WWN Issue 211

This is the 211th issue of the Wine Weekly News publication. Its main goal is to slouch. It also serves to inform you of what's going on around Wine. Wine is an open source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix. Think of it as a Windows compatibility layer. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation consisting of 100% Microsoft-free code, but it can optionally use native system DLLs if they are available. You can find more info at www.winehq.org

This week, 170 posts consumed 543 K. There were 58 different contributors. 30 (51%) posted more than once. 24 (41%) posted last week too.

The top 5 posters of the week were:

26 posts in 80K by Dimitrie O. Paun
11 posts in 27K by Mike Hearn
9 posts in 20K by Alexandre Julliard
8 posts in 19K by Fabian Cenedese
7 posts in 14K by Ivan Leo Murray-Smith

News: WineHQ Updates, WineX 3.3	02/14/2004	Archive
News WineHQ saw quite a few site updates this week. A history of Wine has been added. For the most part it's the same as what appeared in WWN #183 . The status pages were updated, including two new pages for porting status and Winecfg options . The introduction page now has a short index of resources that were previously buried a few links deep. Lastly, the Who's Who page has been completely rewritten and includes new bios of Wine developers. All of those items are on the To Do list. It was updated to reflect the changes. I guess now is as good of a time as any to start keeping track of how progress is going on the To Do items: Green (completed): 11 Yellow (in progress): 31 Red (unstarted): 20 Some newsworthy items came out of TransGaming this week. The biggest story is the release of WineX 3.3: The majority of the technical improvements in WineX 3.3 have been driven by the implementation of support of Steam. Support for its online games has resulted in improved socket and pipe support as well as a major enhancement to font support. In addition to Steam, this release contains copy protection enhancements and support for Dark Age Of Camelot as well some success in making a number of other titles functional with workarounds, although not yet to a point where we can say that they are supported. You will find some of these titles listed in the Known Problems section below. Steam is Valve's peer to peer network designed to keep games such as CounterStrike and Half-Life up-to-date with the latest versions. It also has an instant messaging client that works while you're playing a game. Their release notes have a lot of technical detail about new additions. On a side note, Point2Play was updated to release 1.2.1 and now supports joystick and font configuration. TransGaming's February Development Status and Voting Report outlines a lot of work in many diverse areas. In fact, there's so many things they're working on I'd have to copy the whole report to do it justice. So rather than do that, I'll let you follow the link and instead I'll just give the results of the top-ranked technology poll items: Improved ALSA Support DirectX 9 Non Graphical Performance Increase Improve 3D performance Support Older Games I should also note that an article by InfoWorld, "IBM to launch MS Office for Linux" , caused a bit of a stir. No one really knew what to make of it but Wine is the first thing that comes to mind when you read their objectives. Late in the week another article came out refuting the original claims. Whether or not something is going on behind closed doors remains to be seen, but you can bet that the technical manager that leaked the original story got his ass handed to him on a platter.

News: WineHQ Updates, WineX 3.3

02/14/2004

Archive

News

WineHQ saw quite a few site updates this week. A history of Wine has been added. For the most part it's the same as what appeared in WWN #183 . The status pages were updated, including two new pages for porting status and Winecfg options . The introduction page now has a short index of resources that were previously buried a few links deep. Lastly, the Who's Who page has been completely rewritten and includes new bios of Wine developers.

All of those items are on the To Do list. It was updated to reflect the changes. I guess now is as good of a time as any to start keeping track of how progress is going on the To Do items:

Green (completed): 11
Yellow (in progress): 31
Red (unstarted): 20

Some newsworthy items came out of TransGaming this week. The biggest story is the release of WineX 3.3:

The majority of the technical improvements in WineX 3.3 have been driven by the implementation of support of Steam. Support for its online games has resulted in improved socket and pipe support as well as a major enhancement to font support. In addition to Steam, this release contains copy protection enhancements and support for Dark Age Of Camelot as well some success in making a number of other titles functional with workarounds, although not yet to a point where we can say that they are supported. You will find some of these titles listed in the Known Problems section below.

Steam is Valve's peer to peer network designed to keep games such as CounterStrike and Half-Life up-to-date with the latest versions. It also has an instant messaging client that works while you're playing a game. Their release notes have a lot of technical detail about new additions. On a side note, Point2Play was updated to release 1.2.1 and now supports joystick and font configuration.

TransGaming's February Development Status and Voting Report outlines a lot of work in many diverse areas. In fact, there's so many things they're working on I'd have to copy the whole report to do it justice. So rather than do that, I'll let you follow the link and instead I'll just give the results of the top-ranked technology poll items:

Improved ALSA Support
DirectX 9
Non Graphical Performance Increase
Improve 3D performance
Support Older Games

I should also note that an article by InfoWorld, "IBM to launch MS Office for Linux" , caused a bit of a stir. No one really knew what to make of it but Wine is the first thing that comes to mind when you read their objectives. Late in the week another article came out refuting the original claims. Whether or not something is going on behind closed doors remains to be seen, but you can bet that the technical manager that leaked the original story got his ass handed to him on a platter.

Theming Update 02/16/2004 Archive

Theming Update	02/16/2004	Archive
Configuration Kevin Koltzau is making progress on adding theming to Wine. In a patch on Sunday he remarked, With this some apps may start looking partly themed (e.g. the toolbar buttons in newer versions of mIRC are themed), and we can start adding theming code to widgets Mike Hearn asked, Presumably this is only if you have a native luna theme lying around somewhere, right? Do you know what files we need? Kevin answered: Luna would work yes, but that's not the only theme out there Many skinning sites have sections for msstyle themes, you could check out http://www.skinbase.org/section.php?sections=msstyles for example. Many themes are shipped with a ton of files, right now only the *.msstyles files are useful I've done the majority of my testing with the Luna theme, so bug reports on other themes would be appreciated I'm working on a winelib app that will let you properly install themes, but for now you can set the following reg keys (replacing the filename to your selected theme) `[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ThemeManager] "ThemeActive"="1" "LoadedBefore"="1" "DllName"=str(2):"%SystemRoot%\\resources\\Themes\\Luna\\Luna.msstyles" ColorName"="NormalColor" "SizeName"="NormalSize"` Later he posted a sample app to query, install, and uninstall a theme. Alexandre asked that he merge it into Winecfg rather than leave it as a standalone program.

Configuration

Kevin Koltzau is making progress on adding theming to Wine. In a patch on Sunday he remarked, With this some apps may start looking partly themed (e.g. the toolbar buttons in newer versions of mIRC are themed), and we can start adding theming code to widgets

Mike Hearn asked, Presumably this is only if you have a native luna theme lying around somewhere, right? Do you know what files we need?

Kevin answered:

Luna would work yes, but that's not the only theme out there Many skinning sites have sections for msstyle themes, you could check out

http://www.skinbase.org/section.php?sections=msstyles

for example. Many themes are shipped with a ton of files, right now only the *.msstyles files are useful I've done the majority of my testing with the Luna theme, so bug reports on other themes would be appreciated

I'm working on a winelib app that will let you properly install themes, but for now you can set the following reg keys (replacing the filename to your selected theme)


[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ThemeManager]

"ThemeActive"="1"

"LoadedBefore"="1"

"DllName"=str(2):"%SystemRoot%\\resources\\Themes\\Luna\\Luna.msstyles"

ColorName"="NormalColor"

"SizeName"="NormalSize"

Later he posted a sample app to query, install, and uninstall a theme. Alexandre asked that he merge it into Winecfg rather than leave it as a standalone program.

Embedding Mozilla's ActiveX Control 02/14/2004 Archive

Embedding Mozilla's ActiveX Control	02/14/2004	Archive
Integration A few weeks ago we mentioned Mike McCormack had gotten Mozilla Active X embedding to work (issue #206 ). Well, that attempt went awry and Mike went back and worked on it some more. This week he announced: OK, this time I've done it the right way, and it at least works for one or two apps, with a screen shot to prove it. Screen shot was produced by installing an older version of WinAmp (winamp281_full.exe) and the Mozilla ActiveX control version 1.6 from http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm It would be nice if we could build Mozilla as a winelib app... ;) To see the screenshot Mike mentions, see the post on wine-patches. Dimi wondered, Very cool indeed Mike! One thing that I've noticed is that the code uses a lot of Mozilla dependent names, but the only thing that's actually Mozilla specific is the CLSID. Shouldn't we just read that info from the registry (from some sort of HtmlControl key), so that people can experiment with other things as well (e.g. IE) just by changing the configuration? Mike felt switching to native IE was just a simple config file change: Well, the way to experiment with IE is to do: `"shdocvw" = "native"` since shdocvw is part of Internet Explorer itself.

Integration

A few weeks ago we mentioned Mike McCormack had gotten Mozilla Active X embedding to work (issue #206 ). Well, that attempt went awry and Mike went back and worked on it some more. This week he announced:

OK, this time I've done it the right way, and it at least works for one or two apps, with a screen shot to prove it.

Screen shot was produced by installing an older version of WinAmp (winamp281_full.exe) and the Mozilla ActiveX control version 1.6 from

http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm

It would be nice if we could build Mozilla as a winelib app... ;)

To see the screenshot Mike mentions, see the post on wine-patches. Dimi wondered, Very cool indeed Mike! One thing that I've noticed is that the code uses a lot of Mozilla dependent names, but the only thing that's actually Mozilla specific is the CLSID. Shouldn't we just read that info from the registry (from some sort of HtmlControl key), so that people can experiment with other things as well (e.g. IE) just by changing the configuration?

Mike felt switching to native IE was just a simple config file change:

Well, the way to experiment with IE is to do:


"shdocvw" = "native"

since shdocvw is part of Internet Explorer itself.

Winetest Parser Committed	02/19/2004	Archive
News Ferenc Wagner has been working for quite a while on integrating the test results from Wine's test suite into the web site. This way a bunch of tests can be performed on real Windows boxes to make sure we have a baseline to measure Wine against. Once we get the test results they need to be parsed and organized in some fashion. That's what Ferenc's been working on. An initial commit was done this week, although it's not working yet. The basic framework is complete and you can find it in the tools module in CVS. Ferenc wrote the following README file about it: This machinery is for receiving and analysing the reports resulting from running programs/winetest. The winetest program is a single- executable version of all the DLL conformance test programs suitable for unattended testing and report submitting. This package provides the destination for that and presents the results in an ordered form. winetest.conf Configuration file, sets the following variables: $queuedir - queue incoming submissions here $datadir - processed data get served from here $builds - list of allowed build tags winetest.cgi A CGI script, which receives uploads from winetest and provides manual uploading facility. Asks the CGI.pm module to create its temporary file in $queuedir, then renames it to repXXXXX/report. winetest.cron Sample crontab entry illustrating the intended use of the tools. dissect This program looks for a file matching $queuedir/rep/report, takes it apart in its directory while also creating summary.txt. If an error occurs the directory is renamed to errXXXXX to avoid future attempts at processing this report. If everything goes flawlessly the whole directory is renamed (based on the information learnt in the process) to $datadir/BUILD/VERSION_TAG_DIGIT where DIGIT is for resolving name clashes and $datadir/BUILD/outdated is created to signal the change in the given build. Allowed builds are those in $builds. See also the head of the file. gather This program is intended to run as a second stage. See the sample crontab file, races and concurrency problems must be dealt with on that higher level. The program looks for a file matching $datadir//outdated, creates index.html in the same directory and removes the outdated file. See also the head of the file. summary.css, summary.js, resultform.html These files are referenced by the index.html files created by gather. builds.txt The file to have $builds point to.

Kernel Driver (SafeDisc) Initial Support	02/16/2004	Archive
Patches Marcus spent some time this week getting Windows kernel drivers loading. Specifically, he tried to get SafeDisc working so that copy protection on games would be supported. This was discussed a bit at WineConf and various ideas were kicked around. SafeDisc isn't working yet, and it's not even clear it's possible to support it, but Marcus took a stab at it. From his changelogs: #1: This implements some very basic and functional kernel driver loading and execution. Currently only tested with one driver and with just DeviceIoControl support. Changelog: Added a possibility to load Windows WDM kernel drivers, a bit hackish. Implemented a separate PE loader for WDMs, but reuse common functionality from normal PE loader (relocation fixup, relay handling, module override.) Uses NtLoadDriver. Implemented DeviceIoControl passing to kernel drivers. #2: This is sufficient to support the first windows kernel driver. Note the lack of fastcall support (I just ignore the IofCompleteRequests arguments anyway). Run necessary tools for dll adding ;) Changelog: Very first (partially hackish) implementation of ntoskrnl.exe. This led Uwe Bonnes to ask what was working and what was still unsupported. Marcus explained, although in theory the SafeDisc driver should be working, it wasn't: There is no need for any setup. secdrv.sys of InstallShield just requires some functions of ntoskrnl.exe, which I have implemented to a degree it that it functions. As of working, in Need for Speed v4 from Electronic Arts I now see the SafeDisc[tm] Splashscreen, then it is seeking on the CD pretty heavily, then the program terminates. So consider the first step towards SafeDisc support done as soon as they are merged to CVS. The driver, secdrv.sys, ships with each game using SafeDisc copy protection. It gets loaded when the game starts up, and until now wasn't supported at all. Mike Hearn theorized why it still wasn't working: For the record (we already discussed this a bit on IRC) this is probably SafeDisc taking seek-time profiles from the CD drive. SafeDiscs contain certain blocks in unusual widely-spaced ordering that is not possible to recreate using standard CD burners. By reading each block in turn and checking that the seek times are high enough they can verify the CD has not been copied using consumer-grade equipment. This test, in other words, should pass - as long as the Linux/Wine CD subsystems have similar timing profiles to Windows (gulp) "Similar timing profiles" means the Linux driver for the CD-ROM and the Windows driver must operate in almost the exact same manner. If the driver expects a certain amount of time to read blocks on Windows it must take the same amount of time on Linux. Carlos Lozano pointed out things are further complicated by the fact that several different versions of SafeDisc exist and they operate in different ways.

Kernel Driver (SafeDisc) Initial Support

02/16/2004

World Wine News