MenZa’s Weblog

Lots of Linux users already know about Wine. So do I, and I’ve known about it for a long time.

For the ones of you who don’t know, Wine is a compatibility layer for Unix-like operating systems (Wine is Not an Emulator), designed to run applications built for Windows in said Unix-like operating system.

As I said, I’ve known about Wine for a long time, but Wine is improving every day, and is really becoming a great piece of software.

I’ll take an example: I’m a gamer (well, was before I switched to Linux), and I like to play the latest and the greatest of games, especially Half-Life 2 and related games. Valve, the developers of Half-Life 2, recently launched The Orange Box, a bulk of games including Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and Portal. I’ve been looking forward to especially the latter two—I own the two former already.

At first I thought “aw hell”—these games were for Windows. While I have run HL2 successfully with Wine before, it had a few mildly annoying bugs. Not that annoying, but just enough to make me refuse to go out and pay $60 for a set of games I couldn’t run perfectly.

The last couple of days, however, I’ve heard so much about the games I felt I had to try, at least. I downloaded the latest version of Wine, 0.9.47, and gave it a whirl. It didn’t work. After grumbling a bit, I today decided to try installing Windows on my box—after all, I had paid $62.30 for these games, so I just had to try them.

They didn’t work. I kept getting errors about the main file, hl2.exe, so I rebooted into Ubuntu, installed Wine 0.9.46 and Steam—the application required to run all these games. And lo and behold:

It works. Steam works. And it actually looks kinda native. Also:

See, that’s cool. And games run flawlessly:

For more pics, see my flickr.

OK, so the above story isn’t the whole truth. I’ve had tons of problems with these games here—I tried for hours yesterday, looked through the Wine AppDB and a bunch of other things without getting it to work. Now it works flawlessly, and it took very, very little effort.

Anyway, the point I wanted forth here, is that the Wine team is doing an insanely good job, and getting far too little attention. If you ever run into a Wine dev, buy them a beer. They deserve it.

Priceless (to you UbuntuWeblogs readers: sorry, but I felt I had to share this with everyone.)

While I do have a very nice phone already, the Sony Ericsson K800i, I’ve decided to look for a new one, with a certain array of features:

• 802.11b/g/n support (n isn’t important, but definitely appreciated),
• Large touch screen (preferable with multi touch)
• Ability to install a PDF reader if not available by default—I want it to work as my eBook reader
• Ability to play ogg vorbis files, or to install an application that will
• Preferably one running Linux (fat chance)
• Ability to sync with Evolution somehow.

Has anyone got any idea where to find this? I’ve had a look at the Nokia N800 tablet, which runs a variant of Debian… only to discover it hasn’t got a phone.

I’ve also looked at the OpenMoko phone, Neo1973, but it doesn’t seem like it’s living up to its hype, and there isn’t even a proper version of it out yet (though there is one due in December).

What are your suggestions?