How Necessary Is Windows Part 5 Crossover

Written by Tom Wickline

Tuesday, 24 November 2009 00:52

There have been several attempts down the years to make Windows unnecessary. The most audacious is doubtless ReactOS, which cuts to the heart of things and wants to be a complete Windows XP-compatible OS. Needless to say, this is no small project and will take a long time to complete; right now, I'd call it somewhere between completely useless and intriguingly experimental. (It runs Skype, at least.) I'm also concerned that if they ever do get it anywhere near useful completion, Microsoft will stomp on it hard.

That's certainly the high road. But how necessary is it to clone the whole damned OS? A Windows app, after all, is just a block of x86 machine code that makes calls into one or more APIs. If you can clone the APIs in an acceptably clean-room manner, you don't need to duplicate the entire architecture, kernel and all.

And that brings us to one of the oldest and oddest ongoing projects in open-source computing: Wine, which dates back to 1993, and provides a compatibility layer consisting of clean-room DLLs implementing the Win32 APIs, plus whatever magic is necessary to make the deeper host OS machinery look like Windows to the app. This is easier than implementing a whole OS, with the further advantage that if done properly, Wine can act as a Windows compatibility layer over several Unix-like OSes, rather than only Linux. Currently, Wine can operate over Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD Unix, and x86 Solaris.

After 16 years of dogged work, Wine actually works pretty well. Part of its success is due to a remarkable cooperation between the Wine project and a commercial software house in St. Paul named Codeweavers. Codeweavers sells a $40 deployment/management utility for Wine called Crossover, which basically makes Wine noob-friendly. (Naked Wine is pretty stark.) Codeweavers also tweaks Wine itself to improve app compatibility, and contributes those tweaks back to the Wine project under LGPL. Some financial support is also provided to the otherwise volunteer-based Wine project. Wine's maintainer, Alexandre Julliard, is an employee of Codeweavers, where he works full-time on Wine development.

Codeweavers focuses mostly on big-market apps like Microsoft Office, and doesn't officially support apps beyond a relatively short list of "gold" software. However, I've found that a great many Windows apps install and run just fine under Crossover whether they're on the list or not. InDesign 2.0 is listed on the site as "known not to work" but apart from a minor display glitch, it seems to work as always. (I haven't tested it deeply so far.) Most Microsoft apps work beautifully (especially older ones) and I've been using Office 2000 and Visio 2000 under it without incident since last fall.

Wine implements a sort of runtime environment emulation for Windows called a "bottle." More than one bottle may be created on a single host OS, and each bottle has its own emulated C: drive and Registry. By giving each Windows app its own bottle under Wine, apps are prevented from interfering with one another in the dreaded "DLL Hell" effect. Because it's not a VM, the performance hit for running Wine/Crossover is very small, and most important, you do not need to have a legal copy of Windows running in the VM. On the other hand, a bottle looks enough like Windows to be infectable by Windows malware, though one bottle probably can't infect other bottles on a Linux system, or the underlying system itself. (From what I've heard, the low-level system tricks played by many malware packages keep them from running or at least running completely.) There are known conflicts between WGA and Wine, so don't install WGA if you can avoid it.

Bottom line: If Wine supports all the Windows apps you absolutely must use, you do not need Windows at all. I haven't tested all the Windows packages that I use here (next up is MapPoint 2004) but for Office and Visio 2000 it's been nothing short of magical, and I'm guessing InDesign will come along eventually. In a mature software market, time works in our favor: One by one, existing apps will be installable under Wine, and each time that happens, Windows slips a little bit deeper beneath the waters of irrelevance.

How Necessary Is Windows? Part 1: Overview
How Necessary Is Windows? Part 2: Ubuntu
How Necessary Is Windows? Part 3: Apps
How Necessary Is Windows? Part 4: Format Lock-In
Next up: For the hard cases, there's always virtualization.

Any customer from the USA purchasing CrossOver Games or CrossOver Professional until December 1st 2009 will be automatically registered to win this loaded CodeWeavers Gaming PC. So enter today!

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Biggest Entertainment Title in all history

CarltonH 2009-11-25 12:24:59

I bought Crossover to support Wine, but I prefer just using Wine. Within the Crossover Games side,
I think they should focus on Grand Theft Auto IV support, which is the biggest media product of all
time, by revenue. It remains the only killer game app on any platform.

On the simple game side,
I'd love to see Pendulumania supported. Heck, it is a tiny freeware game and if they got it
working, they could probably get permission to bundle it with CX Games, which would be ironic in
that Vista and Win 7 broke compatibility, so you need XP to run it currently.

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tell that to...

lachlan 2009-11-25 19:55:42

call of duty, halo, etc etc. GTA is a really really popular series but i think you're just saying
that you really like gta 4 here.

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junk is junk

bill 2009-11-25 17:30:30

I used to think i needed windows. I switched to Linux a bit over a year ago. For several months, i
relied on a virtual machine with xp. It took longer and shorter than i expected (depending on the
argument) to ween myself away from windows. At first i thought "i want a program that is exactly
like _this_ windows program". And then i'd try to find a replacement that emulated that program.
I finally realized that there is no drop-in-replacement for any windows apps, but there are some
fabulous replacements that make windows apps look like trash that a high schooler wrote.

It's
hard to drop everything you know about something and start from scratch with something else. I
understand that more than ever now. This is the problem with Linux. It's different. That's good in
almost every way. It takes time, effort, desire, and interest to learn something different.

My
wife makes a good example. She didn't like Linux because it was too different. She couldn't care
less about what OS is installed, so long as the software she knows is there. I tried MSOffice in
WINE with her, but everything else was different, so it was unacceptable. She has enough time, but
no desire to learn how to use Linux. Here i am a year later and her fabulous notebook that she uses
around 4-8 hours per day is crashing at least daily. The problem is windows. The problem is always
windows. I reinstall windows every 6-12 months out of necessity as it always corrupts beyond repair.
Because she sees my frustration helping her with windows and has felt the speed of Linux on my
computer, she's ready to take the plunge. I'll be standing by to help her through the bumps in the
transition.

WINE is a nice idea, but it perpetuates the problem. People will not switch to Linux
until they want to switch and most will not really care about WINE at that point.

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Retired

Jack Wannamaker 2009-11-27 12:07:54

"Here i am a year later and her fabulous notebook that she uses around 4-8 hours per day is
crashing at least daily. The problem is windows. The problem is always windows. I reinstall windows
every 6-12 months out of necessity as it always corrupts beyond repair."

I hold no particular
brief for Windows or any other OS, having three notebooks and a desktop running Vista (never had a
problem in two years), Linux, Solaris, and BSD. I think the fault lies (to paraphrase Shakespeare)
"not in our OSes, but in ourselves."

I believe the reason people have so many problems with
Windows is that they forget that it IS an OS, and that like any other complex operating system it
requires care to perform optimally.

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both right

asdf@asdf.tld 2009-11-27 13:03:16

windows needs care and feeding like any OS. i use linux, os x, mac os 9, xp, freebsd, and
dos.

and i don't have a problem with xp. but it takes a lot more work to make it safe.

it's
getting to the point where the time spent care and feeding for windows is taking up significant
resources.

i've stopped supporting windows for other people. i only do it for myself. i won't
even do windows support for compensation.

linux yes, mac yes, *bsd yes.

windows no.

I'll run it
for myself. Mostly in a virtual machine. but that's it.

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re: junk is junk

Austin 2009-11-25 18:14:33

bill wrote:

WINE is a nice idea, but it perpetuates the problem. People will not switch to Linux
until they want to switch and most will not really care about WINE at that point.

This is too simplistic. One can imitate the interface of windows and one can provide
binary comparability for programs. These are two totally different things.

When you say
"She didn't like Linux because it was too different" I assume you are talking
about the interface (not the binary libraries). There are particular distributions which
try to emulate the XP interface. But they cannot provide compatibility to windows
binaries without wine.

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Mass Market Forces

Stomfi 2009-11-27 11:44:45

The inability of people to want to learn new desktop computer interfaces and applications shows up
the immaturity of the market.
Back in the last century I used to run a business that made stereo
amplifiers. I competed against the the market leader, the company that had bought the technology to
the masses a few years before, with far superior technology for a cheaper price. Unfortunately
everyone associated a home stereo with the market leader. The only way round this problem for me was
to sell a heavily discounted wholesale branded unit to shops, and let them do the persuading.
This
is exactly the situation with Windows vs the alternatives. I now sell Ubuntu computers, using MAC as
an example of a known acceptable alternative. It works. The majority are happy with their cheaper
Ubuntu computer and proud to feel they are part of helping some nameless poor people in foreign
lands along with some frustrated application builders or whatever the current news article tells the
sales people. I install wine without instructions. If they email for help I let them know
alternatives I know will work. Since they've already accepted the basic idea they are getting an
alternative, there is no drama.

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wine for Mac

littlenoodles 2009-11-27 12:48:23

I tried WINE originally to get the Win32 app I wrote where I work to run on Linux. It's worked
great that way for years, and I even used to use it to run the app on a PowerPC Mac by using the
X-Windows server in MacOS to export the display for the app from Linux/WINE to to Mac0S. It worked
and was cute in concept, but I never got around to recommending this to our Mac end-users (Citrix
was an easier sell).

But now that Macs are Intel-based, WINE is the first thing I recommend when a
Mac user asks how they can run this app. I usually send them to Crossover, since raw WINE setup on
the Mac is a bit of a black art. It'd be really nice if Apple were to embrace WINE as a Windows
compatibility layer and just build it in. But I guess that'd make Microsoft mad...

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Wine can be better than Windows

Cay Horstmann 2009-11-27 17:57:02

I need to run an ancient desktop publishing app called FrameMaker. I run it every day under
Wine/Linux and once in a while under Wine/Mac OS X. The good news is that it runs faster than under
Vista. If you want to run a Windows app snappily, Wine may be your best bet!

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Codeweavers Supports Lots of Titles

Jeff Hoogland 2009-11-28 03:22:42

Just so things are clear for people the people over at Codeweavers provide "official"
support for a whole slew of titles (not just ones that are rated at "gold" but many
"silver" ones as well).

They are also fairly good at doing their best to help you get
non-support software to work when they can.

~Jeff

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