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Per �yvind Karlsen wrote:

| Mandrake is not _ONLY_ targeted at "newbies", and describing wine as
| an emulator when it's not (WINE still stands for Wine Is Not an
| Emulator;) will make "hackers" think of us as stupid;)
| anyways, it's not harder than just grab the description from
| winehq.com/about
|
| From winehq.com/about:
|
| "Wine is an implementation of the Windows Win32 and Win16 APIs on top
| of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer. Wine
| provides both a development toolkit (Winelib) for porting Windows
| sources to Unix and a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows
| 3.x/95/98/ME/NT/W2K/XP binaries to run under Intel Unixes. Wine works
| on most popular Intel Unixes, including Linux <http://www.linux.org/>,
| FreeBSD <http://www.freebsd.org/>, and Solaris
| <http://www.sun.com/solaris/>.
|
| 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. Wine
| comes with complete sources, documentation and examples and is freely
| redistributable. (The licensing terms
| <http://source.winehq.com/source/LICENSE>are the GNU Lesser General
| Public License.)"
|
| This should explain it good enough that most linux users understand
| what it's for, and if it's still not good enough it's just to explain
| it better, but still, claiming that wine is an emulator, when it's
| not, well... it's kinda ..
|
| From the wine package
|
| "%description
| This is an ALPHA release of Wine, the MS-Windows emulator.  This is
| still a developers release and many applications may still not work.
|
| This package consists of the emulator program for running windows
| executables.
|
| Wine is often updated."
|
| I actually don't think this explains it much better for those without
| much technical knowledge, and naming Wine "the MS-Windows emulator",
| that's actually quite stupid.
| Anyways the explanation from winehq is better and correct, and
| probably not more confusing for a new user than the one from the wine
| package
|
|
|
| Ben Reser wrote:
|
|> On Thu, Aug 22, 2002 at 01:42:57AM +0200, Philippe Coulonges wrote:
|>  
|>
|>> In my response, I mistaken your message and the one from Ben Reser.
|>> Rereading it, it may look like you're the one that don't understand
|>> the difference, but he is.
|>>   
|>
|>
|> I most certianly *DO* understand the difference.  But you're applying
|> the term emulator to only processor emulation which is certainly a fine
|> distinction that maybe hackers make, but the dictionary and common users
|> do not make!  And considering that for the most part Mandrake is for
|> common users not hackers (though some of us use Mandrake) we should be
|> using language common users understand not elitist hacker definitions.
|>
|>  
|>
|
|
Anyone else think it might be beneficial to either include the words
"wrapper" or "compatibility layer" in this description?  These two come
to my mind immediately whenever I think of WINE.  As an added bonus for
the "wrapper" description, many of the Windows gamers that started at
least 2+ years ago are likely to be familiar with Glide or OpenGL
wrappers.  A lot of drivers just before that had buggy OpenGL support
and some applications only supported the proprietary Glide API so these
wrapper DLLs were a must to use many programs with the newer hardware.
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