WINE. Do you use it, and what for?

Saint of Killers

Greetings gents. I figured this question might be worth asking, to get a feel of what others might find a use for it. I love free software, and an really impressed with how much functionality BLAG can offer using free software, and despite sampling other distros, this one is a stayer. Excellent.

Anyway, as glad as I am to be from under the shadown of MS, and not really needing to boot up my XP drive for months now, there are still a few Windows apps I find that I just don't like being without, as I've grown so used to them, and they're so very useful for times when other stuff just doesn't offer the same simplicity and ease of use.

My personal ones are the delightful Irfanview, with it's multitude of simple functions, graphic support, batch conversion, and many other features. Also, being able to use all it's functions in gui using only the keyboard is also handy. Nothing else so far matches all it's features. I'm sure some of you might try and argue this, but it offers me everything i need in one single package, and is so simplistic to use.

My others are DVDShrink and DVDDecryptor. Ever since discovering the awesome OGMRip, I'm backing up many of my discs as vid files, but for direct copying, and shrinking to single layer discs, these two do an awesome and straight-forward job.

Aside from this handful, I find all my needs easily dealt with by the Free Software offerings. Do you have anything you need WINE for? Please share. :)

extraspecialbitter · Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 1:20 pm Post subject:

I personally find WINE much too cumbersome and kludgy to use for the few Windoze apps I might have the occasion to run (the Rosetta Stone language program being one of them). What I've done instead is to boot Windows as a VM under either QEMU or VirtualBox and to run the program there. Just my two pesos, mind you.

brixtoncalling · Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 2:09 pm Post subject:

I use it for MS Word actually. Now, without exception, I do all my writing in OpenOffice and save in .odt format. But when I need to do editing for other people, it always comes in .doc and I often have to use the track changes functionality. OO supports it, but I'm not 100% sure it's compatible with MSOffice and to be perfectly honest it doesn't work as well (yet!). I'm not too keen on editing a big doc and having some compatibility issues after the fact.

So for the time being I occasionally fire MS Office up with Wine. It's a bit damming of OO that it actually takes longer to load than MS Word does using Wine.

Maybe I should try a VM though. Can I boot an existing Windows partition under a VM? I'm a bit ignorant on these matters ...

Saint of Killers · Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 11:51 pm Post subject:

Why has this been moved to Slaveware? Wine is not slaveware, and this is not a support question, it's a discussion. Please put it back where it belongs.

jebba · Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 12:48 am Post subject:

Saint of Killers · Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 1:27 am Post subject:

It's not a support question. This section is listed as for "issues with non-free software", and this is merely a general discussion. This is not sa support matter. Why could it not be left in general? It does seem unreasonable.

jebba · Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 1:31 am Post subject:

noldrin · Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 3:43 am Post subject:

While theoretically one could use Wine in a complete Free Software Stack. a GPL windows program on a vanilla Wine install, this is hardly ever the case for what it's used for.

jebba · Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 4:13 am Post subject:

Saint of Killers · Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 8:35 am Post subject:

WINE can be used for all manner of apps. Just because the few mentioned so far are no-free should not automatically relegate it to slaveware. It is a GENERAL discussion, hence posting in general. I don't understand why you are being so adamant. I simply thought I would try and get involved and see a topic to discuss, and you decide to sling it straight to "slaveware", a term I find offensive at best. If I'd known trying to have a reasonable general discussion was going to be frowned upon because of my choice of topic, I would not have bothered. The discu7ssion is about wine and what people use it for. Not all apps need be non-free. And it's not a support question, which is what i thought this section was about.

I give up.

saddletramp · Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 12:59 pm Post subject:

i'm in about the same boat as you. although i can tolerate using blags image viewer, irfanview is an awesomely simple viewer that i've used for years!

my main reason for hanging on to windows is the total lack of usb support for visioneer scannners under linux.

to answer your question though, no, i do not use wine.

noldrin · Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 2:27 pm Post subject:

Try not to take forum moderation personally, the point of forum moderation is to keep forums on the intended track. And after all, it's only the internet.

The point of BLAG is free software. This is what the desired focus of the forums is, issues related to free software with BLAG. The reason the slaveware forum exists is to remove clutter while keeping the topic around for people to be able to talk about it. This is rather generous as other forums might just delete the off topic posts.

Why do you find the term slaveware offensive? Do you design or produce slaveware?

The short of it is this topic was recommending non free software, so it was no longer about free software.

jebba · Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 3:42 pm Post subject:

Have you tried gqview image viewer? that's definitely my favourite.

jebba · Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 4:02 pm Post subject: