TAG | Run Window apps on Linux? It just takes a drop of mature wine |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Thursday, 19 June 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 A company called Transgaming came along with the goal of getting Windows-based high-quality 3D graphical games working on Linux. Wine was the perfect base to start from and because its open source software license permitted it, they were free to take the Wine source code and put in their own proprietary DirectX code turning the resulting product into an application called Cedega.The advent of Cedega ended up putting a slump in Wine’s progress which took several years to recover from. Now the Wine license has been revised to one which, while still open source, is less permissive and can now never again be forked into a proprietary program. Like Masada, Cedega will never happen again. Two years ago Wine got another big boost when Google paid Codeweavers to port Picasa, Google’s own imaging tool, over to Linux. From then on new development and patches to existing code came in leaps and bounds until we find ourselves today marvelling at Wine 1.0, the diminutive version number masking the lengthy and rocky journey that the software travelled on. There’s every reason to like Wine. Conceptually, it’s marvellous and a stunning achievement in determination and coding ingenuity. Pragmatically, it’s something that benefits all Linux users by giving an even greater range of software and the freedom to use whichever tool suits the task at hand, unencumbered by the operating system chosen. Wine assure us there’s a lot more to come and no end of work for the next 15 years either, with USB devices being one area of concern, not to mention the next generation in hardware as 64-bit apps become commonplace. Working with Wine is simple to do, and you can download both binary and source code releases at WineHQ. At that site you can also find a user guide, the database of applications tested and many other important pieces of documentation and information.
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