to be your interface. This is unchanged Wine source code, again compiled inside a ReactOS source tree into a PE DLL
• winent.drv - an alternative user/gdi driver, which mostly forwards all calls into a kernel mode graphics engine located in win32k.sys (which is compatible with Windows video drivers, so all acceleration could be used).
• win32k.sys - kernelmode counterpart of the new Win32 subsystem, contains graphics engine, user server which is based on a small part of platform-independent Wineserver source code adapted to kernelmode, and a simple window manager which calculates visible regions for windows and manages window showing/hiding.