So going to try out Indiana Jones' Desktop Adventures out...
Have three WINEs this weekend, because WINE 3.0 has landed
Version 3.0 of Wine Is Not an Emulator – aka WINE – has arrived, and offers all sorts of new emulation-on-Android possibilities. WINE lets users run Windows applications on Linux, MacOS, Solaris, and FreeBSD, plus other POSIX-compliant operating system. To do so it “translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly”, an …
COMMENTS
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Friday 19th January 2018 07:54 GMT tempemeaty
This
"Version 3.0’s headline feature is the inclusion of “A significant number of Direct3D 10 and 11 features”. The outcome? Better graphics for emulated Windows applications."
I'm all...sqweeeeeeeeeee.......!!!!!!!!!
Reg. WHERE'S A WIDE EYED SHOCK EMOTI? .... NEED. IT. NOW.
I have 3D things that must be tried...
* locks and blocks all doors and windows *
* will not be seen again for a long time *
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Friday 19th January 2018 08:44 GMT 45RPM
Re: Office 2016?
I think thats rather harsh - It does need to run Office, of course, but any office from this decade will do since the primary requirement for most people is the ability to open Microsoft Office XML based formats and accurately render the contents. Job done there (albeit only just - Office 2010 is fine).
Everyone’s use-case is different though - for me, Wine needs to be able to run Visual Studio, and (for me) the free version is insufficient. So, whilst it’s a hugely interesting project and an admirable piece of work, I can’t make use of it myself - I still need ‘real’ Windows. But I kow of plenty of people with less demanding needs who have been able to, and do use it to, replace Windows.
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Friday 19th January 2018 14:47 GMT Zippy's Sausage Factory
Re: Office 2016?
Be nice if Office 2016 ran well on Windows 10, come to think of it.
(Yes, I did have a five-hour Office 2016 reinstall the other day thanks to Windows 10 updates, in case you're wondering. And I'm not convinced that's solved my issues with Excel crashing, at least I am now able to log into my email again. And yes I am still annoyed about it thank you for asking.)
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Friday 19th January 2018 15:55 GMT Bucky 2
Re: Office 2016?
Ah, everybody has his use case. LibreOffice suits me for all my document needs.
However, I need to open UI concepts from artists, and those come as Photoshop files.
I generally prefer to keep the layers and effects. That way I can extract the elements that I want, how I want.
GIMP can import simple layers, but can't do effects, and is iffy at importing masks.
That leaves WINE and Photoshop 5. I tend to bitch and moan and complain that I can't run anything newer with any reliability, but I also haven't had much trouble opening files created with newer Photoshops. So, you know, not a heartbreaker.
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Saturday 20th January 2018 00:04 GMT DrBed
Re: Office 2016? (That leaves WINE and Photoshop 5)
PS5? Oh dear.
I run PS CS4 / CS6 regularly at Linux / Wine for years.
> GIMP can import simple layers, but can't do effects, and is iffy at importing masks.
For extended PS specific needs (effects, masks, cmyk .psd ...) just use Krita.
If you need pro effects at GIMP, take a look at G'MIC.
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Saturday 20th January 2018 09:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Office 2016?
Lol, the person living in the 1990s that thinks you need Microsoft office.
The vast majority of users only use word, and could do their stuff in Write, let alone a free real office suite alternative like Google docs (which is better then office in many areas, particularly collaboration) or libre office.
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Friday 19th January 2018 08:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Cautionary tale
Picture the scene: Late 90s, running the fabulous AMEOL CIX off-line reader under WINE, suddenly noticed a WINE process under htop when none should have been active. Discovered that WINE is quite capable of running Windows viruses too... No damage done except to confidence and bragging rights about Linux's malware resistance.
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Friday 19th January 2018 08:50 GMT 45RPM
Re: Cautionary tale
Er., yes. But with the proviso that Wine is effectively sandboxed by your user account so, whilst any Windows malware that it executes might be able to affect your documents (and, given the different directory structures compared to Windows, even that isn’t guaranteed), the OS itself will remain unaffected and the integrity of other user accounts is likely to remain secure.
Note my hedging in the use of terms like ‘likely to’, ‘might be able to’. When dealing with malware one can never be absolutely sure - the price of security is eternal vigilance and so forth - all one can do is say that configuration a is likely to be more secure than configuration b.
And you know what they say. Bragging rights come before a fall.
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Friday 19th January 2018 12:03 GMT big_D
Re: Cautionary tale
The virus is "sandboxed" in the user account? You do realise that the PC and the OS are the least valuable bits of a computer and the user's data is worth a fortune in comparison?
So, whilst the virus can't affect the OS (or data where the user has no rights), it can exfiltrate / delete / encrypt the important and (often) irreplaceable user data... I'd rather it corrupt the OS than my data, installing a new version of the OS and re-mounting my home folder is a lot easier than having to go back in time and make all of those childhood photos again.
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Friday 19th January 2018 12:22 GMT 45RPM
Re: Cautionary tale
In many businesses, and even homes, a computer will have more than one user account on it. So, whilst such malware may be able to wreak horrible damage on your account and your files, files owned by your colleagues / family / friends should be safe.
And yes, user data is worth a fortune (at least to its owner). So it must be backed up - and those back ups backed up as well.
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Friday 19th January 2018 13:44 GMT PNGuinn
Re: Cautionary tale
So, create a new account for yourself, call it Wino or somesuch, and install Wine and your legacy software bits there.
Or create more that one new account and install each legacy bit in a separate "instance".
Wouldn't that narrow the risk a little?
Plus all the other usual caveats of course.
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Friday 19th January 2018 14:15 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: Cautionary tale
"You do realise that the PC and the OS are the least valuable bits of a computer and the user's data is worth a fortune in comparison?"
You do also realise that, once the PC and OS have been compromised, the only safe repair process is a low-level wipe with independently-sourced installation media. Most end-users are not aware of that, have neither the media nor the know-how to do it even if they knew they ought to, and probably couldn't find someone who could. (You can't, for example, trust whatever's on that hidden partition on the hard drive and what's the betting that if you take it into a High Street shop that's all that they'll bother to do, or perhaps even all that they'll know how to do?)
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Friday 19th January 2018 15:52 GMT big_D
Re: Cautionary tale
I do realise that computers can have more than one user and that you need verified media to re-install and checking the data before using it again.
My point was the blase attitude that it is irrelevant if the user gets a virus, because it can only affect the users space. Malware is malware and needs to be taken seriously.
Nonchalantly saying only the users data is affected is the wrong attitude to the problem.
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Friday 19th January 2018 10:32 GMT Stuart 22
End of the Road
The definition of a successful migration to Linux is when you discard WINE. So thanks for the fish developers it was a great if a little bumpy ride. With the bumps speeding the transition rather than hindering it. Took us 5 years but now in a happy place*
* Ahem, I do confess having VirtualBox running Win2000 for old time's sake. The best damn OS MS ever produced and even nicer and snappier than some of today's leaner Linux distros.
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Friday 19th January 2018 15:14 GMT Charles 9
Re: End of the Road
"The definition of a successful migration to Linux is when you discard WINE."
Which means some people can NEVER fully migrate because their most-critical irreplaceable software is, was, and always will be Windows-ONLY. Same with the gamers. With DX10 and 11 support, there's increased hope for support for the newer games out there, but that'll depend on how many Garbage reports get an improvement.
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Friday 19th January 2018 16:34 GMT Alistair
A real world example of determination
I've been a WOW player since Vanilla. Not, originally, because I was addicted to the game, but rather because SWMBO *was* addicted to the game and since I was a unix guy, I thought it would be interesting to to get WOW working on wine in linux. I just wanted to get it working as a challenge.
Frame rates in 0.8 world were horrendous, and there were awful video glitches. In 1.x wine WOW ran *better* on wine in opengl mode than it did in WinXP in DX9 mode. On *much* lower horsepower hardware. In the 2.x series I've been playing (admittedly with less than spectacular frame rates) with wine-staging. There were things (mostly authentication issues and the more bleeding edge DX11 components) that were not in wine 2.x release. I've recently discovered that the less than enthusiastic frame rates are about 60% from the nvidia driver defaulting to "power saving" mode by default - so I've managed to get 30 to 60 fps in wine staging 2.2x with WoW. If 3.x pulls in the security bits and the DX11 instruction path changes I might change over.
My *largest* disappointment is that Blizz dropped support for OpenGL. In OpenGL mode with equivalent hardware my framerates *smoked* what SWMBO got on windows.
Considering the efforts put in by the Wine Team i the last 8 months to get DX11 going, I have to toss them huge kudos.
And -- I'll also be trying out visio 2012 and outlook 2013 in wine 3.0. If I get those going well, by by windows vm.
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Saturday 20th January 2018 00:44 GMT mjflory
Re: Will it run Wordperfect 8?
Corel once provided a version of WordPerfect 8 compiled for Linux, and it was FREE! See http://www.control-escape.com/linux/wp8.html for an overview. Apparently it's still downloadable -- see http://www.tldp.org/FAQ/WordPerfect-Linux-FAQ/downloadwp8.html -- and folks have been downloading and installing it on releases as recent as Mint 17. The site http://www.xwp8users.com/ has advice on the installation. Somewhere in the piles I have a Corel WP8 CD, probably from a trade show, and I was just thinking how nice it would be to get it running on Mint 17 or 18.
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Saturday 20th January 2018 01:10 GMT Barry Rueger
Re: Wine for Android
Does anybody know why Wine 3.0 is available for download for Android?
FTFY
The problem with WINE remains that it's really hit and miss whether a specific app will work. The WINE database is full of comments that basically say "this app version worked, but only with this WINE version," followed by a list of ways it won't work.
I get my bookkeeping done with a Vista VM, and save the hassle.
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