Loading ...Getting 0.1.3 out of the way
So I’m thinking about polishing up the decrepit 0.1.x release and pushing out the 0.1.3 package, this is a bit of a pain as we don’t currently have a clear and concise situation report with 0.1.x series. What would be helpful to me is if people were to test the current trunk and provide any obvious broken bits info.
Also we need packages tested and get them so they mostly work again… Bugs have crept in left and right with the packages over the months (which is a pain to maintain) so if anyone has any patches, fixes tweaks etc… they’re most welcome.
I’m now wanting to concentrate my efforts onto the 0.2 development, as we’ve got a lot of work to get this application anywhere near complete, we’re rewriting most of it to give us engines, bottles and more…
Anyone interested in writing pygtk code, developing php code or getting involved in documenting and packaging should give me a shout.
Project restart
Wine-doors has of late been languishing without any attention, so over the next week I intend to restart the project fix some outstanding bugs and begin to move forward with the project once again.
The reason for the delay, for those of you who are unaware is that I’ve recently moved to Finland, to work for Nokia, this has been an especially busy time for me as you can probably imagine. I’m hoping to find the time to go through some outstanding repo bugs and begin carving out the new bottle engine for wine-doors 0.2, the future of wine-doors is going to be bright, but we always want new developers, new testers and packagers.
We’re also desparate for donations in order to support hosting costs and various other costs which have come up over time. So here’s the current path of wine-doors;
soonish 0.1.3 the last of 0.1, will include the fdi file for office 2k3 unhide and finally the office 2003 package I’ve promised you all so much… Office works, its simply a matter of getting unhide into HAL. This is trivial and we’ll get the fixes to you as soon as possible.
In the future 0.2, this release will be the new foundation of wine-doors, written in clear code, without the rats nest of import constipation that currently exists, cleaner more accessible UI and a full bottling system which will not only rival, but surpass Cedega’s. 0.2 will be different in many ways, and hopefully prevent conflicts in wine and help stabalise the wine-doors development in future pathing the way for us to create the ultimate application database and windows package repository.
Recently Andy has done some preliminary work on getting wine-doors onto windows, and hopefully with the native port of GTK+ being undertaken by immendio we’ll also be able to push wine-doors onto Mac OSX. Solaris is also going to happen… We’re hoping to make it into project indiana, and Sun have really done a good job on this project so maybe lots of us will start using Solaris soon.
Mailing lists back up … finally
I upgraded the slicehost that I use for hosting, it was very very painless… I just told it to resize and about 15 minutes later it was done :)
So mailing lists work again and we’ve got more space to do more things, this is all good but also more expensive :( feel free to donate :)
Migration status
So things have been a bit up and down lately. The server that is :(
At least now I’ve re-opened anonymous ticket reporting, got the trac admin/ticketdelete/spam plugins working again so we’re at least functional on the website… As long as it stays vertical… which it doesn’t…
So we’ve still got a mailman issue to overcome which is probably memory related, and we’re probably going to have to upgrade the hosting account as you hungry wine-doors users are eating up my bandwidth fairly quickly!
Major outages
So we’ve migrated everything we can to the new hosting, and we’re currently in a state where mailman kills the virtual server, trac webadmin doesn’t work, re-installing it doesn’t help, trac spam protection doesn’t work, and re-installing it doesn’t help.
As a result of the enormous amount of spamming we’ve had in the last few days, I’m turning off view/create/append access for visitors. It’s a pain in the backside having to deal with these spam bots manually, and our ticket delete plugin is of course buggered also.
Hopefully I’ll have fixed the bloody mime_magic error that would have buggered up a bunch of peoples use of the live repos, and yet I still have a considerable amount of work left to get this migration working. Not exactly my idea of fun as I’m in the process of emigrating
PLEASE BE PATIENT WITH ME ON THIS
Migration trouble
We’ve had a few troubles migrating from our old server to our new server, most of the work is complete although the mailing lists are still down for now.
The office 2003 challenge
So we can get Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Publisher working great with wine now, 0.9.52 really makes the difference, we’re still working on getting Access and Outlook working but things have moved along in testing, we only have one stumbling block…
We need to execute “mount /dev/cdrom -o remount,unhide” and ideally we’d do this by using “gnome-mount /dev/cdrom -o unhide” unfortunately we can’t as unhide isn’t an allowed mount option for gnome mount, and as we’re not likely to change that any time soon I am wondering if an enterprising hacker can come up with a solution. We can (and probably will) use gksu for ubuntu, but we lack anything similar on fedora, we could possibly provide an update for fedora including the necessary additions to HAL in order to get the unhide option working when we need to use it, this might also work for ubuntu.
Any suggestions on this are welcome, this is our last issue with office 2003 and we’d love to get the package out to you
Wine-doors 0.2 first look
So, the last two days I’ve been hard at work coding on the 0.2 structure and user interface, the application layout is a lot simpler and I’ve completely decoupled the user interface from the core functionality, so you’ll be able to use wine-doors on the command line or qt or whatever, osx is being looked into and if you’d like to help out please get in touch. So this is a first look at 0.2, and it wouldn’t be complete without the obligatory screen shot. So here you go… 
click to enlarge
What I’ve been working on;
- Snazzy sidebar giving you access to available apps and installed bottles
- New home page, giving you access to news and info about wine-doors (nowhere near complete)
- Completely reworked internals, fewer hacks to get things to and from the UI all the modules are formed around a central core now
- Completely new glade file, with only the bits we need in it from now on!
So I’ve managed to get quite a lot done in the last few days and things have moved along nicely, I’m going to make a start on the home page and knock up some simple XML for delivering info to users, we should have something like a working bottle system coming along next, and a whole new preferences and folder layout. We’ve got so much to do to get 0.2 finished but without taking what we’ve learned, and the limitations of wine and wine-doors we’ve observed we’ll never make any progress. After 0.2 I think the core of wine-doors can pretty much remain the same, for as long as until someone wants to refactor huge portions of it again.
So we’ve got a heavy emphasis on bottles but some people may think the user interface is lacking… just you wait! I’ve got some awesome ideas for how this is going to play out so just bare with me while I churn out another 1000 or so lines of code. The really interesting stuff starts to happen in about a month or so when we get to work on the new packaging system. We’ve put quite a bit of thought into this and you can read through our work on the wiki, we’re open to suggestions in a lot of different areas, but we think we’ve got all the bases covered though.
Internet Explorer … going native
We’ve ditched IEs4Linux, our reasons for this are many, mostly we couldn’t pull IE in as a dep, and the bottling arrangement would have made progress slow for us. We’ve used code from the original IEs4Linux script and trimmed it down and involved wine-doors dependencies rather than a full out overwriting of everything. We’ll probably still need to trim the registry down a bit, and we’ll offer another package for “FakeIE” soon so you can skirt around the problem if wine-gecko (the default html engine) won’t.
Video of installing ie in wine-doors, 2.6MB Ogg Theora
We’re involving downloads from various sources now, we’re hoping that linking to places like click-now.net isn’t a bad thing and it’ll get apps like photoshop out there much faster, also we’re driving business for adobe, maybe they’ll notice a sudden increase in CS2 sales…
In other news, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Quake4 have been added to the repos by Andy as reference packs for repackaging loki installers into wine-doors, these use native binaries and just use wine-doors as the conduit, these packages are being improved all the time and we’ll be adding more games like these later, re-adding ET:QW as a native application once we’ve gotten around some mojo-setup issues.
We’re concentrating on packages for now, and we’ll be bringing you updates on the feature set of 0.2 which is now in development.
Wine-doors 0.1.2 (Carménère) debian/ubuntu deb packages available
Andy Stormont has knocked together a deb file for the deb users out there. Grab it here