WINE users?

ME dugan at passwall.com
Fri Jan 12 18:24:40 PST 2001


On Fri, 12 Jan 2001, Doug Palmer wrote:
> Hi, I want to try using WINE (http://www.winehq.com/) Does anyone on this
> list have any tips before I get started?
> I'll be using RedHat 6.2.

I use debian, and have been playing with wine off and on for a while.

The best suggestion if you must use Wine is to have you check to see if
the applications you want to run under wine are supported, and how well:

http://www.winehq.com/Apps/query.cgi

Some work ok. Some users will report what you can tweak in your wine
config to make it work, or even offer e-mail addresses so yo can contact
them and help test and debug. If you are the first to use the application,
then rate how well it runs, and give feedback to the newsgroup. (Bug
reports, trace logs, and input.)

(Ratings work like this:
0 -- Totally nonfunctional. Crashes on load. 
1 -- Loads without crashing. Good enough for a screenshot. 
2 -- Partial functionality. Good enough for a carefully scripted demo. 
3 -- Sufficient functionality for noncritical work. Occasional crashes
okay, as are weird setup problems, required patches, or missing major
functionality. Alpha quality.
4 -- Substantially correct. Good enough for general use, with possible
caveats.
5 -- Perfect. No flaws under any mode 
)

If you are looking to play games, then you may want to explore the
transgaming patch with more development for DirectX in the 3D games. You
should read their licensing to see if you agree with it before you apply
their patch to the open source wine tree and recompile.

An Aladin license used:
http://www.transgaming.com/code.html
their main site:
http://www.transgaming.com/

They claim they push the DirectX 2d stuff into the opensource wine tree,
but keep the 3d stuff in their patch. When they get enough subscribers,
they will release their patch into the open source tree. (Some 3d stuff is
in the main wine tree I think.)

Read their statement and license to be sure it is right for you.

Generally, their source tree patch is best patched against the incremental
wine tar-ball, not a cvs tree.

The incremental wine releases are still considered alpha. Think of the cvs
copies as being even more bleeding edge alpha.

New tarballs are often made about 1 time each 2 weeks.

For source trees. Files are in format: Wine-YYYYMMDD.tar.gz where YYYY is
the 4 digit year, MM is the double digit month, and DD is the double digit
day.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/ALPHA/wine/development/

If source code, or cvs are too bleeding edge, and you want a .deb or .rpm,
then check out
http://www.winehq.com/download.shtml#RPM

I do not suggest reporting bugs unless you have a new version. They seem
to pay attention to bug reports from the CVS code base users, as they are
the most up-to-date and seem to be best informed. If you have a copy that
is more than 4 months old, they often respond with:

"That is old. Get a new copy, test and come back." or
"Those problems have been fixed, and I hate your for reminding me about
them. :-P "

Most messages are not mean, but may take sme time to poke fun when people 
report problems with old versions.

If you decide to go with a new source tree, compile and install, then you
should seriously think about uninstalling your RPM package of wine
(including config files.) They are forever making changes and
updates. Some make old config files useless, or reference libs no longer
used, or used differently now.


Listing methods for playing wth wine in order of easy to more difficult:

install the copy of Wine from youe RedHat CDs as a package. (Assuming they
have it as a package.)

Download an RPM binary and install it (if you trust the people that made
it for you.)

Download a recent snapshop, compile it and read the docs (not necessarily
in that order. ;-)

Download a recent snapshop, apply he transgaming patch if you agree with
the license, compile it and read the docs (not necessarily in that order.
;-)

Setup a cvs client on your box, download a recent tree into the cvs
download dir, then update with CVS, compile and read docs and source code.

For most applications, do not expect flwless function. SOL.EXE works most
of the time.

-ME





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