The DarWINE Project

[Sneeper]

The open-sourced WINE on Linux allows Linux users to run (*some*) Windows programs seamlessly. Some programs work much better than others, but it's always been a Work in Progress. (For example, you can run Photoshop 7 but not Photoshop CS yet).


Someone has created a project to bring Wine to OS X.
http://darwine.opendarwin.org/

While of course a native OS X app is far better than emulating a Windows app, sometimes there are Windows apps that have no equivolent in OS X. Hopefully DarWINE will help fill this gap.

Of course VMWare/VirtualPC will run a lot more apps, but DarWINE is seamless (check out the screen shot) and it's Free. Here's hoping it does well!

 

[stoid]

This sounds great! It seems still in the realm of OpenOffice requiring a serious geek with lots of time to install. Any chance that this would hit the same popularity or ease of use of VPC?


The nice thing about this is that it seems that you wouldn't have to buy a copy of Windows in order to run the Windows apps. And that alone would be worth the time to keep people from having to shell out to MS anyway.

 

[CubaTBird]

eh

i installed open office with no problems and i already had x11, when i double click x11 open office launches automatically and im good to go

 

[Sneeper]

This sounds great! It seems still in the realm of OpenOffice requiring a serious geek with lots of time to install. Any chance that this would hit the same popularity or ease of use of VPC?

It is SO far out of the realm of OpenOffice at this point that they can't even see each other without the Hubble Telescope.

This project is in its infancy.. At this point, only developers are working on it.

Hopefully some day it'll have an installer and be all user friendly. Fortunately though, it will not be using X11 like OpenOffice does. I hope OpenOffice makes an Aqua version some day. THat would be nice.

 

[stcanard]

I hope OpenOffice makes an Aqua version some day. THat would be nice.

They plan to for version 2.0. The problem is that the interfaces are being completely reworked for that version, so it's not worth doing all the work for an Aqua interface now, just to have it obsoleted in the near future.

On the darwine side, I'm actually more interested in the winelib part than the emulation and that's already complete. Essentially as it is now, you can recompile Win32 source code and run it on Macs (mind you it's not that easy, there's a bit of kung-fu involved ). That's actually how Corel created Word Perfect for Linux.

I've installed and played with QEMU, the emulator that darwine is planning to use), and it's really quite nice. As long as you're comfortable working with ISO images it's pretty easy to use, and is noticeably faster than BOCHS -- I managed to do a Windows 98 install on my PB in 90 minutes, and it even looks usable! I haven't benchmarked it yet.

Of course I have no use for Windows (I can't think of a single Windows only program I need, but after years of Linux use I'd pretty much divested myself of those needs anyway), but it's fuin to try just because we can

 

[dolphin842]

I've installed and played with QEMU, the emulator that darwine is planning to use), and it's really quite nice. As long as you're comfortable working with ISO images it's pretty easy to use, and is noticeably faster than BOCHS -- I managed to do a Windows 98 install on my PB in 90 minutes, and it even looks usable! I haven't benchmarked it yet.

I'm just starting out w/ QEMU, and have been trying to do an install of Win98, but to no avail. I used Disk Utility to make an image of my install CD, and the bios recognizes and tries to load it, but qemu crashes before the install menu comes up.

Is there something I'm doing wrong? Any help would be very much appreciated!

 

[stcanard]

I'm just starting out w/ QEMU, and have been trying to do an install of Win98, but to no avail. I used Disk Utility to make an image of my install CD, and the bios recognizes and tries to load it, but qemu crashes before the install menu comes up.

Is there something I'm doing wrong? Any help would be very much appreciated!

Hmm, I created the disk image slightly differently. I suspect disk utility is making an image that is slightly different from what QEMU expects.

Here's what I did (warning, you will need to reboot to get the CD out of the drive because OSX starts to get confused when you do this; I've done this procedure a number of times and never had a problem after rebooting):

1) After putting the CD in the drive, open terminal
2) type "mount" -- it should give you a list of mounted drives, including the CD you put in. Take note of the device, in my case it's /dev/disk1 for the drive. Now do the following:

bash> umount /dev/disk1
bash> dd if=/dev/disk1 of=~/win92_image.iso bs=1024

Now you have to reboot to get the disk out. Try QEMU again with that iso image and see if it helps. FWIW I'm using V 0.5.5

 

[ravenvii]

Hmm, I created the disk image slightly differently. I suspect disk utility is making an image that is slightly different from what QEMU expects.

Here's what I did (warning, you will need to reboot to get the CD out of the drive because OSX starts to get confused when you do this; I've done this procedure a number of times and never had a problem after rebooting):

1) After putting the CD in the drive, open terminal
2) type "mount" -- it should give you a list of mounted drives, including the CD you put in. Take note of the device, in my case it's /dev/disk1 for the drive. Now do the following:

bash> umount /dev/disk1
bash> dd if=/dev/disk1 of=~/win92_image.iso bs=1024

Now you have to reboot to get the disk out. Try QEMU again with that iso image and see if it helps. FWIW I'm using V 0.5.5

Couldn't you then just type mount /dev/disk1 ./Desktop (assuming you're still in your user folder), then eject it the OS X way, to get it out?

 

[stcanard]

Couldn't you then just type mount /dev/disk1 ./Desktop (assuming you're still in your user folder), then eject it the OS X way, to get it out?

Strangely, no, because there is extra information hidden somewhere. You can remount it and access it, but OSX won't recognize it because it still thinks it's mounted in the original directory. If you try remounting on the oridinal directory in /Volumes, you end up with two directories (or something like that, it's been a long time since I tried).

I've tried playing with diskutil to unmount it in an OSX friendly manner, but I have not yet figured out how to get diskutil to unmount removeable media without also ejecting it.

So when I need direct disk access I always end up with this really messy way of doing things.

 

[dolphin842]

1) After putting the CD in the drive, open terminal
2) type "mount" -- it should give you a list of mounted drives, including the CD you put in. Take note of the device, in my case it's /dev/disk1 for the drive. Now do the following:

bash> umount /dev/disk1
bash> dd if=/dev/disk1 of=~/win92_image.iso bs=1024

Thanks for the tip! I'm making the image as we speak. Just a note for others, when I first tried to unmount my CD, I got an "operation not permitted" error. I got around this by putting sudo before the umount command.

I'll give an update once I'm able to try out the new image.

Update: qemu's still crashing on me in the same spot. I have a feeling this is due to the fact that my win98 CD is one of those computer-company-modified versions (mine's from Packard Bell). Has anyone else been able to do an install from a proprietary CD?

 

[stcanard]

Update: qemu's still crashing on me in the same spot. I have a feeling this is due to the fact that my win98 CD is one of those computer-company-modified versions (mine's from Packard Bell). Has anyone else been able to do an install from a proprietary CD?

That would probably do it, as they probably have come sort of copy protection on the CD. Mine was a Gateway that was protected and I got around it, although YMMV (note: under Canadian law this is legal, as there are restrictions on what companies can restrict; essentially as long as it's a legally purchased version, and you are only installing a single instance they can't restrict it to a specific computer -- and considering how many times I have had to pay the Microsoft tax on my linux/openbsd computers I really don't feel guilty).

Anyway, this is how I did it:

There was a program on the CD that when ran reported bios information. The installer checked the output of this program to ensure I was installing it on the correct computer. So I found a dos based C-compiler that could create console programs that ran without any external libraries (neither gcc nor Visual Studio work for this, I found an old freeware one), and created a program that produced the exact same output regardless of that computer it was running on (simple printf). I created an iso of the CD, replaced the original program with my version, and burned it back to CD.

Voila, a disk that is installable anywhere!

As a side note, I did this because I had to do Windows 98 compatibility testing for a client. I went to buy a copy of Win 98, but since ME had been released MS had withdrawn all copies of Win 98 from the shelves, so I was unable to purchase one even to do backwards compatibility testing.

 

[dolphin842]

Yes, I can imagine that the CD would be modified in some way to do that, but I've installed it on another x86 box w/ different hardware and it worked. I assume it's just a limitation of the emulator, as it makes sense to focus on supporting the 'standard' Win9x CDs. Perhaps I'll mess about it some more.

Thanks again, though, for your help!