Wine is Nicely Enabled
Wine is Getting Good: "Anyone else notice lately how good Wine is getting?"
I haven't checked Wine out in awhile, but I'm a big fan. I was using it to run Radio UserLand under Linux, about 5 years ago. (Wow, has it been that long?) I've kind of assumed that Wine would get Good Enough at some point to run almost everything that matters that was written for Win95, Win98, Win2K, and eventually even WinXP. And, games aside, pretty much everything that matters and that anyone bothers with runs on this range of Windows versions. And, seeing as Windows Vista hasn't exactly set the world afire, I'm betting that Wine might actually have a chance to catch up well enough to be trouble.
Oh yeah, and CrossOver Mac is based on Wine. And CrossOver Mac supports Team Fortress 2 right now, without purchase of a Windows license. Think about that. So, maybe we shouldn't put games aside. Really, unless Microsoft can somehow patent the crucial APIs exposed by Windows - if they haven't already - resistance is futile. There are nerds motiviated and annoyed enough to reverse engineer and assimilate. I'm not a lawyer, though: I suppose by the point Wine actually becomes a threat of any sort, nasty things can be sprung.
Archived Comments
I haven't tried Team Fortress 2 with it yet. Not having luck getting Portal to run. Clues gratefully accepted.
I've only tried two programs with Wine. Winamp and Skype. Both are so close and yet so far but ultimately were unusable.
I'd really like to see Apple dump some money into the Wine community. Surely it would be in their interest for it to improve more quickly?
Of course, I spout off about Wine and CrossOver Mac - and I haven't tried Wine in a few years and I don't own either CrossOver Mac or Team Fortress 2. I should actually try them out. :)
I've played through the whole of Portal under Wine with no hiccups whatsoever.
I just installed the Ubuntu package that is available from the Wine website. The only tinkering I did was to reconfigure it to use alsa instead of oss to make the sound work.
What did not work, however, is the purchasing interface in Steam. I regrettably had to return to Windows-land for a short period to actually buy Portal. It downloaded into Steam under Wine just fine afterwards, though.
The fact that it "just worked" for me leaves me puzzled about what exactly you're doing wrong, Bill. Are you using an old version of Wine, perhaps? What is it doing when you try to run it?
(It might be relevant that I'm launching Portal from inside Steam rather than from its own "shortcut".)
They really have done an amazing job. Most of what I use personally works just fine. I did run into a sticking point however trying to use windows media encoder. It just didn't work at all.