Wine activity

[Vincent Povirk]

The Wine activity has advanced to the point where I think it's ready
for testing by actual users.

The current package, development history, and my todo list are at
http://wiki.winehq.org/SugaredWine

The intent of this project is to provide a shell that can be used to
run Windows programs using Wine in the Sugar environment. It should be
good enough that someone used to Windows can grab and install a
Windows program without help, once the activity is installed. Ideally,
the installer and software will both work fine in Wine and within the
hardware limitations of an XO. In this ideal case, someone used to
Windows should be able to operate it without help.

If it does not live up to this ideal for platinum software (according
to the Wine appdb) whose hardware requirements the XO meets, I want to
know about it and hopefully fix it.

Wine bugs and hardware limitations mean a lot of Windows programs
won't work or won't work properly. On Linux, one can often push the
compatibility much further than what works "out of the box" by looking
at console messages (the log viewer works for this) and tweaking Wine.
Don't expect everything to work perfectly, but don't give up if it
doesn't. This is normal, even on Linux.

Winehq.org has support channels for such cases (appdb, bugzilla,
mailing lists, and the winehq irc channel). Most of the people there
probably don't know anything about Sugared Wine, but collectively they
should know more than I do about making Wine work in general. If a
program doesn't work for you, you can go to any of those places for
support. You can also email sugaredwine at codeweavers.com. That goes
directly to me for now, but in the future (maybe the very near future)
I may decide to send it somewhere public, like a mailing list,
instead.

Wine and the code that I developed for this project are licensed under
the GNU LGPL. The entire package isn't quite LGPL because I included
7-zip. 7-zip is LGPL + unRAR restriction (you're not allowed to use
the source code to create a RAR compressor).

If you have a program that works well in this Wine package and would
like to package it as a stand-alone .xo, please let me know. I already
did most of the work for this so that I could include 7-zip and a
firefox downloader/installer (and I could probably have included
firefox itself if not for the fact that it would require uploading
non-open-source code to repo.or.cz).

Vincent Povirk