Sugared Wine project begins

[John Gilmore]

X86-based Linux systems have been able to run some applications
written for MS-Windows for many years, due to the efforts of the Wine
project (http://winehq.org).  Wine is a GNU LGPL licensed implementation
of the Windows API on top of X and Unix.  It does not use any Microsoft
code.  Many popular free or proprietary programs run well under it;
see the Applications Database at http://appdb.winehq.org/.  Wine just
had its 1.0 release in 2008; after 15 years of continuous development,
it's getting pretty complete.  Retail and corporate sale of commercial
versions of Wine have supported two small companies (CodeWeavers and
TransGaming) for many years.

Wine already runs on the OLPC ("yum install wine"), but it's clunky
because Sugar doesn't integrate well with it.  So CodeWeavers and I,
with the assistance of the Public Software Fund, have started the
Sugared Wine project to improve that integration.  See:

  http://wiki.winehq.org/SugaredWine

Wine normally lets the X window manager manage its windows.  That
doesn't work well with Sugar, so CodeWeavers is improving Wine's
existing alternative "full-screen" mode, in which Wine manages all the
sub-windows that the applications create.  This improvement also
involves implementing the "Smart" menu that sits in the lower left
corner for starting Windows applications, and the taskbar that lets
the user manage multiple running Windows applications.

The project will also package Wine as a .xo with all the usual Sugar
goop.  (Possible future work might include the capability to bundle up
a single Windows application with Wine and goop to produce a .xo that
would directly run that app.)  We expect to be testing the port to
Sugar using the Windows binary of Firefox 3.0, a pretty demanding
application that also happens to be free.  All of the work will be
released under the GNU LGPL.

For many purposes, like running MS-Office, the results of the project
should compare favorably with dual-booting Windows and Linux.  The
Windows programs can merely run under Linux.

The work is just starting, so it's a good time for early feedback on
the technical goals and tactics of the project.  Will the result
proposed at http://wiki.winehq.org/SugaredWine be useful to OLPC's
customers?  What changes would make it more useful?  What other
programs should we be testing in the XO Wine?  Would you like to be an
early tester for the project?

(Those who do not want to run Windows apps should keep their flames at
home.  Nobody will force you to run either Wine or Windows apps.  Some
good people need, or choose, to run apps coded for the Windows API.
We may deplore it.  But peaceful coexistence, plus superior technology
and licensing on the GNU/Linux side, are our best path to compete with
it for mindshare and market share.  Most of the improvements being
made here will be useful in other portable and embedded systems,
making Microsoft OS's even less competitive in that market than they
already are.)

	John Gilmore