> > I've been watching wine for years and I feel that it's just never > > going to make it. At one stage I managed to get Word and Excel working > > under it but then they changed to the new system with the dosdevices > > directory and I haven't been able to get them working since. Also even > > though Excel was "working" I couldn't get the Visual basic stuff to > > work, which is the only reason I'd use Excel, to deal with a spread > > sheet with a VB macro in it. However I hear that codeweavers > > cross-over office seems to be more reliable (don't know what the > > codeweavers secret is as it's based on wine).
The Codeweavers guys are doing some awesome work, and yeah, I always recommend that people use one of the commercially backed versions of WINE atm. The way it works (AFAIK) is that Codeweavers keep their own tree, and work on that in order to get support for the apps they've got targetted in their next release. After the release happens, they submit their patches back to mainline WINE and AJ goes off applying patches (which is a pretty time consuming process). So mainline WINE is generally about a year behind Codeweavers work, and at the moment it's also lacking the nice interface for getting stuff installed[*]. There's a lot of structural changes going on at the moment that will ultimately result in a better codebase. They're not without migration issues though. WINE also hits issues every time the threading model changes in the kernel. We've seen a lot of such changes in the last year or so, but it looks like things have settled down since then. Mer, so the reason I'm writing is twofold: 1. Tell us about the issues and I reckon we can get them solved. 2. I think they will get there, and I think the changes that are happening now are a vital step on the road to "there". > > I have to say that I feel the same about Wine. I run a legal application > that uses Folio Views (Terrible software!) and it is a real pain to get > in running every time that Wine changes. Since the latest dosdevices > change I haven't been able to get it going at all. There's a lot of debate about issues like this on the wine-devel mailing list. There's also versioning issues in the .so that does most of the work, which they're trying to form sensible policy on. They are, in my opinion, doing the right thing. They're trying to move away from the massively abused configuration file that has been with WINE since its inception (as far as I know). In the long term, you can expect this to make it easier to get things to work, rather than harder; but there are definitely migration issues. The only thing that changed in the dosdevices patch was that the drive definitions were moved out of the config file and turned into (easier to manage) symlinks. If you can tell us more about the problems you're seeing, I'll try to help you get it working again. James. [*] Just on this: I started hacking on some stuff to let you install Windows software with RPM a while ago, but I never got enough time to make it really useful. If you are interested in this, let me know what you need to get running on WINE and I'll tack it onto my todo list. -- "Now, there are no problems only opportunities. However, this seemed to be an insurmountable opportunity." - http://www.surfare.net/~toolman/temp/diagram.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
