Wine Traffic Brian Vincent

This is the 202nd issue of the Wine Weekly News publication. Its main goal is to give Santa something to read while he drives his sleigh. 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
News CodeWeavers codeweavers News

CodeWeavers had a last minute gift for everyone. On Tuesday they released CrossOver Plugin 2.1. An official press release appears to still be in the making. Jeremy White emailed an announcement that included the following:

This release is primarily intended as a maintenance release; it brings forward some of the internal system changes we made for CrossOver Office so that the Plugin should work on all Linux distributions again.

It also has a range of bug fixes, and supports updated versions of various plugins. A full changelog is in line, below.

There's some interesting threads I didn't cover this week. You'll just have to read the archives for the details.

Merry Christmas!

Build Process

Michael Stefaniuc put together a short recipe for setting up a MinGW cross-compiling environment. This would be useful if you wanted to do something like compile Wine's test suite on Linux in order to run it on Windows:

Here are the steps needed to setup a MinGW on a Red Hat Linux like rpm based system (Fedora Core, Mandrake Linux, ... should probably work even on a SuSE Linux)

You may want to try your local Red Hat mirror for the above srpm's.

This info can be found also on http://people.redhat.com/mstefani/wine/

Boaz Harrosh added, Just a side note, if we are at the subject. One can download the full package of "MinGW Developer Studio" (http://www.parinya.ca) It comes complete with a compiled tool chain. The Installer runs flawlessly under wine. And so is the Dev-Studio and the compiler. (1:0) for wine. The only thing that does not work is MinGW-gdb. One day I intend to check this code out and fix this area on wine.

Ferenc Wagner described the setup process for Debian:

And here are the steps needed to setup MinGW on Debian Woody (stable) (hope I remember correctly and you have unstable in sources.list):

    # apt-get install mingw32 mingw32-runtime/unstable
Documentation

If you've ever seen the term "critical section" and wondered what that meant, Mike Hearn found an article that may interest you:

I found this article:

There are two points of interest that we don't seem to cover:

  • RtlpWaitForCriticalSection will NOT block if the process is shutting down and the wait is on the loader lock. I've seen a fair few times when an app deadlocks on shutdown on the loader lock - could this be the cause?
  • The loader lock is stored at offset 0xA0 in the PEB. I doubt this is important, but now the info is published murphies law says one day an app will try and get to it directly.
Architecture Microsoft

Microsoft's Rich Edit controls are responsible for everything from text entry to paragraph formatting. A good example would be things "Wordpad" does. Subhobroto Sinha had a gripe about the status of Wine's builtin version:

Actually, I noticed this many times before (text not displaying at all in a RichEdit control..)

I am one of those (un)fortunate enough to not have a real Windows, and often download Win32 freeware to see how WINE's doing from time to time...

IMHO, one of the best tests are Steve Gibson's (www.grc.com) freeware tools - this guy writes in pure ASM. and thus we can be sure that his code will be the least messy (lesser MS stuff..)

However, if you try his 'Wizmo' or 'DCOMObulator', you will see that the RichEdit textareas as blank !

Joshua Walker wrote back with a pointer to a possible resource:

If you need the source of a program that can uses RTF as it's native format, can spit out microsoft-compatible RTF files, has all the tools for editing Rick Text, and the source is aviliable in C... then use the Source for "Ted"

I would toss it in myself, but I suck a coding. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

Good ol' ted. A long, long time ago it was my favorite editor (for a month.) Still, the properties of ted would might be a good starting point for working on this control. Any volunteers?

Winelib

I posted the following note because I thought it was interesting:

Looks like Nullsoft has released the Winamp 3 code as open source. I have no idea what their build process is like, but maybe porting it could be added to the Winelib page?

Dimi replied with a short blurb for the Winelib page.