George Boutwell wrote:
>
> I was wondering if someone from Code Weavers good
> give a blurb about how they felt things at BorCon
> went. I was at BorCon, stopped by their booth (was
> glad to see them there), and wasn't able to make it to
> the Birds of a Feather Session they had and would like
> to know how that did (or didn't) go. Thanks.
I was at BorCon for CodeWeavers. I hosted the BOF on "Using Wine to
Port Application Software to Linux" and also gave a talk on "Porting
Windows Application Software To Linux" (which really covered all of the
tools, technologies, and techniques).
I also worked in the booth all day Tuesday and Wednesday. CodeWeavers
also had a BOF on porting Delphi code to Linux using Wine, but I missed
that one, so can't talk about how it did.
Overall impression: good show, lot's of interest and enthusiasm in both
Linux and Wine.
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The BOF
-------
The BOF was surprisingly well attended, especially since it started at
7:00am on the last day of the conference. We had about 30 people in
all, mostly windows application developers using C/C++ &| Delphi.
I spent about 30 minutes simply talking about what Wine is, what it
does, it's history, and status. It turned out to be a great forum for
educating the audience about Wine, since many of them were highly
pessimistic about it (complaints about it not being able to run Word or
Excel are all too common - argh). Most of the questions that came in
related to winelib, which I was glad to talk about (beats having to
discuss why Quicken won't work!). Most of the audience had never heard
of it, and even those that had misunderstood its purpose. The only
complaints that came in were in regard to it not being perfect (duh) and
the "poor" documentation. Other than that, it was really well
received. I really blew them away at the end when I showed them MS
PowerPoint2000 running on Wine (thanks to all of you!).
They were also excited about the future of Wine. In fact, when I
discussed the objectives/goals of Wine 1.0, it generated a lot of
discussion, and certainly a lot of enthusiasm. What surprised me
though, is that the 1.0 discussion was not about "cool, it'll work with
all of my windows apps," but instead, "cool, it'll work well with some
of my windows apps," and "cool, it will be better documented and easier
to install/configure."
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The Talk
--------
The talk focused on tools and technologies that are available for
deploying windows software on linux. I covered everything from VMWare
to (what I call) "pure porting" (using Xlib/Xaw/Xm/libc, etc.). I
focused on teaching the differences between the technologies, and
showing what's good and bad about each. I emphasized Wine and winelib
quite a bit, but again had to educate the audience about what it is. I
think most of the audience agreed that, even if it's not your final
solution, using winelib to get to Linux was the best starting point.
------------
The Exhibits
------------
According to some of the other exhibitors, this year's exhibit floor was
the biggest one yet. Personally, I thought it looked small. It
certainly wasn't LinuxWorld. Heck, it wasn't even as big as The
Bazaar. But it was intimate, and we were able to meet a lot of great
people. We were also able to talk to quite a few people for a longer
period of time, which was a nice change. Traffic through the booth was
near zero during the day (while sessions were running), but during
lunch, and after the sessions ended, it was always busy. Again, a lot
of interest in moving to Linux. I think the Borland development
community is suddenly taking Linux very seriously, and as Kylix becomes
available, we'll start to see more and more interest (at least from the
business world). That interest will drive additional enthusiasm, and
Wine is becoming an obvious consideration for everyone from users to
developers and ISV's.
That's about it for now. Feel free to ping me if you need/want more
details. I'll be posting the talk on www.codeweavers.com, and for
anyone that was at the show, it'll be on the post-conference CD.
Hope to see more of you at LinuxWorld in August!
Jim Graham
CTO - CodeWeavers, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
