Following last nights meeting, I have been nosing around the various information available for the above methods of running Windows games (and other applications), to see what can and cannot be done.
The wine project, I am sure you will all be familiar with. It is the most widely used of these projects and I have played with it for some years now. You can run a wide variety of Windows applications under wine, not simply games - things like Photoshop for instance run (with differing results depending on wine version and Photoshop version for instance). It is the original wine version and is licenced under the LGPL licence, which means it is possible to include it in a distro. Further details from their site - http://www.winehq.org/ which is well worth bookmarking - especially if you want to check if a program will run under wine ;) Winex and Cedega are the same project, a commercial fork from the wine project by Transgaming. Originally called WineX, the project was renamed to Cedega when version 4 was released in 2004. The big advantage with the commercial Cedega over wine is that it does include the ability to install some programs which use "copy protection". That can cause wine users hours of hassle - involving the downloading of no-cd cracks and hacking the wine installation in various ways. Cedega also has better DirectX support and support for other features found under the Windows system. There are two types of Cedega/WineX - one is the commercial one, available from Transgaming, which requires a monthly fee (fairly small fee). The other is a "free" version - the CVS version. This CVS version, although including some of the extra features of Cedega compared to Wine, does not include all the functionality which gives the commercial version its edge. It is also a rather older version than the current commercial one - usually quite considerably out of date compared to Wine or Cedega. The licencing of Cedega is a little unclear. Although released under "free" licences, Cedega have made it clear that redistribution of their CVS version compiled into a package for distributions, is frowned upon. They have publicly stated that they will change the licencing should they feel the CVS version is being abused - i.e if distros include it. From their licence agreement - "Note that while this license does permit certain kinds of non-commercial distribution of pre-compiled binary packages of Cedega, doing so on a large scale is discouraged, as it affects TransGaming's ability to continue to improve and develop the code. TransGaming reserves the right to change the license under which TransGaming-owned copyright code is made available, and will not hesitate to do so if non-commercial distribution of pre-compiled binary packages adversely affects the financing of continued development." Whether building a rpm for Yoper and including it in the repositories would be seen as adversely affecting Transgaming is open to debate, although I suspect it would! So, we are left with two choices - First is to include Wine and continue to assist users with their gaming/Windows app issues as we have in the past or We package the CVS version of Cedega and get a little more functionality - but risk Transgaming changing the licence which would impact on all Linux users - not just Yoper users. I would suggest sticking with Wine, which has come on rapidly lately. Comparing the versions of Wine in Yoper 2.1 to the latest versions is like comparing a horse and cart to a modern car. I use Wine quite often for gaming and, whilst there are often still error messages thrown up at the command line, things tend to continue to run anyway. I shall be testing out Wine in the next week on the weekly test iso and running some games and Windows applications to see how things look. In the meantime, I am looking forward to ideas/comments on the above ;) Cheers, Mark _______________________________________________ yoper-dev mailing list yoper-dev@lists.yoper.com https://morpheus.pingos.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/yoper-dev
