Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: wine

  • Free Codeweavers Wine today Only

    This is for Mac or Linux. Their servers are VERY busy right now as you might imagine. But, if you’ve always wondered about crossover wine, see if you can get a copy today at Codeweavers main site. I was redirected to their DOWN page which is a lean page with the download links and a place to sign up for a license key. The license key you can register by the end of the month. Right now their server is crying since they’ve been dugg and slashdot’ted at the same time, but I’m sure it will be possible to slip in sometime today for a free copy of their polished product.

    On a side note, I’ve been a paying crossover license owner for some time although on my current main laptop I’ve been using stock wine with VERY good results. If you look “up the food chain” though. Many of the good results we get in the free stock wine is thanks to the work at codeweavers. So…. in spite of todays free offer, they deserve the communities support if you believe that a working Windows compatibility layer is important to the future of operating systems such as Linux.

  • Internet Explorer 7 on linux

    Haven’t had the chance to try this one firsthand yet, although I’ve been watching for this. You may be familiar with ies4linux which is a script that uses wine to download/install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on a linux install. (But why oh why would you do this?) For many that do web design it’s a tremendously good idea to test what a website looks like in multiple browsers because they all have their own unique …. quirks. Of course, there are other reasons…. sites that refuse to work with anything but IE. (Blue Cross/Blue Shield for instance has some web apps that will not work with anything else.)

    Well… now Internet Explorer 7 is supported by ies4linux….

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  • Microsoft Update day for September…. AND Flash… AND Apple

    Yesterday, of course, Microsoft released it’s monthly patches. I found the Windows update site to be painfully slow (and in some cases unresponsive.) It wasn’t quite a huge update day by recent standards, but here’s the summary…. Incidents.org has a nice chart showing the two re-released patches (one is actually re-re-released…) They are MS06-040 (server service patch – critical) and MS06-042 (IE 6 patch). Both of those vulnerabilities addressed are well known and could be actively exploited. The “first release” updates from this month affect Microsoft Queue System MS06-052 which is the most important of the releases….

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  • Codeweavers releases beta of Windows compatibility software for Apple Mac OS X

    Yesterday codeweavers announced a beta release of their Crossover Office product geared towards Apple Mac OS X users. The software will allow certain windows applications to run on top of Apple’s operating system. They’re of course, seeking feedback and suggestions for what direction to take the project. This is based on the wine project, codeweavers also has Crossover Office for Linux. (The beta release is 6.0, currently the linux version is at 5.0.3)

  • Flashplayer 9 on linux

    Macromedia Flash player 9 running on linux? Impossible? No… many things that seem impossible, well… aren’t This morning there’s a good writeup at how-to-forge about installing flash player 9 on linux. It involves wine and the how-to is specific to Ubuntu. However, the first two steps (sudo apt-get install wine and sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts) are the only ones that are ubuntu specific. For your given distribution, install according to your distro (urpmi/etc.)

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  • Helixplayer to include Windows media file viewer

    WMV and WMA file formats (Windows Media Video and Windows Media Audio) have been one of those sore spots for desktop linux. Yes, I KNOW mplayer and other players can handle them. (If the codecs are installed.) (and wine can run media player) But, there have been licensing issues there. The fact is, distributions that are strict about their “open source only” policy have a situation where those formats don’t work out of the box. That appears as though it will change soon as Real Networks includes open source codecs for those formats in it’s Helixplayer. DRM (Digital Rights Management) will not be supported in the helixplayer project.

  • Running windows applications directly in linux

    Linux.com has a good explanation of using binfmt_misc to directly launch a windows (or java or python) application just by typing in the application name. *(without all the contortions of … /home/user/bin/wine /home/user/.wine/c_drive/Program\ Files/Really\ Neat\ Software/Program.exe ) You do have to make the app executable under linux (chmod 755) and you can take it as far as symlinking from a directory in your path (/home/user/bin???) or the system path (/usr/bin).

  • Wine-Doors the future of Windows software installing on Linux

    I just came across this article about wine-doors which sounds VERY promising. Of course, let me set the stage. Wine is a windows compatibility api for linux. The goal of wine is to allow windows applications to run on top of a linux system without modification (of the original windows version.) There are codeweavers wine (a commercial version that drives most of the development – and is known for easier installs of software.), the main open source wine and cedaga (aimed towards games 3d directx implementation.)

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  • Google Earth for Linux

    One of the big linux news stories yesterday was the release of google earth for linux. Essentially the Google earth team has released “release 4” which is a beta version of the next release. It looks like there are greater “user contribution” capabilities with this release. I’ve tried the download for linux and can say that it installs well, the user interface looks fine (it’s not a wine-wrapper application – it’s a true linux port.) It’s not usable yet (for me…)

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  • Remote Tech Support using VNC (Ultravnc SC and x11vnc+wrapper script)

    Ok, some time back I’d done a writeup on UltraVNC SC, which is a nice customizable (windows version) VNC server that essentially let’s someone doing remote support build their own downloadable .exe that runs and automatically tries to make a direct connection to a “listening” vnc viewer. It’s good for helpdesk environments as an easy download and run, and I’ve done some trials at using it over the internet with some of my existing computer service customers. Very soon, I’ll be adding a page and information about Remote Tech support services using this same method. I have run into some problems with it though. There are multiple advantages to this approach though (the main being NO firewall config for the user needing remote support – all firewall config is done at the “support center” end. Another advantage being that it’s “hardcoded” to connect to a specific given address and if that fails it gives up and uninstalls itself. The last advantage being that it completely uninstalls after a successful session as well. (Well, technically it never “installs” to begin with.))

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