So, not content with merely having the idea of a Wine-based Linux distro, I decided to try setting up Wine as a desktop shell on top of Arch Linux, with the help of the alternative Windows shell BBLean. Basically I just installed BBLean in Wine and put Code: exec wine "c:\bbLean\blackbox.exe" in my .xinitrc. First impression: It's darn slow. Really darn slow. And crashes a lot. [Laughing] Nonetheless, it works... and pretty well considering that's not what it's designed for. Some things I'm noticing: - Lots of "fixme" messages in the console. LOTS. Hundreds of them. Never seen so many. I'm thinking maybe it has to do with Arch Linux compiling everything -O2? Or maybe it's just because nobody ever tried BBLean on Wine before. :? - Despite the sluggishness of the desktop shell, K-Meleon (once it launches, which takes about 10 seconds) is very very fast. Faster than Chrome running natively on Linux, and leaves Firefox on Linux completely in the dust. More proof IMO that browsing on Linux is in a bad way. (Then again, last I tried Windows 7, browsing was also slow as heck. I seem to be mentally comparing everything to the speed of Windows XP.) - More on the sluggishness: applications are slow to launch, but what's particularly annoying is that their GUIs refresh slowly, taking about a second to redraw after anything is dragged over them. Could be a hardware or driver issue though. - Likewise, lots of cursor freezes. This though I know is not Wine's fault; rather it's the interaction between Wine and the new KMS-capable Intel driver. Basically with the KMS driver you get cursor skipping with certain programs. No idea why. [Rolling Eyes] - I haven't yet figured out a way to mount external drives in the Wine shell. HAL seems not to work. Maybe use static mountpoints? I'll keep you folks posted as I continue to mess around with it.
On 6 March 2010 22:57, Gullible Jones <wineforum-user at winehq.org> wrote:> - Lots of "fixme" messages in the console. LOTS. Hundreds of them. Never seen so many. I'm thinking maybe it has to do with Arch Linux compiling everything -O2? Or maybe it's just because nobody ever tried BBLean on Wine before. :?Wine FIXME: messages are notes from developers to other developers should basically be ignored for almost all purposes - they're for such things as "this function is actually a stub and hasn't been written yet." No-one worries about them unless and until the incompleteness of the function in question turns out to be problematic in practice. (Remember that Wine was not written by sitting down with MSDN and reimplementing the whole thing - it's done with each piece being written *as and when* an application actually needs it, and quite a lot of apps want to check for functions they never actually get around to using for things ... the world of Windows programs turns out in practice to be a complete mess.) - d.
Gullible Jones you really don't understand what you are looking at. The performance issues in browsers are coming from many issues. One is gcc itself another is filesystem syncing. http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html This upcoming gcc complier will be able to build browsers way better. There is also graphical acceleration issues linked to intel drivers. Ie wine takes the output 1 path native takes another. Both are different speeds. All those fixmes is that windows manager support functions are missing from wine. Nothing todo with -02 Redrawing will be worse compisting on desktop to make appearance more stable is not enabled by windows manager running in wine. Wine is not built to mount drives this is part secuirty containment. Got some big bad news particular programs hate BBLean. So your experiment is a real waste of time.
Gullible Jones wrote:> So, not content with merely having the idea of a Wine-based Linux distro, I decided to try setting up Wine as a desktop shell on top of Arch Linux, with the help of the alternative Windows shell BBLean. Basically I just installed BBLean in Wine and put > > > Code: > > exec wine "c:\bbLean\blackbox.exe" > > > > in my .xinitrc. > > First impression: It's darn slow. Really darn slow. And crashes a lot. [Laughing] >Well this is definitely a start. However, you do have to have a way to get to the Linux part. Not everyone does or should run Windows exclusive programs.> Nonetheless, it works... and pretty well considering that's not what it's designed for. > > Some things I'm noticing: > > - Lots of "fixme" messages in the console. LOTS. Hundreds of them. Never seen so many. I'm thinking maybe it has to do with Arch Linux compiling everything -O2? Or maybe it's just because nobody ever tried BBLean on Wine before. :? >A lot of the fixme calls are due to the kluges used to get some, if not all, Windows programs working. Returning an 'OK' to a call like 'Are you connected to the Internet' can be the difference between a program working and a program crashing. Some programs actually check to for what kind of connection and Wine will always return "LAN" whether this is true or not. Thus, a good effort might be to actually 'flesh' this out and make the call to Linux for connection type work. Like others here, please keep on working on this. An alterative to the existing Gnome/KDE desktops that runs Windows programs is always welcome. Running the Window API in the Kernel is almost as dangerous as running Windows itself, and can be just as wasteful of resources. James McKenzie
Huh... So much for that idea I guess. If Wine has that many problems with 2D acceleration this whole thing is probably not worth it at all. And being a beastly kludge and all... I guess I should not waste any more time on it.