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Friday, September 24, 2010

Purchase Bordeaux and help support Wineconf 2010 and FreeBSD

Last month we ran a 50% off sale on Bordeaux and this month we would like to do something a little different and raise some money for a good cause. With your help we would like to help support three very important projects.
  • The first project is the Wine Development Fund. Proceeds from the WDF go toward supporting the annual Wine Conference. This year the Wine Conference will be held in Paris, France.
  • The second project is freebsdnews.net. freebsdnews is a site about the current happenings in the FreeBSD community.
  • The third project is the FreeBSD Foundation. The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD Project.
We will donate 50% of all sales over the next month to each of the three projects listed above. Below is how we plan to distribute the funds to each project :

For each Linux and OpenSolaris sale we will donate 50% of sales to the WDF to help fund this years Wine Conference.

For each Mac, FreeBSD and PC-BSD sale we will donate 50% of sales to freebsdnews and then in return Gerard from freebsdnews will donate 10% of the funds he receives to the FreeBSD Foundation.

The remaining 50% covers our expenses and also will be used to hire a new developer to improve our UI for Bordeaux 3.0 (see below).

Here is a screenshot of a mockup of the upcoming Bordeaux 3.0 UI. From the toolbar you can select to see installed, available and unsupported apps. Under Edit there will be preferences with a link to our Cellar Manager. Also after you install an application you will be able to launch it from the Bordeaux UI and uninstall the application with a single mouse click. In the Cellar Manager we plan to add a "New" button, just click new and then create a new cellar. After the new cellar has been created you can then configure it and install applications or games into the newly made cellar.


The 50% donation will begin on Monday August 23st 2010 and run until Sunday October 3rd 2010.

Update 08/25/10

We would like to thank the folks at http://www.ixsystems.com/ for their support of FreeBSD / PC-BSD and for their recent purchase.

Update 09/22/10

We are happy to announce that we have now raised over $500.00 for WineConf 2010 and FreeBSD. :) Any organization, web site, or person who makes a purchase of $100.00 or more will in return be given a link back to your web site, as well as a huge "Thank You"
If for some reason you dont need Bordeaux at this time you can still make a donation via our Donations page.

At this time Bordeaux only cost $20.00 for Linux and *BSD and $25.00 for Mac and OpenSolaris. So with a purchase you will be helping four very important projects including the Bordeaux Project. If you dont currently need to run Windows Applications or Games on your system but you would still like to make a donation you can use our PayPal donation page to donate. All donations made through our donation page will be equally shared between each project.

-----
The Bordeaux Team


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Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Direct3D 10 and 11 Is Now Natively Implemented On Linux

Written by Michael Larabel

Its a pity Luca Barbieri or any Mesa / Gallium3D developers are not at Oktoberfest as they are deserving of more than a few Maß of Augustiner. In fact, today a new Gallium3D state tracker was pushed into Mesa and it's perhaps the most interesting state tracker for this open-source graphics driver architecture yet. Its a state tracker that exposes Microsoft's DirectX 10/11 API on Linux! And it's already working and can be hooked into Wine!

Luca Barbieri made a rather significant commit today that adds a state tracker dubbed "d3d1x", which implements the Direct3D 10/11 COM API in Gallium3D. Luca says this is just the initial version, but its already working and can run a few DirectX 10/11 texturing demos on Linux at the moment. This is not a matter of simply translating the Direct3D calls and converting them to OpenGL like how Wine currently handles it, but is natively implemented within Gallium3D and TGSI to speak directly to the underlying graphics driver and hardware. Thanks to Gallium3Ds architecture, this Direct3D support essentially becomes "free" to all Linux drivers with little to no work required.

As said in the commit, "The primary goal is to realize Galliums promise of multiple API support, and provide an API that can be easily implemented with just a very thin wrapper over Gallium, instead of the enormous amount of complex code needed for OpenGL. The secondary goal is to run Windows Direct3D 10/11 games on Linux using Wine."

In regards to Wine taking advantage of this state tracker, no DLLs have been published yet for Wine to hook into this state tracker, but Luca says that should be quite easy to accomplish.

If things could not get any better, "Fglrx and nvidia drivers can also be supported by writing a Gallium driver that talks to them using OpenGL, which is a relatively easy task. Thanks to the great design of Direct3D 10/11 and closeness to Gallium, this approach should not result in detectable overhead, and is the most maintainable way to do it, providing a path to switch to the open Gallium drivers once they are on par with the proprietary ones."

This is incredible news especially as Wine only has limited DirectX 10.0 support and lacks no form of DirectX 11.0 at the moment.

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Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Bordeaux 2010 year end roadmap

I thought this would once again be a good time for us to share our next six months outlook for Bordeaux. Maybe I should start with whats taken place over the past few months then go over our future goals.

Over the past six months it has been extremely exciting times around here once again, we shipped Bordeaux for MAC users and now MAC users can run Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer 7 and many other Windows applications on their beloved MAC Computers. So, now its easy and inexpensive for MAC users to run Microsoft Windows Applications and Games without having to run bootcamp and a full version of Windows.

We also refreshed Bordeaux for BSD and Linux five times this year, and added support for Mozilla FireFox, Apple Safari, Google SketchUp, VLC Multimedia player and updated to the latest IrfanView release. Bundled Wine 1.2.0, added support for Pulse Audio, updated and cleaned up our custom winetricks script and we also fixed a number of bugs and tweaked the install scripts for cleaner installs.

We are currently running a donations promotion, where we will give fifty percent of all sales back to the Wine and FreeBSD community's. For more information of the fifty perfect give back promotion please take a look here.

In the next few months, we plan to ship Bordeaux 3.0.0 and this is where 99% of our work will be focused. In the past Bordeaux was a run of the mill "Wine front end" and while their is nothing wrong with being just a front end to Wine this approach causes massive head aches. Wine is released every two weeks and over just a couple months their are numerous versions that need to be supported. Some people stick with the old stable Wine 1.0.1 version that came with their distribution while others install the latest version just after each release. And if you have used Wine for more then a month you know that what worked in one release isnt guaranteed to work in the next release.

So it came to the point to where we needed to also Bundle Wine with Bordeaux. And as of our 2.0.0 release we now bundle our own Wine build with each release. This allows us to focus on one version and test all of our supported applications against it. And now we don't have to worry about the next Wine release breaking a application or feature. This move has also opened up the availability for us to add in hacks and tweaks so certain applications and games run, or in some circumstances run allot better then with just plain stock Wine.

We have also included a number of hacks and fixes in our Wine build, some of the hacks include the unsupported DIB Engine. We know its not perfect but it allows our customers to use it if needed. We have also built in Pulse Audio support for the Linux release, added a memory hack to the BSD build and many other small hacks that were not possible before. In the near future we will be able to support IE 8, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office 2010, and much much more.

Now that the Wine bundle is complete and all of our current supported applications run we plan to re-write the front end and make it extremely simple to install any application or game through the new UI. The new Bordeaux User Interface is next on our todo list and our plans are to ship Bordeaux 3.0.0 by early 2011. We will also be adding some new features to our Cellar manager, these changes will make it possible to add a new cellar and configure a cellar more easily, the new Cellar manager changes will be released in a upcoming 2.2.0 release. As soon as the main UI is complete we will ship Bordeaux 3.0.0 for Linux, FreeBSD, PC-BSD and MAC.

Here is a screen shot of a mockup Bordeaux 3.0.0 UI



After the new front end is complete we also plan to have our own application and game database and then tie it into the UI so you can instantly see what other peoples success are with any given application.

Here is a recent screen shot of Pulse Audio working in Bordeaux on Linux.



Bordeaux 2.0.8 on Mac OSX 10.6



Bordeaux 2.0.8 on Free and PC-BSD


If Bordeaux is something your interested in we would ask that you purchase the current 2.0.8 release to help fund future releases. All of the above changes take one of two things time or money. And with your support we can invest in more hacking hours and have Bordeaux 3.0.0 ready for release in just a couple short months.

Keep in mind if you make the purchase now you get six months of upgrades, so you will also get version 3.0.0 and any service releases.




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Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Crossover Bordeaux Cedega VS Vanilla Wine

A question I have fielded more then a couple times in the Wine section of the Ubuntu Forums is

What is the difference between commercial Wine products and vanilla Wine?

There are three main commercial Wine products: Bordeaux, Cedega, and Crossover. There are a few distinct differences between the commercial Wine products and the FOSS Wine.

Support:
One of the largest benefits to using a paid for Wine product is that not only are you paying for software, you are also paying for support of said software. What this means is that if an application that is suppose to function, doesn't work properly - You will have a real live person to help you debug the issue. While support for Cedega is somewhat lacking, Bordeaux and Crossover have fantastic support staff.

GUI/Automated Installer:
All three of the commercial Wine applications provide a GUI/automated installer for installing applications. This makes it much easier for new users (and faster for experienced users) to configure applications properly under Wine. Time is money as they say.

Read the Full Article Here.




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