Hi,
I am looking into good way to port Windows applications
to Linux and hopefully any other Unixes.
I'd like to know about questions below.
If anyone answer them, I'd appreciate it.
1. Can I use Winelib to port commercial application
whose sources will be not disclosed ?
2. Is it possible to link Winelib statically with an application and distribute
it ?
3. In case that I don't use Winelib and use Wine instead
to provide commercial application,
can we include Wine with the application to distribute ?
4. Does porting with Winelib still need to compile MFC ?
libmfc42.so still doesn't work ?
5. Can Winelib deal with other languages besides English
such as Japanese and German ?
6. How is printing ? Can we print from ported application like Windows ?
7. Is the license condition of Winelib is as same as the one of Wine ?
8. It might be a problem compiling MFC on Linux and
distributing it with an application
because of MS's MFC license condition, right ?
But there are companies have already ported their applications with Winelib.
How did they avoid this type of problems ?
9. Though I think I have read most of part in winehq.com and
have checked newsgroups using groups.google.com,
if there are good information about porting by Winelib I'd like to know.
10. Is there good way to provide Help system
with ported application like Widows Help ?
Thanks in advance!
Masahiko Hayashi
Masahiko Hayashi wrote:> Hi, > > I am looking into good way to port Windows applications > to Linux and hopefully any other Unixes. > > I'd like to know about questions below. > If anyone answer them, I'd appreciate it. > > > 1. Can I use Winelib to port commercial application > whose sources will be not disclosed ?Yes.> > 2. Is it possible to link Winelib statically with an application and distribute it ?It is possible, but probably better to distribute shared object libraries - static linkage in Wine is broken at the moment. However, I think the important point of your question is: can we distribute our own version of Wine with our app, and the answer is yes.> > 3. In case that I don't use Winelib and use Wine instead > to provide commercial application, > can we include Wine with the application to distribute ?Yes> > 4. Does porting with Winelib still need to compile MFC ? > libmfc42.so still doesn't work ?Yes. You can compile the MFC source. It takes a bit of doing, but can be done. The winemaker tool is the key.> > 5. Can Winelib deal with other languages besides English > such as Japanese and German ?Yes.> > 6. How is printing ? Can we print from ported application like Windows ?Yes.> > 7. Is the license condition of Winelib is as same as the one of Wine ?Yes.> > 8. It might be a problem compiling MFC on Linux and > distributing it with an application > because of MS's MFC license condition, right ? > But there are companies have already ported their applications with Winelib. > How did they avoid this type of problems ?Their are a range of versions of MFC; most of them allow redistribution of MFC. For example, the most recent service pack of Visual C++ 6 allows for this.> > 9. Though I think I have read most of part in winehq.com and > have checked newsgroups using groups.google.com, > if there are good information about porting by Winelib I'd like to know.Probably the best source of information is the Winelib user documentation. There is a copy at http://wine.codeweavers.com/docs/winelib-user you can also find those same documents under the documentation directory in the main Wine source tree.> > 10. Is there good way to provide Help system > with ported application like Widows Help ?There is a winhelp executable under the programs directory. However, our customers generally prefer to switch to an alternate style of help, such as HTML. Jeremy White CEO CodeWeavers, Inc.
> 1. Can I use Winelib to port commercial application > whose sources will be not disclosed ?yes. Wine is developped under a X11 like licence which allows that> 2. Is it possible to link Winelib statically with an application and distribute it ?it has been possible at some point in the past, but because of the ways DLLs are handled now it's now longer in the main tree (and main become a bit difficult to handle) furthermore, it's a bad idea if any ported app from windows has to have it's bundled Wine image, it'll eat lots of memory (disk, RAM...)> 3. In case that I don't use Winelib and use Wine instead > to provide commercial application, > can we include Wine with the application to distribute ?yup (or I don't see any reasons not to do so)> 4. Does porting with Winelib still need to compile MFC ? > libmfc42.so still doesn't work ?well, either you distribute the native mfc (which should work), or you recompile native MFC for linux. Since, this is a derivate work from the MS folks, it cannot be included with the wine tree. However, some folks are still working on it> 5. Can Winelib deal with other languages besides English > such as Japanese and German ?Wine is designed to mimic Windows behavior and support (at least on the API level) both ansi (including various code pages) and unicode versions. So, it shouldn't be an issue. Most built-in DLLs come with their resources in several languages> 6. How is printing ? Can we print from ported application like Windows ?yes. support has been recently greatly improved (both the postscript driver and a driver to connect to the CUPS system, which hides all the complexity of the printer configuration)> 7. Is the license condition of Winelib is as same as the one of Wine ?yes. both are distributed under the same licence> 8. It might be a problem compiling MFC on Linux and > distributing it with an application > because of MS's MFC license condition, right ? > But there are companies have already ported their applications with Winelib. > How did they avoid this type of problems ?well. They shouldn't have used MFC ;-)> 9. Though I think I have read most of part in winehq.com and > have checked newsgroups using groups.google.com, > if there are good information about porting by Winelib I'd like to know.well, read the code Luke! specmaker (from the CVS tree) might be the best way to start> 10. Is there good way to provide Help system > with ported application like Widows Help ?windows help used to work (even if 32 bit version had some trouble) anyway, if you consider doing serious porting job with Wine, I'd advise posting to wine-devel@winehq.com where you might the best technical answers A+ -- --------------- Eric Pouech (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/eric.pouech/) "The future will be better tomorrow", Vice President Dan Quayle
Jeremy and Eric Thank you for your reply. I also wonder why IBM Homepage builder and Corel WordPerfect use Wine and not Winelib. Does porting with Winelib is harder than using Wine ? Did they simply want to keep single source code for Window and Linux ? Is there any commercial product ported with Winelib ? Thanks in advance! Masahiko Hayashi