For some time now I have been researching the upcoming Windows 7, scheduled for release in 2009 - 2010. Recently, a number of websites have stated that Microsoft is no longer including backwards compatibility with software from previous versions of Windows. From the number of sites, I'm guessing this is not just a rumor. And considering the almost infinitely massive list of Windows programs already in existence, previous users of Windows will not be very happy about it. So, would it be possible to create a version of Wine that could run under a Windows environment as its own executable? I've tried sifting through the .zip archives, and only found the stuff that Wine installs to imitate Windows. So far the only other solution would be to install an older Windows on a virtual machine or by finding some kind of emulator, but after using Wine and seeing its friendliness, I believe a Windows version of Wine would be best for this task. Thank you, Ryan Northrup P.S. If there is another section of winehq.org that is more suited for suggestions, then redirection would be greatly appreciated.
Northrup wrote:> For some time now I have been researching the upcoming Windows 7, scheduled for release in 2009 - 2010. > > Recently, a number of websites have stated that Microsoft is no longer including backwards compatibility with software from previous versions of Windows. From the number of sites, I'm guessing this is not just a rumor. And considering the almost infinitely massive list of Windows programs already in existence, previous users of Windows will not be very happy about it. > > So, would it be possible to create a version of Wine that could run under a Windows environment as its own executable? I've tried sifting through the .zip archives, and only found the stuff that Wine installs to imitate Windows. So far the only other solution would be to install an older Windows on a virtual machine or by finding some kind of emulator, but after using Wine and seeing its friendliness, I believe a Windows version of Wine would be best for this task. > > Thank you, > Ryan Northrup > > > P.S. If there is another section of winehq.org that is more suited for suggestions, then redirection would be greatly appreciated.Wine's objective is to run windows programs on *NIX (Linux, Mac, BSD, etc). windows is not *NIX so Wine won't run on it as simple as that. Yes some dlls can be used as a replacement but that is pretty much limited to "peripheral" dlls - those that are built on another layer. Or some special cases, like d3d9 which is built on top of OpenGL. Core dlls, such as kernel32.dll, user32.dllm shell32.dll, ntdll.dll & co won't ever work. And trust me, most of the "legacy" junk windows has is spread among those core dlls that do lots of nasty stuff to stay compatible with old legacy programs.
there were talks about this (using cygwin and wine) http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2000-12/msg00010.html... but I don't what happened in the end with that
Northrup wrote:> For some time now I have been researching the upcoming Windows 7, scheduled for release in 2009 - 2010. > > Recently, a number of websites have stated that Microsoft is no longer including backwards compatibility with software from previous versions of Windows. From the number of sites, I'm guessing this is not just a rumor. And considering the almost infinitely massive list of Windows programs already in existence, previous users of Windows will not be very happy about it. > > So, would it be possible to create a version of Wine that could run under a Windows environment as its own executable? I've tried sifting through the .zip archives, and only found the stuff that Wine installs to imitate Windows. So far the only other solution would be to install an older Windows on a virtual machine or by finding some kind of emulator, but after using Wine and seeing its friendliness, I believe a Windows version of Wine would be best for this task. > > Thank you, > Ryan Northrup > > > P.S. If there is another section of winehq.org that is more suited for suggestions, then redirection would be greatly appreciatedI think this would very much depend on what windows 7 is actually based on. If it's posix based, you could probably run wine on it. In the (imo much more probable) case it's a 'cleaned up' version of current windows apis, running wine on it would be far from trivial, as would running its apps in wine on other platforms.
I strongly doubt Microsoft will change anything about Windows. And how exactly would running Wine be trivial? Especially if legacy support will be either reduced to mediocracy or abandoned completely?
Northrup they hare doing the alterations to allow it. Hypervisor allowing many versions of windows to be run side by side. Everything I have seen Windows 7 is not really to make the jump. Windows 8 maybe. You have another nice issue. Wine is tested a lot with gcc almost none with MSVC. So things could get really interesting. There are a lot of other things that will make doing it hard Northrup. Ie MS posix layour all times recently I have looked are way out of date compared to current day posix standards. If it was upto date the would be a good chance wine could be built there. Thinking the MS posix layour has a gcc complier. Also wine is C. And the issue wine has with MSVC are not really C++ relegated. Gcc and MSVC have different ammouts of standard incompatibility.