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Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Wine 1.1.7 Review First Steps of Direct3D 10 Implementation

I think Wine is one of the most promising and useful applications, especially for those who need to run Windows programs in a Linux environment. A new development release is put up every two weeks or so, and improvements are visible from each version to another.

Wine is the project which makes possible to run games like World of WarCraft, Counter-Strike, Half-Life 2, WarCraft III and so on. And Wine is also the project which makes possible for web developers to test how their web page is viewed under Internet Explorer. Not to mention hundreds of other applications which work very well or well enough with it.

Ever since the first release tagged as 'stable' was put out for the public after 15 years of development, the Wine project continued development and now the latest version is 1.1.7, which brings numerous improvements and additions.

According to the official announcement, one of the highlights for this release is that the first steps were taken to implement the Direct3D technology, which is part of the DirectX API from Microsoft. The open and widespread competitor for Direct3D is OpenGL, the Open Graphics Library.

It's well-known that Wine works awesome with games like WoW, Counter-Strike or Half-Life 2.

A while ago I ran and installed the new Google Chrome web browser through Wine, since a Linux port is not available yet, and the result was very satisfying: with the exception of a little interface slowness, it behaved very well.


For this release, I installed Google Chrome following the tutorial I wrote for 1.1.6. I had to run it as:

wine ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/USERNAME/Local\ Settings/Application\ Data/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe --new-http --in-process-plugins

And replaced USERNAME with my username. Chrome displayed all the web pages I tried, including this blog, Digg.com, YouTube.com (with the Flash plugin too) and the WineHQ homepage, but scrolling a page is extremely slow and choppy until the web page is completely loaded. I never tested Google Chrome on Windows so I can't compare exactly the behaviour.


I also installed Adobe Flash Player using the browser instead of winetricks. Below are some screenshots running Chrome through Wine. As you can see, Flash is enabled:


Wine provides an application database on their homepage, which classifies applications depending on how well they run and perform: platinum, gold, silver. The nice thing is that each application has detailed information on how to set it up in order to work best, in what conditions it was tested and it also includes user comments. Usually, if a game or application is known to work through Wine but you couldn't set it up, have a look at the comments posted and a solution will surely be provided.

As I already mentioned, one of the most popular games which worked perfectly for me in Wine is World of WarCraft:
World of WarCraft

I was glad to see the mIRC scripts editor does not crash the application anymore, but instead I couldn't make it connect to another network but the default QuakeNet, so you will have to use the /server command. Otherwise, mIRC 6.35 works pretty well, and if you really really need it and can't re-write your scripts for a native Linux client you can use it through Wine. Still, I suggest using a native IRC client like XChat, Konversation or Irssi.


I also tried the last version of Winamp, 5.541, and I installed the Lite version. It works very well, although I did not test it for long. It plays music.


It's true, I don't think Linux needs to run a player like Winamp, when we have powerful and full-featured, native and open-source audio players like Amarok, Banshee, Rhythmbox, Songbird or XMMS. But maybe someone still finds a use for it, or it can help those who just switched from Windows and can't get used to another player.




Monday, October 27, 2008

CrossOver 7.1.0 for Mac and Linux released!

Codeweavers released Crossover 7.1.0 for Linux and Mac systems a couple days back, here is the full change logs for each system. While there practically the same I thought I would post both Change logs so their wouldn't be any confusion on what has changed for each platform.

Changelog for CrossOver Linux:
7.1.0 CrossOver Linux - October 22, 2008
  • Outlook fixes:
    • Restored use of the Rules and Alerts dialog
    • Improved connectivity with Exchange servers
    • Fixed installation of several custom versions of Outlook
    • Improved copy and paste behavior
    • Fixed 'reply all' behavior
    • Improved printing
    • Partial support for signed emails
    • Fixed some address autocompleteion in Outlook 2007
    • Fixed ability to create new contacts, appointments & tasks
    • 2003 & 2007 now exit cleanly on the Mac
    • Can now open recurring Calendar Items
  • Application installation changes:
    • Many more versions of Office 2007 (including Enterprise editions) now install properly.
    • Office 2003 Service Pack 3 now installs.
    • Office 2003 one-shot updates now apply.
    • Several more versions of Office 2003 now install.
    • MS Office language packs now install
    • Visio 2003 sp3 now installs.
  • Other fixes:
    • Office 97 now works better.
    • PowerPoint 2003 slide preview improved.
    • Bidirectional text behavior is improved.
    • Access 2002 reporting is improved.
    • Improved Java behavior.
    • Use the native FreeType library on Leopard systems.
    • On Linux, add the ability to generate Debian bottle packages.
    • Fixed a CrossOver installation error specific to Estonian locales.
    • Fixed: Word 2003: Can't open Word doc, Out of Memory
    • Pull-down menus now appear more than once (WordArt)
    • Can now open Project 2007 files with Project 2003 (with the add-on installed)
    • Rotating text boxes now works in the proper direction
Changelog for CrossOver Mac:
7.1.0 CrossOver Mac - October 22, 2008
  • Outlook fixes:
    • Restored use of the Rules and Alerts dialog
    • Improved connectivity with Exchange servers
    • Fixed installation of several custom versions of Outlook
    • Improved copy and paste behavior
    • Fixed 'reply all' behavior
    • Improved printing
    • Partial support for signed emails
    • Fixed some address autocompleteion in Outlook 2007
    • Fixed ability to create new contacts, appointments & tasks
    • 2003 & 2007 now exit cleanly on the Mac
    • Can now open recurring Calendar Items
  • Application installation changes:
    • Many more versions of Office 2007 (including Enterprise editions) now install properly.
    • Office 2003 Service Pack 3 now installs.
    • Office 2003 one-shot updates now apply.
    • Several more versions of Office 2003 now install.
    • MS Office language packs now install
    • Visio 2003 sp3 now installs.
  • Other fixes:
    • Office 97 now works better.
    • PowerPoint 2003 slide preview improved.
    • Bidirectional text behavior is improved.
    • Access 2002 reporting is improved.
    • Improved Java behavior.
    • Use the native FreeType library on Leopard systems.
    • On Linux, add the ability to generate Debian bottle packages.
    • Fixed a CrossOver installation error specific to Estonian locales.
    • Fixed: Word 2003: Can't open Word doc, Out of Memory
    • Pull-down menus now appear more than once (WordArt)
    • Can now open Project 2007 files with Project 2003 (with the add-on installed)
    • Rotating text boxes now works in the proper direction


Putty for Mac
Putty for Mac
$15.00

https://winereviews.onfastspring.com/putty-for-mac



Monday, October 20, 2008

Running Google Chrome Under Wine 1.1.6 in Debian

Google Chrome is an open-source web browser from Google, currently available only for the Windows platform. It aims to have a minimal and easy to use interface. Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine, which was developed from KHTML, and it is used in various browsers like Konqueror on KDE4 or Safari (on Mac OS X).


First of all, install Wine 1.1.6. I created two guides for installing the last Wine release, here (from the WineHQ APT repository) and here (compiling from source). Don't worry if the tutorials are for 1.1.5 and 1.1.4 respectively, they will work for a later Wine version too.

I only tried it with Wine setup as Windows XP in winecfg.

Also, install the cabextract package as root:

apt-get install cabextract

Get the last version of winetricks using this command:

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

Make the winetricks script executable, then install the packages below by issuing the following commands:

chmod 755 winetricks
./winetricks msxml3 corefonts flash winxp riched20 riched30

Next, download Google Chrome from here. You can use this command in your terminal:

wget http://dl.google.com/chrome/install/149.30/chrome_installer.exe

To run it, use:

wine chrome_installer.exe

Chrome should start the first time, and you will be able to see it as in the screenshots below:


Close it, then run it using the following command:

wine ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/YOUR_USERNAME/Local\ Settings/Application\ Data/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe

Make sure to pay attention to any case-sensitive characters if that's the case, and also replace YOUR_USERNAME.


Edit: I saw suggestions to run chrome.exe with the arguments --new-http and --in-process-plugins, although it seemed to work fine for me without the need of those.

For a complete list of Chrome command-line arguments, go here. They are listed from the Google Chrome source file src/chrome/common/chrome_switches.cc and are briefly explained.

How it behaves
It looks very, very good in my opinion, but the interface is extremely slow. I guess until the Linux port will be ready, Google Chrome through Wine is useful only to have a preview of it, or eventually test how it displays web pages.


My impression was the one which Firefox gave me when I first used it, back at version 1.0 (1.0.4 if I recall correctly): simple interface, clean, with only the basic options which one needs, but powerful in the same time.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Wine 1.0.1 Released

The Wine maintenance release 1.0.1 is now available. This is a maintenance release from the 1.0 stable branch. It contains only translation updates and small 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

Bugs fixed in 1.0.1:

5031 First Encounter Assault Recon (FEAR) SP Demo Crashes on Start
6650 MSTSC (Remote Desktop) crashes
9775 Syberia 2, Max Payne 1 & 2 - Screenshots and thumbnails broken
9777 Silencer doesn't fully connect to lobby server.
10132 bad cyrillic font rendering
10229 Serious Sam TSE 1.07 - network connection fails
11198 C & C Tiberian Sun reporsts comctl32.dll is an older version on winver higher then 98
11494 Speed Commander 12 does not install
11640 Unable to use multiplayer in Sins of a Solar Empire: unknown address family
11766 Heap corruption in crypt32 during Sandra benchmark?
11936 window size is too small in the "vc2008 redist installer" and "Firefox 3" [dogfood]
11950 TheBat! 3.99.1 show white squares not icons under wine after 0.9.56
12005 Regression in pressure sensitivity with wizardpen tablet driver and Photoshop 7
12302 Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar unplayable due to high lag
12305 Firefox 3 beta 4 font problem: colon displayed as 0038 unicode glyph-missing glyph [dogfood]
12740 Wine tries to execute non-executable data (regression against 0.9.59)
12879 Cluster size not supported for large NFS mounts?
13227 100% CPU Usage with notepad - with dtrace output
13599 Can't install Autocad 2005
13601 can't compile wine with Xcode 3.1 or iPhone SDK
13713 Hema Album Software Advanced won't start, it crashes and has to be killed.
13748 Last Chaos aborts after clicking 'start' in 0.9.57 and later
13765 ZENcast 2.01.01 Installer Fails to Start
13882 psiops crashes while starting (XStreamlok)
14006 at least one locale missing: eo - (breaks .NET internationalization)
14019 systray icon not displayed in dual screen
14040 Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D beta inner installer aborts when reading registry
14053 Winamp 5.53 fails to start due to a loader crash
14188 utorrent - it disconnects fast leaching peers with Error 10022
14356 alt.binz does not run anymore