Wine Traffic #196 For 14 Nov 2003 By Brian Vincent Table Of Contents * Standard Format * Text Format * XML Source * Introduction * Mailing List Stats For This Week * Threads Covered 1. 9 Nov 2003 (1 post) More Games Reviewed 2. 10 Nov 2003 (1 post) Wine Lecture in Tel Aviv 3. 10 Nov 2003 (1 post) Top 30 on SourceForge 4. 9 Nov 2003 (1 post) ALSA 1.0 Support 5. 13 Oct 2003 (4 posts) Exec-Shield Problems 6. 13 Nov 2003 (2 posts) Volunteers Needed For LinuxWorld Booth Introduction This is the 196th issue of the Wine Weekly News publication. Its main goal is to ski. It also serves to inform you of what's going on around Wine. Wine is an open source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix. Think of it as a Windows compatibility layer. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation consisting of 100% Microsoft-free code, but it can optionally use native system DLLs if they are available. You can find more info at www.winehq.com (http://www.winehq.com) Mailing List Stats For This Week We looked at 171 posts in 540K. There were 61 different contributors. 35 posted more than once. 31 posted last week too. The top posters of the week were: * 13 posts in 35K by Mike Hearn * 11 posts in 28K by Alexandre Julliard * 8 posts in 22K by Shachar Shemesh * 7 posts in 18K by Dimitrie O. Paun * 6 posts in 17K by Steven Edwards * Full Stats 1. More Games Reviewed 9 Nov 2003 (1 post) Archive Link: "5 games tested in wine..." Topics: DirectX People: Thomas Brix Larsen, , Carlos Lozano Last week Carlos Lozano reported some success with games. Thomas Brix Larsen decided to do a test of his own: Motivated by my previous mail to the list, I have tried some more of my games with wine, and 2 out of 5 works perfect, but has some minor problems. Hmm, I guess a trace could be needed on some of them? But anyway here it goes: * Risk II: The "loading screen" displays, but: wine: Unhandled exception (thread 0009), starting debugger... * Empire Earth: winevdm: can't exec 'G:\Empire Earth\Empire Earth.exe': error=21 * Europa Universalis 2: Is a bit slow but works perfectly. :D But can only be started from the konsole. If I try to start it from konqueror it says it can't find its data files. Something to do with konqueror not setting cwd? (or whatever it's called) The konsole is full of: err:ddraw:Main_DirectDrawSurface_GetSurfaceDesc Impossible/Strange struct size 0. * BattleField 1942: Alot of KEYFOUND: ... happens. But there is never displayed any graphic. Could this be something to do with the no-cd crack? * Master of Orion 3: Game works perfect, some menu graphic missing, and mouse cursor ugly. I found something VERY interesting with this game and wine, the nebulas in game is different in wine and surely looks way better :D. 2. Wine Lecture in Tel Aviv 10 Nov 2003 (1 post) Archive Link: "Wine lecture" Topics: People: Shachar Shemesh, Shachar Shemesh is giving another lecture about Wine. If you happen to be in Israel you might want to check it out: Last time the subject came up, someone suggested I make the date available so it can be published on the winehq.org site. I'm going to give a lecture about Wine in a club called "Telux". The web site is at http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/telux/ (http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/telux/) (supposedly in Hebrew, but if you click the "Advanced lectures" english link at the left, you will get a pretty readable schedule even for non-Hebrew speaking). The lecture will be on Nov 30th, at the Tel Aviv University. The lecture will be given in Hebrew. It will start 18:30 in the math building at the university. No advance registration is required, and no fee. 3. Top 30 on SourceForge 10 Nov 2003 (1 post) Archive Link: "Top 30 on SF" Topics: Project Management People: Dimi Paun, Dimi Paun looked at some SourceForge stats and reported: I've just checked and we're in Top 30 downloads over the last 7 days at SourceForge. More exactly, we're 28th most downloaded project, with over 20000 downloads. Not bad. We'll need over 30000 d/l for Top 20, and over 50000 for Top 10. We'll get there sooner or later. :) 4. ALSA 1.0 Support 9 Nov 2003 (1 post) Archive Link: "Winealsa: Add alsa 1.0 support" Topics: Multimedia People: Sylvain Petreolle, Sylvain Petreolle posted two patches (http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/ wine-devel/2003/11/0166.html) for ALSA 1.0 support and put a call out for testers: This patch is almost complete, one macro hasnt been rewritten yet. alsa09.diff must be applied to allow compilation with alsa 0.9. Please test it with alsa 0.9 or 1.0 and give me the result. Sylvain provided the patch for ALSA 0.9 support and then another for 1.0. 5. Exec-Shield Problems 13 Oct 2003 (4 posts) Archive Link: "Windows programs no more running with the new wine-glibc" Topics: Fixes People: Sylvain Petreolle, Mike Hearn, Vincent Beron, , codeweavers Sylvain Petreolle reported a problem with some threading changes Alexandre made: With yesterday cvs update, whch adds a glibc-threading detection, wine doesnt load a _Windows_ program anymore. Using the RedHat rpm Yarrow kernel, I get : err:virtual:map_image Standard load address for a Win32 program (0x00400000) not available - security-patched kernel ? wine: could not load L"C:\\arakas.exe" as Win32 binary Funny thing : If I set up a symlink to the wine-glibc in another directory, it works without problems. Mike Hearn asked, " Well, are you sure you have disabled exec-shield for the actual wine binaries being used? " Sylvain reported that he had never activated exec-shield and that things worked fine a week ago. Vincent B?ron felt that was the problem too and explained a possible scenario like Sylvain described: Exec-shield is activated by default, as well as prelinking. Read the release notes of Yarrow if you want to disable them. What probably happened is you were lucky the first week, in that the random addresses assigned to the various libraries left 0x400000 (the default loading address for Win32 binaries) available, and with enough place to load what you loaded. The loading addresses for system libraries are changed once per week (or 2 weeks, don't remember). System libraries added after the last complete assignation are assigned a random address at each load, so is you try to execute 10 times in a row the same program, it'll fail some of the time and succeed the remaining times. I haven't been able to see that message with winelib applications (probably not in a codepath used for winelib apps, didn't checked yet). But it's pretty easy to hit if using Win32 apps. Disabling exec-shield (either via setarch i386 or with the proc thing) works sometimes, depending on the loading addresses assigned to libraries. If something (libc, libm, libdl, etc.) uses that address, nothing Win32 will be usable. When exec-shield is disabled, new libraries will be assigned loading addresses starting at the lower value possible, but already assigned ones (via prelinking) will still keep theirs, hence possibly blocking execution. Vincent replied a few days later with more information on the problem: Sorry, forgot to come back to say how testing went. The best workaround I found (from http://www.codeweavers.com/site/support/ tickets/browse/?ticket_id=34072 (http://www.codeweavers.com/site/support/ tickets/browse/?ticket_id=34072) ) is to change the default prelinking options, so that the required address is still free for Win32 apps. If you're hit by this, in file /etc/sysconfig/prelink, change PRELINK_OPTS=-mR to PRELINK_OPTS="-mR --no-exec-shield" The loading addresses chosen will be from 0x40000000, the default value on Linux systems, rather than trying to put the maximum of libraries before 0x01000000 (so that the first byte is always 0x00, rendering string buffer overflows mor difficult to exploit), hence crowding the area we want to keep free (0x00400000). So far (little testing only, but still), I haven't had a problem with those settings, either running Wine or Linux apps. Further reading in the referenced page shows Alexandre is in contact with some RedHat people, so hopefully they can come to a solution. RHEL 3 is affected as well, not only Fedora. 6. Volunteers Needed For LinuxWorld Booth 13 Nov 2003 (2 posts) Archive Link: "LinuxWorld Expo NY" Topics: Project Management People: Jeremy White, CodeWeavers, LinuxWorld, Jeremy White put out a call for volunteers to help with a booth at LinuxWorld: I somewhat impetuously requested a table for the Wine Project at the LinuxWorld New York expo, without really thinking if anyone could man the table. We'll have a CodeWeavers specific area in another part of the expo, so we won't really be able to provide a lot of help (and won't need any extra promotion). So, I was wondering if anyone wanted to go to New York and represent the Wine Project. If so, let me know privately. If I don't hear anything, I'll quietly tell IDG nevermind . LinuxWorld will be at the Javitz Center in New York City on January 21-23, 2004. Sharon And Joy Kernel Traffic is grateful to be developed on a computer donated by Professor Greg Benson and Professor Allan Cruse in the Department of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. This is the same department that invented FlashMob Computing. Kernel Traffic is hosted by the generous folks at kernel.org. All pages on this site are copyright their original authors, and distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.0.