World Wine News

r40
Update to latest mono
Remove mono11 and mono12 verbs, replace with mono19
Abort properly on network errors

r39
Updated xvid

r38
Switch to listing simpler synonyms for changing windows version
Correct description of volnum verb (it's still needed)

r37
Fix typo in sha1sum check that caused it to be ignored!
Update sha1sum for flash player (see comment for URL about the update)

r36
Much better error reporting for gui users.

r35
Add wmp10 and windows media codecs

r34
Add Windows Media Player 9 (not really usable yet; this is for the guys implementing Quartz etc.)

r33
Fixed typo that disabled curl.

r32
Three improvements from Paul Drain:
1) better error handling options for wget
2) add the rest of ms core fonts
3) specify (currently) known good sourceforge mirrors for some files

As always, get it at
http://kegel.com/wine/winetricks
or
http://code.google.com/p/winezeug

Wine 0.9.60 was released today, with the following main changes:

    * Better support for Windows IMEs.
    * Option for Windows-style window decorations.
    * Improved system tray behavior.
    * Window management fixes.
    * Improved quartz audio support.
    * Better support for launching apps from Unix file managers.
    * Lots of bug fixes.

Wine 0.9.59 was released today, with the following main changes:

    * Improved support for the .NET framework.
    * Better services handling through a separate services.exe process.
    * Support for ATI fragment shader.
    * Better support for http proxies.
    * Window management fixes.
    * Pre-compiled fonts are now available in the source tree.
    * Lots of bug fixes.

We had a 0.8 release and an 0.9 release; they had the desired effect of attracting more users, while not overpromising. I think this is a pretty good time for 1.0, actually. The question is rather, what will our policy be for future releases? The Linux kernel is probably the most similar project out there, and they do a release every three or four months. I'd like to see a wine-1.2.0 release in time for the Ubuntu 8.10. Judging by https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GutsyReleaseSchedule and http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointTwentythree, that means wine-1.2.0 in late August '08. That would mean we'd be out of the 1.0 code freeze for only 6 weeks before the code freeze for 1.2, which is crazy fast. So maybe not this time around (unless some absolutely amazingly cool features land during those six weeks).

We should be shouting "Try your Photoshop CS2 plugins! Try Dreamweaver 8! Try your organization's mission-critical apps! Report any problems you find!"

The big ones I can think of are the DIB Engine (an idea which has been percolating for ages) and .net support. Oh, and the Javascript support needed to install Photoshop CS3. Longer term, I'd like to see the user-mode WDM driver framework supported.

Long term, we'll probably find that we have to follow Windows' example and implement application-specific behavior to get key apps working perfectly without breaking other apps. Ugly, but true.

No idea; I imagine we'll just keep pushing on whatever mainstream apps we think are the current low-hanging fruit.

You'd be surprised how many people complain when we break windows 3.1! Turns out a lot of old apps use a little bit of win 3.1, especially installers. I do think we'll want to revive the DOS support and improve Win 3.1 support sometime. We'll probably never do real VxD support, nor arbitrary drivers.

At one point, Wine was a crazy project. It's not crazy anymore.

One thing in our favor is that victory is easier for underdogs in a way; we only need to make a relatively small percentage of the user base happy to significantly change the status quo.

I'd improve disk storage. For instance, I'd make LVM snapshots more space-efficient. (Actually, I *am* doing that; see http://zumastor.org .) Also, right now, if you put your whole system on an LVM volume, it's hard to read your disks without actually booting the system from them; I'd fix that. (Maybe Dan Phillips will fix that, it's certainly on his mind.) And I'd get rid of the need for init ramdisks...

It looks like Microsoft's strategy is increasingly to merge apps with Windows, which is clearly anticompetitive. I think the EU should follow the original antitrust judge's verdict, and order Microsoft to break itself up into separate companies for Windows and for applications, prohibit the Windows spinoff from offering any apps, and prohibit the apps spinoff from using any Windows source code or undocumented interfaces.

They already bundle Wine, don't they? Hmm, http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=redhat doesn't say. Somebody get distrowatch to track wine, please :-) Anyway, yes, all distros should bundle Wine. I don't know of any legal problems; if Microsoft wanted to shut us down, they should have done so years ago.

Not yet. It's a fine license, but relicensing is hard.

As I said above, I'd like to see Wine get into a four-release-a-year cycle, where releases are relatively painless operations. I think that's going to require that automated application regression test suite, though.

I think we have some work pending with the SFLC that needs to get done, too.

Full support for the top twenty apps requested by Linux users!

"We are completely rewriting the Windows operating system from the ground up," he says. "Basically we took Microsoft's crown jewel, that they've had billions of dollars to develop using tens of thousands of developers, and we, the open source community, have essentially re-implemented that. We are the scrappy underdogs. Here's where the Hollywood music comes up."

Hello all,

I know this will only interest a small portion of you but thought i would give a quick update on the state of IMM32 since I have brought it to a major milestone.

All the main patches are in which now separate IMM32 and IMEs. There is still more work to do but the major framework is in place. X11 XIM processing should be unchanged. However wine can now begin to load native windows IMEs as well.

I have tested with windows ATOK20 (a popular Japanese IME) and successfully had text processing in a fully IME aware application. There are still clear issues to resolve in many aspects of this processing but we have forward progress.

ImmInstallIME does not work yet, nor does switching keyboards. So to get the native IME to work you need to add this registry key.

System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layouts\'keyboard layout' ->"Ime File"='IME filename'

so for example for ATOK20 in Japanese i used.

System\\CurrentControlSet\\Control\\Keyboard Layouts\\e0010411 ->"Ime File"="ATOK20W.IME"

I would love to hear how well things work. I am sure using native IMEs will quickly show us many places where IMM32 needs to be improved.

One issues I am going to investigate next is that sometimes non x11drv ime initialization, if occurring too early, causes x11drv to fail to create windows. I have not investigated with the latest changes to xim.c (which may already correct this problem) but if you see this problem this patch may help and i believe the IME_UpdateAssociation(NULL) is already unneeded.

thanks,
-aric

I was very annoyed with the slowness of the theme engine in the listbox case (as used by builtin regedit). I tracked down the source of the slowdown to a iteration in UXTHEME_SizedBlt() that repeatedly calls UXTHEME_Blt() in order to cover the required area. The attached patch replaces this with an iteration over a memory bitmap that is then used by UXTHEME_Blt() in a single call. All tests still pass. Results in noticeable speedup in the painting of the listview header in regedit and the two uses in winecfg.

Changelog: * Speed up UXTHEME_SizedBlt in the ST_TILE by building an appropriately-sized memory bitmap out of the tile instead of iterating with UXTHEME_Blt() directly.

Hi,

Here's a short summary of the wine-related things that were going on on XDC:

-> Mouse input: Daniel Stone will take care of that. He says DGA would give us what we want, but recommends not to use it. He is working on extending XInput(or making a new XI2) which can report relative mouse movements. The X people want to phase out DGA. Some games use it for relative input, so they'll make a DGA emulation layered on the new XInput stuff. He will need debugging / testing help from us since Wine will most likely be the only App making use of that directly. Also we should not hold our breath, he has some other items on his TODO list, but the end of 2008 is a plausible ETA.

-> Tablets: Config issue is known and being worked on

-> Graphics, general: The Mesa and ATI people are willing to help out with our issues. I talked to Aaron Plattner and Pierre ? from Nvidia, and they know the issues and worked on some extensions for that internally some time ago, but then decided that they're not going to implement that for some reason they didn't tell me(I hope they re-consider that now that someone is asking for it though). The ATI guys warned me that it might take a while until any new extensions are available in production drivers, but that's something we have to put up with I guess. Also both the ATI and Mesa people like the idea of using our conformance tests for their driver testing and debugging. The Nvidia guys offered help with the multithreading crashes and the 32 vs 40 varying issue.
(I also talked to Ben Byer from Apple, but he's not in charge of the graphics drivers)

-> Graphics: Flat shading: Picking that as a first case for working on an extension. Should be fairly easy to implement in Mesa since all cards have a specific register for exactly that issue.

-> Graphics, multithreading: general agreement that what we are doing is correct, and driver bugs need fixing. It looks like the crash in fglrx will be fixed soon(my test app worked in Matthew's development driver). For the Nvidia issues I'll file a bugreport as soon as I know if the glxSwapBuffers crash is a driver or Gentoo bug)

-> Graphics, sRGB blending: Everyone believes me that our emulation is slow("pow() - uh oh, don't use that, that's not parallelizeable"[Keith Packard]). The nvidia people are aware of the issue, but a fix is also unlikely. The ATI people aren't sure if their dx9 hardware supports sRGB writing, maybe the windows driver is emulating things as well - have to check

-> Graphics, GLSL issues: MOVA and LIT, possibly extensions for that.

-> Graphics, Hacks: Both the ATI and Nvidia developers warned me that their Windows drivers have a huge per-application bug workaround database. Aaron was pretty impressed that Wine doesn't have any app-specific hacks. I am afraid we will need them, as some apps seem to expect different behavior that our d3d9 tests get. I think the best way is to fetch some information about the Windows driver hacks and write tests which trigger them to show that "hl2.exe" gets different driver behavior than "d3d9_test.exe"(or in whatever way things work)

Hi, My hope that was for Wine 1.0 we could add error handling for missing dlls and functions that made sense to the user rather than just silent failed or spewed messages to the console. If you have an application that depends on a dll such as OUTLOOK.EXE depending on OUTLIB.DLL you will get a message like this:

err:module:import_dll Library OUTLLIB.dll (which is needed by L"Z:\\home\\sedwards\\.wine\\drive_c\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\OFFICE11\\OUTLOOK.EXE") not found
err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for L"Z:\\home\\sedwards\\.wine\\drive_c\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\OFFICE11\\OUTLOOK.EXE" failed, status c0000135

So instead how about throwing a nice message box? I started working on this but don't quite know how to properly pass the information to the MessageBoxW or maybe fill in the MessageBoxIndirect structure to display the error in a human readable format. I just don't really know. Of course once its done this would need to be broken out in to a helper function, its just a proof of concept....

Anyone want to help?

You certainly don't want to call through explorer for that, showing a message box directly is fine. You have to be careful to only do it when loading the main exe, not for any random dll load; also you have to properly handle the case of a missing X display.

A link to a wiki page (https://wiki.winehq/MissingDLL ?) with list of common dlls/where they come from/what they do/how to use winetricks/etc.) would be a bit easier/quicker to implement.

For those of you who haven't heard yet, the Google SOC Projects were announced today: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/04/announcing-accepted-student-proposals.html

6 Wine projects have been accepted: http://code.google.com/soc/2008/wine/about.html

Improving Wine MSXML implementation
by Piotr Caban, mentored by James Hawkins

Print Dialog
by Gal Topper, mentored by Detlef Riekenberg

Implementing proper Control Panel support for Wine
by Owen Rudge, mentored by Juan Lang

DirectPlay implementation
by Ismael Barros Barros, mentored by Kai Blin

Wine - Richedit with Tables
by Dylan Andrew Harper Smith, mentored by Huw D M Davies

Improve Gdi+ Implemenation
by Adam Joel Petaccia, mentored by Lei Zhang

Thanks to all those who applied and congrats to those who were accepted!

Now get hacking ;-).

Hello all. :-) I already introduced myself a while ago when I was writing my proposal, and I'm very pleased to see that it was accepted! I'm a 3rd year comp sci student at the University of St Andrews in sunny(!) Scotland. Looking forward to getting to work on Wine, although I've got exams and a junior honours project to get finished first, alas! I've got various ideas floating around my head and have figured out how I think I'm going to start tackling the project, so hopefully I'll be all ready to go when exams are out of the way. Cheers,

Hello everyone. My name is Gal Topper and my goal this summer will be to implement PrintDlgEx* in Wine, so that we'll have support for the newer and more flexible print dialog that was introduced in Windows NT. I am a third year computer science student in York University in Toronto, Canada, and lucky for me, my exams are over! So for now, I can enjoy both the project and the spring. :)

I'm excited about this project and plan to keep you all up-to-date when things start moving. :)
Cheers, Gal

Hi there

I'm from Spain and I'm supposed to hack DirectPlay support up until wine can fully run at least GTA2 multiplayer out of the box, but I hope to have time enough to give some love to other dplay games. I'll try not to have too much fun in the testing phases, I promise :)

I still have to get some exams done before embracing the sleepless nights of passionate coding (and/or swearing against msdn), but things are going faster than expected and I hopefully will be free of urgent duties in two or three weeks.

Hope not to break anything
Over and out
Ismael

Hello Wine world, my name is Adam Petaccia, and this summer I will be working on Wine's GDI+ implementation, so more applications can work "out of the box". I am currently a student at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro (US), and look forward to getting to coding, once I'm done with those pesky exams.

Its exciting to see how far Wine has come (I remember running Starcraft as root with nice -20 just so that the game could be somwhat playable -- thank [deity] we don't have to do that now) and I look forward to making Wine even greater.