Thread: Wine OpenBSD
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Old 2nd October 2009
IronForge IronForge is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2009
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Default I was hoping that would change for the better...

Greetings:

I was looking into the Wine situation a bit too - exchanged emails with one of their developers. He showed me a msg thread he had with the Openports.se Wine maintainer - looked like a bit of a nasty (borrowing his words) problem. I'm no system programmer; but I've done some work with custom built, database, and pkgd apps as Developer, BSA, and as a PM.

The WINE team had been looking for OBSD developers for some help with the malloc problem, so if any C Programmers are available, pls contact the Openports.se maintainer and the Wine Team for further direction.

I know most of you know this; but I'm listing the URL for the casual C hacker who's itching to have a little fun with a Memory Allocation Challenge.
http://openports.se/emulators/wine

On the practical side, not having something that would help people - pardon the pun - cross over from Windows for nearly ten years "just doesn't look good" on the advocacy front, IMHO. Though the OBSD OS/Documentation philosophy is quite straightforward, pragmatic, and logically sound, there appear to be a few apps/features that prevent more people, corporations, etc. to try it out. Given the popularity of Linux and OSX, I'm sure people would enjoy having to work with more reliable alternatives to the Windows OS AND still have access to its apps.

E.g, from the text here at the forum, the search for Flash has read like a "deal-killer" on occassion. Granted, we can live without and work around it; but WINE's currently popular with Gamers (not the worker bees who want their *NIX at the home office) working out their Windows toys on Linux, for crying out loud - kind of reaching a "critical mass" where the interest and increase in the functionality of WINE is self-sustaining. Might as well invest a few Man-hours to enhance the availability of a whole class of apps on OBSD, Should get more users/adopters to try out OBSD - yes, even the corporate Linux fanboys.

It'd be a great "seller" (Your CDpkg and demo opp to co-workers) to others if you can get Wine to get flash and basic M$ Office Apps running. E.g., I'll be working with a Company Packaged App Suite that uses Excel plugins - I know that we have the KQEMU option; but a working WINE would allow us to skip installing the Win* OS altogether and run the "Windoze Apps" a bit faster.
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