Written by Tom Wickline
Wednesday, 09 December 2009 00:02

Last week, we asked developers to reconsider the idea of creating games for simultaneous release on both PC and Mac platforms. However, we cannot control what others do; we can only ask. So let's concede for the moment that things will continue as they are now -- very few games coming out on both systems at the same time, and Mac getting ports of popular PC games much later than their original release. What's an avid Mac gamer to do?

Windows Emulators for Linux

Written by Tom Wickline
Thursday, 03 December 2009 03:30

If you are not one of the pack that gravitates toward a PC running one of the flavors of Windows, or a Mac enthusiast, you are likely running a version of Linux.

Suppose you want to run software such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, or a Windows based game on your Linux computer. Is there a way to do this? The answer is most certainly yes. There are two possibilities. You could set up a separate partition, run a Dual Boot System and switch back and forth between your Linux and the Windows system. On the other hand, you could get a Windows Emulator program for Linux.

There are quite a few out there. All you need to do is do a Google search for Windows Emulators for Linux. One word of caution, not all of the emulators available on the internet will work with every Linux build. Some may be made exclusively for Red Hat, while others might only work on a Ubuntu system.

One of these is called; CrossOver Linux, and is designed by Codeweavers. This software will allow you to run productivity software, plug-ins, and games on your Linux. It integrates with Gnome, or a KDE environment. CrossOver will work on any x86 based Linux distribution and will allow you to use Windows plug-ins directly from your Linux browser. You just click on the application as you would if you were on a Windows system. It will also mesh perfectly with many browsers, such as Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, or Opera. You can open Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets within your email client.

Written by Tom Wickline
Tuesday, 10 November 2009 02:50

Most people who use Linux for desktop use are well aware of the one of the largest issues facing the platform: Lack of commercial software. Now in most cases this is not an issue, no MS Office - use OpenOffice, no Internet Explorer - use FireFox. However one thing which there is currently no replacement for is gaming. Try as they might there are just not enough Open-Source game developers (or even closed-sourced ones) that bring the level of gaming quality, as of yet, to Linux that Windows enjoys.

Enter the world of Win-on-Lin. The Wine Project, was start in 1993 and has slowly come into maturity over the course of the last sixteen years. Wine is a compatibility layer, or more precisely a reimplementation of the Windows API, that allows Windows applications to run under Linux. While the Wine project does a wonderful job of what it is designed to do (run Windows applications on Linux) how ever it sorely lacks in the means of a GUI front end for easy configuration/calibration.

Which brings me to my topic at hand - Cedega & Codeweavers. What are Cedega and Codeweavers? They two (closed source) programs both based off of the Wine Project to create what it lacks - a user friendly interface. Designed to help you get your Windows games working with ease on Linux. They both have their ups and downs and today I am going to look at each program and see how they compare. I currently have both Cedega and Codeweavers licenses so all the information given is from first hand experience working with both products. I'm going to be judging based on following criteria:

Functionality - How well do they do what they are suppose to do?
GUI Front End - How do the front-ends between the two compare?
Website - Being able to find information is everything, how do the websites compare?
Customer Service/Support - If you are paying for a product you want to know you can get help with it if it doesn't work properly.
Fees & Licensing - How much do they cost and what are you paying for?

Functionality -

Written by Tom Wickline
Wednesday, 02 September 2009 09:50

Latest Release Features Support for Left4Dead, Tales of Monkey Island
"Zombies need to die," CEO proclaims.

SAINT PAUL, Minn. (September 2, 2009) – CodeWeavers, Inc., a leading developer of software products that turn Mac OS X and Linux into Windows-compatible operating systems, today announced the release of CrossOver Games 8.0 for both Mac and Linux, available immediately. CrossOver Games allows Windows games to be played on Mac and Linux PCs without the need for a Windows operating system license.

CrossOver Games 8.0 adds support for Left4Dead and Tales of Monkey Island (Steam version only). Other titles include Perfect World International's games Perfect World, Jade Empire, and Ether Saga, as well as Aeria Games' Dragon Sky, Shaiya (English versions only), and unofficial support for their Last Chaos title on Linux. In addition, numerous fixes and enhancements for Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Spore, Guild Wars, Civilization IV, Bejeweled and unsupported titles such as EVE Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Pharaoh, City of Heroes and Lego Starwars have been added.

winetricks 20090716 released

Written by Tom Wickline
Thursday, 16 July 2009 23:54

Dan Kegel released winetricks 20090716 today, get it while its hot... Dan Kegel sent the following email to the wine-development list. Another fortnight, another winetricks. Three new verbs: two fonts (droid, wenquanyi), and one library (dinput8). (dinput8 is a subset of d3dx9 which is a subset of directx9. The fewer native dlls one installs, the better.) Changes since 20090705:
Read more...

Steady march to CrossOver 8.0 builds for OpenSolaris and FreeBSD

Written by Tom Wickline
Tuesday, 05 May 2009 13:31

From Jeremy White's Blog at CodeWeavers:

We've been making good progress towards CrossOver 8.0. In fact, we are feeling confident enough about our progress that we put out a public release of the first beta. We've done this mostly for our customers that use Quicken 2006. This way, they can upgrade to Quicken 2009 before the support for Quicken 2006 expires.

While we're pleased with the progress on 8.0, we do have a good bit of work to do. Internet Explorer 7 requires some polish, and our efforts to make Office 2007 progress to Gold rating needs a good bit more work as well. Of course, all of our efforts and the efforts of the Wine community as a whole, mean that even this beta build represents a significant progress. I'm really looking forward to releasing a more polished version sometime in the next month or so - I think CrossOver 8 is going to be fantastic! (Okay, I'm admittedly quite biased, but hey, I still think it's going to be a great release ).

Additionally, I'm happy to say that we've leveraged Francois Gouget's hard work, along with a lot of work from the broader community, and have put out unsupported builds for FreeBSD and OpenSolaris. Hopefully this will help spread some CrossOver joy to folks that may have been feeling neglected. After all, it's a bit hypocritical for us Linux guys to fault BSD and Solaris for having low market share. And I feel that the BSD community has responded to my challenge.

PlayOnLinux 3.3 released

Written by Tom Wickline
Sunday, 25 January 2009 10:25

Here's the First version of PlayOnlinux for the year 2009 !

It is a major change in WineVersion's behavior, not about the graphics or the script implementation but on the internal code
This change allows the use of wine packages that have been intended for PlayOnLinux.
This means that we're no longer dependent on the debian repository, which was a source of problems for certain distributions, but on a repository maintained by a member of the team (MulX).

Every new version of wine will automatically be compiled on Sunday night (if there has been a new version) and so the update in the Wine Version menu will happen on Monday morning.

Written by Nick Koch
Saturday, 06 September 2008 07:26

With the buzz of Google Chrome and a new Wine release that targets some of the bugs when running it, another howto has popped up on the net. Check it out.
Read more...

Darwine 0.9.60 released

Written by Tom Wickline
Sunday, 04 May 2008 01:52

From Random tidbits of Information

Instead of having to compile or run a script to set Wine or Darwine up fully (fonts stuff mostly), I've packaged everything into a .pkg that installs the latest version of Darwine, FontForge, FreeType, and symlinks fonts from /Library/Fonts to the proper directory for Darwine to use. Enjoy!

These builds are and will always be Intel only. Wine, and by extension, these builds of Darwine do not emulate anything. It is an API layer. For it to run on PPC, it would need to emulate some x86 stuff. This is what Darwine originally attempted to do in combination with QEMU, however it is no longer necessary with the switch to Intel.

Wine Weekly News: Issue 340

Written by Tom Wickline
Wednesday, 23 January 2008 02:46

This is the 340 issue of the Wine Weekly News publication. Its main goal is to inform the public of weekly wine updates. It also serves to inform you of what's going on around Wine. Wine is an open source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix. Think of it as a Windows compatibility layer. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation consisting of 100% Microsoft-free code, but it can optionally use native system DLLs if they are available. You can find more info at www.winehq.org

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