James Gregory wrote:
1. Tell us about the issues and I reckon we can get them solved.
<disclaimer> I know Wine is alpha software, etc and as far as FOSS is concerned "I get it" and I know how exceedingly difficult a task the wine people have set themselves and how devious MS is. So this rant is purely to tell you about the reasons I want to use wine and issues that I had with getting it to work. </disclaimer>
I'm only interested in a non-windows system, I.E "a fake windows". I only want to run Windows software where there is no practical Linux alternative. Mostly this comes down to Office/Excel and IE. The only reason for using these products is to cope with spreadsheets etc that have VB macros in them that simply don't work in Gnumeric, or to use web sites that Firefox can't cope with because of some proprietry I.E crap, which these days seems to be mostly broken Javascript, (ain't there some irony in that).
If I install from rpm the wineinstall utility isn't in the distribution so the fake windows system doesn't get created. Thus I have to install by compiling from source. I forgotten now but to get this to actually work I had to jump through a number of hoops not the least being that the wineinstall failed to build the windows directory with some error about C: doesn't exist.
I can no longer go "$ wine /some/unix/dir/setup.exe" this doesn't work, I have to put the setup.exe into the wine directory first and then it has to be in the path.
The installation of office or IE always fails at some point (I haven't bothered to record the errors here and if I ever get around to trying it again I'll do so) with some fixme: then wine goes into the debugger (which is totally useless to me). Even if I do get an application to work, it's never very stable and will often crash and drop into the debugger, which means that there is next to no chance that I would ever deploy it. In fact this has happened so much that I've no confidence in ever deploying such a solution as the user problems would just defeat me.
Wine is rock solid when it comes to playing solitare or freecell, or even running the windows version of firefox but I have Linux versions of those so that's only mildly amusing from an academic point of view.
I can get Office 95 and old Ie to run, but these days that's about as useful as tits on a bull. The later versions of office and IE simply don't work.
<warning views with extreme prejudice follow>
Windows with XP and Longhorn (and who know's what will happen with office) continue to evolve in my view faster than wine can keep up, so wine will never be of any practical use because MS will keep pulling the rug from under it with their applications which are the only windows things I ever need to run.
VMWare on the other hand has worked rock solid for me for at least the last five years.
Is my attitude productive? Probably not but as I said in the original posting, I've watched and tried wine over at least the last five years and in my view it's as far away as ever from being able to run MS applications in a production environment. (Note the the empahsis on MS applications, windows applications from other vendors, I'd rate as a reasonable chance but stuff from MS, they obviously have their own unpublished API calls that only MS stuff uses).
I started to write this as a constructive critism, but it sounds more like a frustrated rant, oh well cest la vive.
Cheers
Pete
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