DirectX 10 coming to Linux through WINE and CrossOver

Most desktop Linux users have at least heard of the free application Wine or its retail cousins CrossOver Linux and CrossOver Mac.

If you haven't heard of these applications, you may want to give them a try. They allow users to run Windows programs in other operating systems (namely Linux, Mac OS and Solaris) without any virtual machines or other resource-intensive processes, as long as you have an x86-compatible CPU in your PC -- and let's face it, nowadays, who doesn't?

In fact, with WINE there's no need for Windows at all. WINE< creates an environment that responds to Windows API calls, so apps 'think' they are running in Windows, when in fact there's no Windows there at all.

The difference between the two applications is that CrossOver uses a proprietary, more up-to-date version of Wine along with some handy extensions. The two also differ as far as support; CrossOver is commercially supported by CodeWeavers while Wine relies on the community for support.

Last week Codeweavers' Jeremy White posted an update on the CodeWeavers website outlining what has been happening over the last eight months and giving a preview of what is to come this year for CrossOver and Wine.

As far as the last eight months, most of the development work has gone towards what White calls "under the hood" improvements and better support for the newer releases of Microsoft Office. Many of these changes are now present in the development version of Wine. Quite a few DirectX 9 games are well supported along with many other common applications such as Photoshop and QuickBooks.

What is more interesting, though, are the few details White gives about what this year has in store. It seems that this year will be focused more on the core functionality and user experience. Developers will begin working on adding DirectX 10 compatibility layers while improving support for Outlook, Quicken, Photoshop, QuickBooks, and many other applications. On top of that, CrossOver will get a user-interface makeover.

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Google Summer of Code 2009 and Wine

It's time for another round of Google's Summer of Code (SoC). The SoC is an effort that first started in 2005 as an effort to get students involved in open source code development. Google provides a stipend to the student and to the mentoring organization that helps the student.

Kai Blin this week sent the application for this year's Summer of Code. Below is the email Kai sent to the wine-devel mailing list.

Hi folks,

I've just sent our application for this year's Summer of Code.
Could everyone please have another look at the proposed projects at
http://wiki.winehq.org/SummerOfCode to see if all the proposals are still current. Feel free to discuss new project ideas on the mailing list as well.

Cheers,
Kai

The deadline for mentoring organizations to submit is March 18, 2009 and Google will begin taking student applications on March 23, 2009 with the deadline for student applications on April 3rd. On April 20th, Google will formally announced the accepted student applications and then after a several week learning period students will begin coding their projects on May 23rd. The SoC coding then continues on until August 17th.

If you have an idea, please post it on Wine Developers mailing list so we can help you with your idea and find out if it's realistic or not. Showing initiative and willing to discuss your idea greatly improves your chances of getting accepted.

As long as you work hard and interact with the community and your mentor in a positive and constructive way you don't have to worry about not meeting all your goals.

For updates and news about Google's Summer of Code 2009 (SoC) and Wine keep a eye on the Wine (SoC) wiki page. If your interested in participating in this years (SoC) it might be a good idea to subscribe to the Wine Developers mailing list now and start the discussion.

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CodeWeavers Outlook for 2009

Tom Wickline pointed out that it has been 8 months since I had put out a road map. So I thought I'd take some time to review what we've accomplished in these past 8 months, and what we hope to accomplish through the rest of the year.


This has been an interesting 8 months. We've deliberately been working on some very 'unsexy' initiatives. For example, we've been focusing a lot of energy on some 'under the hood' improvements to Wine. Things like .NET support, work on a DIB Engine, Gdiplus, and a lot of Direct X work. We've also spent a lot of energy focusing on issues with Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007, in an effort to bring those applications fully up to 'Gold' level.

We have had some challenges; for example, we discovered, after working our heart out on a DIB Engine, that in fact, the DIB engine wasn't the magic bullet we were hoping for. (Instead, we've recently focused more energy on Gdiplus, and we're pleased with the performance boost that is giving things like Quicken).

One great result is that we're continuing to see a lot of broad success stories; an awful lot of applications just work better now than they ever have with Wine in the past.
We've just shipped a lot of those 'under the hood' improvements for games out in CrossOver Games 7.2. We're really pushing Direct X 9 support pretty far along, and getting ready to move on Direct X 10.

In the next few months, we'll be shipping CrossOver Linux 8.0, and CrossOver Mac 8.0. That revision of our flagship product will bring support for IE7, modern QuickBooks versions, Quicken 2009 (at a nice speed), Photoshop CS3, and many many other improvements, particularly around Microsoft Office and specifically Outlook.

After we ship version 8, and make sure we keep Games fresh as well, we're going to turn our focus to our next major revision. In addition to our normal work of broadening and deepening our application support in Wine, we're going to try to dramatically improve the CrossOver GUI itself. First, the Linux version will get a fresh new look. But both versions are going to get an interface that we hope will bring the power of the Compatibility Center right into the installation view. The key idea is to make it easier to distill the gathered wisdom on unsupported applications and make it far easier to use. I hope we'll have that available before the end of the year.

New PlayOnLinux Helper Plugin adds winetricks integration

NSLW posted on the PlayOnLinux forums about the new helper plugin he wrote. I have posted this news here in the hopes that PlayOnLinux users will download and help test the plugin. The feature list is impressive for a first release, with some testing and input im sure it will only improve over time...

I wrote a application which makes PlayOnLinux more ergonomically usable. The program can be freely redistributed and executed. It is written in GTK and it meets the needs of the PlayOnLinux community.

http://www.playonlinux.com/en/topic-1801-winetricks_integration.html
http://www.playonlinux.com/en/topic-2058-further_to_suggestions_re_already_installed_games.html

I know, it may still contain bugs and therefore it only shows basic information if executed from the terminal which may help me to further debug it. I'm currently using PlayOnLinux 3.4 from the generic package on Fedora 10 and the application works for me. The application starts in Ubuntu 8.04 but I didn't tested it yet.

To install PlayOnLinux Helper copy the "POL Helper" directory to your "/home/YourUsernameHere/.PlayOnLinux/plugins/" directory and then you can easily run it from the PlayOnLinux menu. (see download link below)

Features list:

1) Create or Edit PlayOnLinux scripts

• You can add already installed applications.
• You can easily define the Command-line.
• You can correct paths in PlayOnLinux script if you were installing not in the default directory.

2) Change icons of PlayOnLinux scripts

• You can add and change the icon for unsupported applications.
• You don't have to worry about the size of the icon as the script will automatically re-size it to right size.
• You chose from the directory where wine throws all icons.
• You've got icon preview during choosing.
• Current supported formats are .png .xpm .ico

3) Rename PlayOnLinux scripts

• You can easily rename PlayOnLinux scripts without searching through POL directories.
• You don't have to worry about assigned icon as it will be carried along.

4) Create shortcuts on your desktop and in the menu for PlayOnLinux script

• You can easily add shortcuts for PlayOnLinux scripts.
• You don't have to worry about icons, because if there was any, it will be automatically assigned to that shortcut.

5) Easily use WineTricks with PlayOnLinux prefixes

• You can (and have to if you want to use this feature) easily download WineTricks from "http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks"
• You can easily use WineTricks (created and maintained by Dan Kegel) on all PlayOnLinux prefixes.
• You don't have to worry about WineTricks and the version of Wine assigned to the prefix (it is vital thing for e.g. gecko package)

The file is on the file share server and it's name is "POL Helper.zip" you can download it from here.

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