winetricks 20090607 released

Written by Tom Wickline
Saturday, 06 June 2009 23:40

Dan Kegel released winetricks 20090607 today... Another, er, quarter, another winetricks. Online as always at http://kegel.com/wine/winetricks or http://winezeug.googlecode.com Thanks to Austin English for taking on most of the work keeping winetricks up to date! (And apologies for my own slowness in doing another release.) Changes since 20090116:
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Play Lord of the Rings Online on Mac OSX

Written by Tom Wickline
Friday, 22 May 2009 02:48

I have bitched about the state of mac gaming before. I still stand by that as nothing is different and nothing got better. The development companies (or production companies for that matter) still ignore the platform and the few games are still more expensive than their windows equivalent, save for some exceptions. There is yet hope though.

There are other ways to play your favourite games on the mac without leaving OSX to bootcamp back to windows. I tried parallels. At first, I was thrilled and excited, but then I was as annoyed as bootcamping and more(its slower than windows on bootcamp). It is an impressive piece of software but I still had to load an entire Operating system even if the loading took place on a virtual machine. I then tried Crossover games. For this paragraph i 'll just say that lotsa Orc-slaying is taking place using Crossover.

Crossover is a commercial flavor of wine, the well known open source Windows API implementation, that allows windows programs to run on various operating systems including Linux and Mac OSX. I have used wine in the past to play games but it felt more like work to maintain your gaming environments clean and keep your games in a working order without screwing something up. Crossover is saving you from just that. It is basically wine with a better environment and lets you install your windows games cleanly without affecting your other games and it lets you configure everything correctly without much headaches. It is doing that with the use of bottles(get it? bottles of wine?) to isolate your individual games and everything runs on it own bottle.

PlayOnLinux 3.1 beta 1 released

Written by Nick Koch
Sunday, 31 August 2008 05:40

The first beta of version 3.1 of your favorite software has been released. I want today to test a single new function that is why one new feature was added for the moment. Without further ado, I present to you playonlinux-daemon
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CrossOver Office Mac Version 7.0.0 Review

Written by Tom Wickline
Tuesday, 17 June 2008 23:11

INTRODUCTION:
In our last installment we reviewed CrossOver Games for the Mac. This week we will take a look at the current version of CrossOver Mac. CrossOver Mac is one of the successor products to the CrossOver Office suite.

CrossOver which was once original for Linux, now allows you to run Windows applications such as Microsoft Office, Intuit Quicken and Quickbooks on your Mac.

As stated in part one, CrossOver is based on the Wine project and as such shares some of its technical limitations and abilities. Wine is a compatibility layer for non-windows systems allowing them to run Windows applications.

to a limited degree. Due to the highly complex nature of the software, third party vendors such as CodeWeavers package Wine to create a product for the end user. In part three we will go in to more detail about the internals of Wine and why it imposes limitations on the products built around it but for now, lets take a look at CrossOver 7 for Mac and the applications that it supports.

CodeWeavers has just released CrossOver 7 Mac which now provides support for Office 2007 based applications. As this is new to CrossOver not all 2007 based applications work well at this time, right now only Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook 2007 are known to work and are supported. Prior versions of Office 2003 applications are much better supported, including support for Project 2003 and Visio 2003.

Company of Heroes on Linux with Wine!

Written by drewfs7270@gmail.com
Wednesday, 11 June 2008 15:45

Introduction

”A real-time strategy (RTS) game set in World War II, Company of Heroes brings to life -- in full cinematic detail -- the greatest war mankind has ever known. Gamers will experience the journey of the brave men of Able Company in a deep single-player campaign that begins with the invasion of Normandy through their fight across Europe. Company of Heroes' completely destructable environment means no two battles ever play out in the same way. Advanced squad AI brings soldiers to life as they interact with the environment and execute advanced squad tactics to eliminate the opposition forces.” Source

Company of Heroes is the game that has forced me boot to XP from time to time, but now I don't need to! Thank you Wine developing team!

Photoshop CS3 on Linux with Wine

Written by Tom Wickline
Sunday, 23 March 2008 09:28

About Adobe Photoshop CS3

Industry-standard editing toolset Perfect your images with industry-leading image-editing capabilities, which include enhanced color-correction and cloning and healing tools.

Nondestructive editing

Take advantage of nondestructive editing capabilities, including new Smart Filters, which let you visualize different image effects, and Smart Objects, which let you scale, rotate, and warp raster and vector graphics — all without altering pixel data.

Rich painting and drawing toolset

Create or modify images with a wide assortment of professional, fully customizable paint settings, artistic brushes, and drawing tools.

Wine Weekly News: Issue 338

Written by Tom Wickline
Monday, 07 January 2008 02:05

This is the 338 issue of the Wine Weekly News publication. Its main goal is to provide big bugzilla 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

Written by Tom Wickline
Saturday, 15 December 2007 04:52

If your a Mac OS X Leopard or Tiger user and want to use Wine you can find precompiled binary downloads with FreeType 2.3.5, FontForge py25-20071210, and Liberation Fonts here.

From the site: Random Tidbits of Information

Instead of having to run a script after installing Darwine to set fonts up, I’ve packaged everything into a .pkg that installs the latest version of Darwine to /Applications/Darwine, the latest versions of FontForge and FreeType to their proper places in /usr, and Liberation fonts to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts.

If you’re updating to a newer version of Darwine, you don’t need to reinstall FontForge or FreeType and can deselect those packages.

If you install Liberation fonts, the installer renames your current ~/.wine to ~/.wine-xxxxxx where xxxxxx is a random set of alphanumeric characters. If you want to restore your old ~/.wine dir, you should delete, rename or move ~/.wine somewhere else and then rename ~/.wine-xxxxx to ~/.wine.

Wine 1.3.5 Released

Written by Tom Wickline
Monday, 18 October 2010 05:22

The Wine development release 1.3.5 is now available.

Whats new in this release:

Support for animated cursors.
Printing directly through CUPS instead of lpr.
Installer fixes for Office 2010.
Many MSXML3 improvements.
Improved Shader Model 4 support.
Proper icons in built-in Internet Explorer.
Translation updates.
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.

Written by Tom Wickline
Wednesday, 26 May 2010 01:37

I mentioned earlier this month that I was enjoying the Starcraft 2 beta on Ubuntu 10.04 thanks to Wine software. In my previous posting I had simply stated that SC2 was "playable" under Wine. I have a fairly powerful gaming laptop that sports an nVidia 260m GTX and a 1680x1050 resolution panel. SC2 defaulted itself under Wine to "ultra" settings on my system - after playing one game at these settings (well it was really more like playing a slide-show). I promptly lowered the details and textures to low (while leaving the resolution the same).

With these settings I average around 40 FPS at the main menu and in game. At the high end I see just over 50 FPS while playing and at the low end it bottoms out around 20 FPS in combat. (For those wondering how I obtained these numbers press control+alt+f to put an FPS counter in the upper left hand corner of the screen while in SC2). These numbers come from the latest SC2 patch as of today (05/25/10).

Now for a bit of an ironic story regarding SC2. Late last night I dual booted my system with Windows 7 Ultimate again due to the need for an embedded youtube video to work in an Office 2007 power point presentation (it failed to work under Crossover and youtube plays poorly in VMs, thus native install was my only option left). Back on topic - since I had Windows installed anyways I figured I would copy over my SC2 files (god bless Blizzard and their portable installs) and see how comparable the performance was on the native operating system.

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