[aklug] Re: Adventures in wine

I agree that wine is much better these days. My son plays World of
Warcraft on his Ubuntu box under wine.

I find the older win98 stuff mostly works, and any new game that is not
on their gold list pretty much won't, especially if it needs DirectX stuff.

I finally got my wife to switch to Linux about 6 months ago, and set her
up with the Sun VirtualBox from their web site so I could get the USB
support that I think is not in the open source edition of virtual box.

She still uses her Quickbooks on XP, and I used it for TurboTax this
year as well. Other than those two, we seem to get what we need on Ubuntu.

The virtual box "transparent mode" is awesome running XP. I found some
operating systems that did not seem to have the necessary drivers to
support it, or at least not easily for me, (win7, fedora, debian) but I
only need XP every once in a while, and it is very usable even without
transparent mode enabled.

(sorry if topposting is discouraged)

Thomison, Lee wrote:
> I've kept kind of an occasional eye on wine over the years. In the last ye=
> ar or two has seen great improvement, particularly on programs that have be=
> en around a while and are well established, and haven't done the lemming th=
> ing into .NET. For example, the one windows app that I routinely use is a =
> graphics viewer called Firehand Ember didn't work for a long long time, lot=
> s of problems, barfs, segfaults, branch-and-hang, then suddenly last year i=
> t works very well in wine (finally).
>
> Unfortunately, I have to use a lot of stuff professionally that -doesn't- w=
> ork in wine. At all. Typically these are niche programs (programs that co=
> nfigure PLCs or some other field device or controller), or that require spe=
> cial hardware (modbus or similar protocol analyzers) or something that requ=
> ires a hardware key/dongle. I have never succeeded in getting wine to work=
> with one program that uses a PCMCIA based key.
>
> Anecdotally, anything that requires .NET2 is flakey, and anything that requ=
> ires .NET3 is a nonstarter (recent quicken, quickbooks, turbotax).
>
> Also anecdotally, virtualbox can be configured to work 'transparently', tha=
> t is it runs the program in the guest system, but the user sees it as worki=
> ng like it is on the gnome/xfce/fluxbox/whatever desktop, not in an XP desk=
> top 'box'. I haven't seen the need or taken the time to check this out mys=
> elf so it may be total bs. And even if it isn't, you still have to install=
> the guest os with all it's baggage anyway.
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Received on Thu Apr 9 10:04:10 2009