WINE on HAIKU?

Submitted by unxed on Sat, 2008-05-10 15:10.   Tags: 

In his excellent article, "Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems", famous Joel Spolski writes:

Quote:

Nobody is going to use your platform until there's good software that runs on it, and nobody is going to write software until you have a big installed base.

Linux overcomes this barrier by supporting POSIX architecture (making easy to port software from UNIX systems) and also by supporting win32 API through WINE.

As it is declared on the home page of the project, WINE is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix.

As WINE it is API Layer based on POSIX, may it be possible to make a Haiku port of it? It could bring haiku a great number of running software (including FOSS, as most of it now has it's own win32 ports).

I'm interested to hear from Haiku developers about this idea.

Thanks for your very interesting project!

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koki
Re: WINE on HAIKU?
Submitted by Jorge G. Mare on Tue, 2008-05-13 02:42.

There was a BeWine project, but it doesn't look like it has been actively developed for quite a while. You can find some info here:

http://bewine.loungenet.org
http://www.bebits.com/app/2388

The Wine FAQ at...

http://www.winehq.org/site/docs/wine-faq/index

...states that "porting efforts (BeWine) used to be pretty strong, but BeOS has severe limitations in Unix call support. The demise of Be further hampered the project though it might come back one day on one of the open BeOS projects."

Hopefully someone will pickup BeWine or restart a port of Wine for Haiku some day.

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darkwyrm
Re: WINE on HAIKU?
Submitted by DarkWyrm on Tue, 2008-05-13 10:40.

Joel isn't necessarily correct in all cases. There's quite a bit of software already available for BeOS, thanks to the dedication of many hobby programmers. All that's missing is a halfway decent office suite, and even then, we're partway there -- all that's really missing is features in Sum-It and there isn't a presentation program. Don't get me wrong, though, WINE would be a nice addition to Haiku. It's just not the only hope of Haiku being mainstream at some point. ;)

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mmu_man
Re: WINE on HAIKU?
Submitted by François Revol on Thu, 2008-05-15 12:33.

It should be possible but remember X is not part of POSIX...
There is an X11 server for BeOS though so it should be possible to have something usable rapidly.
Or one could try to use http://sourceforge.jp/projects/bexlib/ but it's not really finished.

There used to be something called WinBe, but it never really got finished either.

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arielb
Re: WINE on HAIKU?
Submitted by arielb on Thu, 2008-05-15 16:59.

it is important that Haiku isn't just a somewhat nicer "playground" for the same old apps but rather a way of having better apps through use of its services. People would switch to haiku because the haiku apps use translators and attributes and are more responsive. There are UI standards.

There needs to be new ideas like a new system of OLE linking where you can mix different apps so that you can create a spreadsheet in one app, have it embedded your word processor doc and use another spreadsheet app so that you are not locked into a 'suite' I would like to see many spreadsheets competing and that will happen only if they don't have to reinvent the wheel with file format compatibility.

We have to insist on these points otherwise what's the point of the best scrollbar (taking from another discussion...) if the rest of your computing experience isn't very good at all?

It is very important that Haiku has strong haiku app development. Those that develop apps for haiku will also want to contribute to the Haiku OS and that will make haiku a lot stronger.

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mmu_man
Re: WINE on HAIKU?
Submitted by François Revol on Thu, 2008-05-15 19:00.

Problem is that the lack of apps is usually a blocker on OS adoption. And native apps take time to write, so being able to use existing apps lowers the entry barrier. Besides some software is unportable (proprietary...) and just too complex or specific.

As for OLE stuff, the replicant mechanism can easily be extended to allow for generic ones selected on mime-types.

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