Written by Tom Wickline
Monday, 15 February 2010 04:12

VirtualBox may be free, but you still have to own a copy of Windows. If you’re not willing to shell out a few hundred dollars to Microsoft but still want to run Windows on your Intel-based Mac, there is one more alternative: CrossOver from CodeWeavers costs $40 and runs Windows applications on Mac OS X — without Windows.

CrossOver is not virtualization, as evidenced by the whimsically named technology behind it: the open source Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) project. With CrossOver, Windows applications run directly in Mac OS X, and not in a virtual machine. Wine is an implementation of the Win32 API on Mac OS X. The Windows applications don’t know they’re not running on Windows. There’s also a CrossOver for Linux.

The result is that a Windows application running with CrossOver uses fewer system resources, including memory, disk space, and CPU utilization, than the same app running in Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion. Performance of Windows applications is very good.

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Bordeaux review at webmasterfrank.com

Written by Tom Wickline
Sunday, 14 February 2010 05:53

No, this is not a review of wine. It is in fact a review of a computer program made for those of us who use Linux instead of Windows. I use Ubuntu--a flavor of Linux--on my laptop. I use the laptop primarily for browsing the internet and Ubuntu is a bit faster than Windows on the internet and a lot more secure viruswise.

But I also need to run some programs that do not work well on Ubuntu alone. Namely Fritz Chess and CT ART-- another chess program. I tried using Wine but that alone didn't work and then I ordered Bordeaux and that did the trick. I also wanted to use AIM but so far I haven't been able to get it to work. However I have been able to get Quicktime and Grabit to work and I will continue to try additional programs in the future and inform you as to whether or not they work.

Bordeaux is a good program. It does pretty much what it is supposed to do. But it is not perfect. However it is a work in progress and so there is no telling what the future will bring. I personally would like to see a program that would emulate Windows XP entirely. There is an operating system that supposedly does this--ReactOs. But after 10 years of development ReactOs is still not available in a Beta version and so cannot be used as a reliable program nor will such a version be available soon.

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The needs of the one...

Written by Tom Wickline
Friday, 12 February 2010 02:49

From Jeremy White's Blog :

I realize that it's trite for anyone in the computer industry, but I have to confess to being a life long fan of Star Trek.

Now, mind you, I don't know Klingon, I don't own a starfleet uniform, and I don't routinely go around quoting obscure Ferengi dialog. So there are many that would say I don't really qualify as a trekkie (or trekker, although I do know that it's a point of debate :-/ ).

But my wife and I have watched every episode and every movie, and we've enjoyed sharing many of the episodes with our kids.

So when Cryptic offered an opportunity to beta test Star Trek Online, I jumped at the chance. With a lot of hard work the team here and some help from Cryptic, we were just able to get it running in Wine.

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Wine 1.1.38 Released

Written by Tom Wickline
Friday, 12 February 2010 02:07

The Wine development release 1.1.38 is now available.

What's new in this release:

Better support for memory allocations debugging.
Improved MIDI support.
A wide range of Direct3D fixes.
OLEDB fixes (should fix Clipart in Office).
Improved debugger support on x86-64.
Many MSI fixes.
Various bug fixes.

The source is available now. Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

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winetricks 20100201 released

Written by Tom Wickline
Friday, 12 February 2010 01:58

Oh, my, we've been busy. Lots and lots of improvements. Runs better on Windows, too.

Cygwin is kinda broken with current wine, so we've rewound back to an old version, but you have to copy and paste a URL from winetricks' output into the mirror selector to use it. Sigh.

Dan Kegel:
Add AF's speedup to dotnet30 verb; unpack dotnet35 before running its setup.
Remove trailing CR in programfilesdir_win; add vc2005save and vc2005load verbs
fix glaring thinko in how we decided whether to run gksudo (i.e. it
was horribly broken)
Quote more paths
Abort if sudo or gksudo fails
Work around strange NULs in argument to zenity
Internatinalize VirtualCloneDrive code.
Support caching cygwin packages (manually for now)
Finished vc2005hotfix verb
Fixed WINETRICKS_CACHE_WIN value on XP
Make vc2005trial verb work on XP
Make vcrun2005 work on windows.
vc2005trial verb returned before install was really done, tsk.
Fix bad font check
Work around wine bug 21206, fix cygwin for now by using an old copy.
Fix calls to try_regedit to also work on Windows
Fix append_path to work on both Windows and Linux (though maybe not solaris?)

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Bordeaux 2.0.0 for Linux Released

Written by Tom Wickline
Friday, 29 January 2010 12:18

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.

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Wine 1.1.37 Released

Written by Tom Wickline
Saturday, 23 January 2010 07:45

The Wine development release 1.1.37 is now available.

What's new in this release:

A number of fixes in AVI file support.
Several MSXML improvements.
A few MSI fixes.
Various bug fixes.

The source is available now. Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

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Is Cedega Hanging in There?

Written by Tom Wickline
Thursday, 21 January 2010 12:45

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.

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Written by Tom Wickline
Thursday, 21 January 2010 11:14

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.

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Written by Tom Wickline
Tuesday, 19 January 2010 05:59

In a official post on the Ubuntu Forums, user Matthew Helmke 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.

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