Codeweavers CrossOver 15.1.0 for Linux and Mac OSX has been released

I am delighted to announce that CodeWeavers has just released CrossOver 15.1.0 for both Mac OSX and Linux.  CrossOver 15.1.0 has important bug fixes for both Mac and Linux users.

Mac customers with active support entitlements will be upgraded to CrossOver 15.1.0 the next time they launch CrossOver Mac.  Linux users can download the latest version from https://www.codeweavers.com/.

Change Log For CrossOver Mac and Linux :

 15.1.0 CrossOver - March 31, 2016

• Mac OS X:
  • Improved some confusing behavior in CrossOver's Software Installer.
  • Fixed a bug where CrossOver's Software Installer would hang while looking for compatible bottles.
  • Improved our resilience to custom Python installations. We now refrain from loading custom Python module installed in system directories, which prevents crashes when incompatible modules are present.
  • Improved security for Sparkle updates.
• General Improvements
  • Fixed a problem initializing some fonts with dwrite, which could cause Steam to fail.
  • Fixed a bug in setting CrossOver's anti-virus scanner from a configuration file.
• Application Support:
  • Fixed a bug which caused Heroes of the Storm to freeze.
  • Fixed a bug which prevented login to World of Warcraft.
  • Fixed some graphical problems in Alekhine's Gun on Intel graphics hardware.
  • Fixed a bug which caused Microsoft Excel to hang when accepting non-English input via an Input Method Editor.

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Vineyard Wine Configuration Application for Linux has been released

Wine version handling, better 64-bit support and bug-fixes!

Vineyard for Ubuntu and Linux has seen some development during the past few weeks and has received bug-fixes and new features! Some of the more advanced functionality – that was previously only supported by editing the wrapper.cfg file – is now easily accessible!

Here’s a list of some the most visible changes:

• Creating a prefix has been overhauled:
  • You can now choose between creating a 64-bit or 32-bit prefix.
  • A specific version of Wine can be selected to be used for the prefix.
  • Installed versions of Wine are auto-detected (looks through $PATH, /opt and PlayOnLinux folders).
  • Progress indication works (finally).
• 64-bit support is now auto-detected from the Wine version.
• The main tab now shows which Wine binaries/version and arch (64/32-bit) is used.
• The “Run executable” tool works again for .exe files in modern distros.
• Added newer versions of MS Visual C++ to install list.
• Launching a terminal in a prefix now works correctly again.
• The menu icon has been changed to the modern gtk menu icon.

And since a picture is worth a thousand words:

New builds in the PPA

I’ve overhauled the packaging of Vineyard, and we now have builds back up for all LTS (long term support) Ubuntu releases going back to 12.04 (Precise) as well as for 15.10 (Wily) and 16.04 (Xenial). 16.04 deprecated the python-support package in favor of dh-python (in line with Debian), so Vineyard can now be built using both.

The name of the vineyard-testing PPA has also been changed to “PPA for Vineyard” as it really is the current stable PPA; the link is the same, so there’s no need to change your APT configuration.

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Wine Staging 1.9.6 has been released with Vulkan support

We are happy to announce the release of Wine Staging 1.9.6. This version adds support for Vulkan and fixes for various other bugs.

This release adds a first version of a Vulkan wrapper to make the Vulkan API accessible to applications running in Wine. The work was started by Erich E. Hoover and later finished by other Wine Staging maintainers. The code translates the Windows specific surface extensions to the corresponding X11 / XCB extensions and passes the remaining functions on the host Vulkan library. Although this seems to be an easy task on first sight, there are various pitfalls that make this wrapper more complicated than you might think. While the Vulkan API is almost binary compatible in 64 bit (except the differences in the calling convention), properly translating Vulkan calls on 32 bit turned out to be a bit difficult.

The biggest problem on 32-bit is caused by alignment differences when using 64 bit integers in structures. On Windows a 64 bit integer is aligned on a 8 byte memory address, while compilers on most other systems only align them on a 4 byte boundary. Passing such a structure without conversion to the host library would cause problems and eventually lead to a crash. As the Vulkan API contains more than 120 structures, we had to spent a lot of time to implement structure and array conversions, which make the 32-bit version slightly slower than the 64-bit version. The final implementation adds about 10.000 lines of code to the Wine Staging code base.

Although this is the first beta version, we are happy to say that this version already passes all (~80300) Khronos Vulkan conformance tests (32 + 64 bit) when using a compliant driver on the host system. We also tested the windows version of the game "The Talos Principle" and various samples from the LunarG SDK and so far, we aren't aware of any bugs. If you still encounter any issues, feel free to open a bug report. Here is a screenshot showing The Talos Principle running in Wine Staging using the Vulkan option:
 

Before talking about the smaller additions, there is another important announcement regarding this release. We are aware that a big group of people uses Wine Staging because of the CSMT (command-stream multi-threading) patch-set, and we are glad to see that there is again (slow, but steady) progress to include this feature in the development version of Wine. The whole process also has a downside though. Various design goals have been changed during the up-streaming process and we are currently not aware of any fully functional patch-set, which provides all CSMT features. So far the multi-threading part, which contains the actual performance improvement, is not upstream yet and the remaining patches are getting more and more incompatible. Working around all those problem (which we did in the last releases) is not possible in the long term, and we therefore decided to disable CSMT support in this release. If you depend on this feature, you should not update to Wine Staging 1.9.6. The feature might be available in future versions again, so don't forget to check the release notes.

As mentioned at the beginning, we also added several smaller fixes. There are several patches to improve the compatibility with Python 3.5 as well as patches to improve Wines gdiplus.dll implementation. Here is the usual list of all changes, without those which already have been accepted upstream:

• Do not update iosb.Status after FSCTL_PIPE_LISTEN call (Python 3.5)
• Implement GdipCreateMetafileFromStream (Captvty v3, Wine Bug #40325)
• Implement support for WICPixelFormat32bppGrayFloat (SlovoEB 2.1, Wine Bug #36517)
• Fake success in dwmapi.DwmSetWindowAttribute function (Epic Games Launcher)
• Implement support for Vulkan (Wine Bug #40164)
• Fix pointer to custom dialog control data (Wine Bug #40303)
• Populate CA certificate store in registry (Python 3.5)
• Fix handling of GetOverlappedResult when status remains STATUS_PENDING (Python 3.5)
• Implement semi-stub for ws2_32 DisconnectEx (Python 3.5)
• Implement wuauserv dummy service (Python 3.5 installer)
• Fix handling of INTERNET_INVALID_PORT_NUMBER in HttpOpenRequestW (Wine Bug #40169)
• Implement windowscodecs.WICCreateBitmapFromSection(Ex) (Paprika Recipe Manager, Wine Bug #40273)
• Implement a better stub for IPicture::SaveAsFile (JawsEditor, Wine Bug #8532)
• Implement query operation in reg.exe (Wine Bug #24017)

Run Microsoft Windows Applications and Games on Mac, Linux or ChromeOS save up to 20% off  CodeWeavers CrossOver+ today.

CodeWeavers CrossOver can now run Steam on Android Remix

James Ramey the President of CodeWeavers has posted a short video showing CrossOver running Steam on Android Remix at this years GDC 2016 ( Game Developers Conference ) that was recently held in San Francisco USA.

James also posted on his Facebook account, "Our company, CodeWeavers, with the help of Jide Technology was able to demonstrate Steam running on Android. Gamers will be able to play their PC based games on Android devices. It's cutting edge if nothing else."

Back on October 9th 2015 I posted about CrossOver and Wine coming to Android maybe with this news a preview release is soon approaching.

About CodeWeavers
Founded in 1996 as a general software consultancy, CodeWeavers focuses on the development of Wine – the core technology found in all of its CrossOver products. The company’s goal is to bring expanded market opportunities for Windows software developers by making it easier, faster and more painless to port Windows software to Linux. CodeWeavers is recognized as a leader in open-source Windows porting technology, and maintains development offices in Minnesota, the United Kingdom and elsewhere around the world. The company is privately held.

Run Microsoft Windows Applications and Games on Mac, Linux or ChromeOS save up to 20% off  CodeWeavers CrossOver+ today.