World Wine News

You can install this colour scheme by pasting the contents of this text file into your ~/.wine/user.reg file.

However, in the current Wine versions full theming is too slow to be usable. (You can watch it draw individual lines in slow motion.) If the Wine developers fix this in time for Ubuntu 8.04, a matching Wine theme will be used by default.

On my machine, we've been hovering between five and ten test suite failures for some time (see http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9916 )

IMHO one of the hallmarks of 1.0 should be reliably getting zero test suite failures. That would make regressions stand out like sore thumbs instead of requiring developers to diff results before and after their changes, and might result in fewer regressions getting committed.

How 'bout folks spend some time tracking the current six odd failures down and cleaning them up? - Dan

Ideally, all tests should pass on all platforms. However, there are issues with different service packs/hot fixes on each version of Windows, different user configuration (themes, UAC on/off, locale, etc.), different hardware and even different behaviour between different versions of Windows. I like the idea of getting the tests passing on Windows XP (SP2?) - that will then be the baseline for Wine. This should not cause regressions on other versions of Windows.

Yep. And at some point we should indeed make Windows XP the default personality in Wine. Seems like a 1.0 kind of thing.

But that should be done way before 1.0 to overcome any regressions.

This script, http://kegel.com/wine/valgrind/valgrind-330-build.sh builds a copy of valgrind-3.3.0 with John Reiser's forward port of the Wine support patch. With that, I can run Picasa for Windows under Wine under Valgrind. It takes 40 seconds to start up on my 1.3GHz Athlon 64, which is right in line with Valgrind's legendary ~10x overhead.

It seemed to find lots of little problems, but since there were lots of numeric addresses without symbolic info in the valgrind log, it wasn't directly useful to the Picasa developers.

The next step, I suppose, is to find a way to make the valgrind log contain symbolic identifiers for the functions in the Windows app. I looked at that for a few minutes; here are some notes that might provide a starting point.

- Dan

Any change might break things, that has never stopped us before ;-)

I agree we need a way to configure the Run entries to be able to remove worms and other nuisances, but if running a legitimate app causes trouble we want to fix it, not just force users to disable it; and the way to find out about it is by running these entries and seeing what happens.

Still, we don't need to debug it all at once, so I've disabled the Run entries for now. This way we can first concentrate on fixing trouble caused by services and RunOnce entries; but once this is done we definitely want to enable them again.

PlayOnLinux is a script written in bash, that uses Wine ( http://www.winehq.org/ ). Wine's aim is to install and run under a Linux distribution software that is designed for Microsoft Windows.

What is PlayOnLinux's aim?

After using Wine we realised that it sometimes needs complex commands. PlayOnLinux helps you to soften the processn making your life even easier in the Linux world.

More, some people who care about the games they own won't come to Linux simply because they want to be able to play them again. Our script will help them to move on Linux.

Each supported program is shown in a menu, and are either scripted (using bash) by the official developers, or contributed by community members.

There are interesting options in PlayOnLinux, and these include the following:

1. POL allows each installed program to be installed within it's own wineprefix and directory (similar to bottles in CrossOver).
2. It does simulated reboots for certain programs.
3. It has an option of installing Directx for a certain installed game.
4. It can run graphics tests/benchmarks for your video card (using Glxgears, Glxmux, etc.).
5. POL allows you to update install scripts from a central repository - this allows the supported games/programs to grow without you ever having to reinstall the program.
6. . You can assign specific wine versions to run your installed windows program from. If that Wine version is not available on your system, you can choose what version you want and POL downloads and installs the specifc wine version for you.
7. You can also assign the git version of Wine for the installed program. POL has a menu to automatically download the newest sources of Wine from the git repositories and compile them for you automatically.
8. POL can automatically put the installed windows programs shortcuts into the Desktop and/or KDE or Gnome PlayOnLinux menu.

To sum it up, POL is a promising frontend installer for Windows and Dos programs. Although there are some scripts that are outdated (POL uses Wine 0.9.37 to run MSOffice 2003, and the IE6 installation script - which uses the IE4Linux script - doesn't work properly on the current 0.9.53), the advantage of POL online repositories (and consequently an active community contributing) gives it the upper end in updating installation scripts for supported programs.

There seem to be a large number of apps that don't
start unless a wmvcore.dll is present:
 TVersity
 Phatnoise
 Lost Planet
 The Bard's Tale
 WMA Workshop
 MixMeister
 ...
So, how 'bout it?  Should we create a stub for wmvcore.dll and friends?
- Dan

Sounds like a great idea. Also some games require a WMA codec in order to play their music.

Oh, and it would be nice for Wine to have its own version of the Media Player, too. :)

Alexander N. Sørnes

Hello All

I was just wondering what the status was of D3D in a child window. Looking back at the release info it seems that the OpenGL in a child window has been sorted and that D3D has been converted to use WGL. Is this not enough to get D3D in a child window going?

I have tried the mfctex sample but it draws the D3D child window in slightly the wrong place and doesn't render anything at all. I have also tried a couple of other apps which also exhibit similar behaviour.

Just wondered what else needed fixing before this would work?

Thanks
Mark

Second not all 'child window rendering issues' are over. OpenGL/Direct3D apps that have a file menu and for the rest a 3D view, still don't work. I hope to fix those cases in the near future but the patch will affect ALL graphical programs on Wine, so that's why it requires a lot of testing (the patch is close but not yet done). Roderick