Wine activity

[Ben Wiley Sittler]

That's awesome work! I was able to install Wine and use it, including
firefox and a win32 application I had previously build using mingw32
under Linux on another PC and uploaded to a webserver, and then
downloaded using firefox inside wine. However, I did notice the
following oddities:

1. When I later resumed the activity from the journal, the wallpaper
was gone and nothing worked, although the start-menu items for firefox
were still there.

2. It was not clear to me how to save wine's state to the journal.

3. At some point the usual 'leave full-screen mode' icon appeared in
the upper-right corner, but clicking it seemed to have no effect other
than to make it disappear, i.e. no sugar UI appeared and the desktop
size did not change.

4. Wine crashed when I used Firefox's download manager to open the
location of a downloaded file (winefile appeared briefly, then the
whole activity crashed.) I have no idea why yet, but perhaps there is
some information left in a log file somewhere I will find.

On the bright side, this means it's fairly trivial to run at least
some "windows-only" software on the OLPC now, which is great when
there's not yet a Sugar or Linux version.

-Ben

On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Vincent Povirk
<madewokherd+8cd9 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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