Installing Old Counter Strike

I just got bored today and i decided to install the old Counter Strike game from Valve using Wine and it worked out-of-the-box. Amazing. In the past, CS was considered one of the best FPS game in their era and few years later, Valve has released the sequel of this famous game.


Wine has been maturing lately and every two weeks, they released a snapshot which is getting better and better. Even though they are considered developer snapshot, they are quite stable for daily use. I have been following their work and so far, it has been a good cycle.

Wine 1.4 is Near

Wine, the project that enables users to run Windows application on Linux platform is now reaching a big milestone with 1.4 is getting frozen and the first RC version is out for public. The last major release was 1.2 and it was more than one year ago and since then, the developer has released a developer snapshot every two weeks and the last snapshot was 1.3.37 and now it has been replaced by 1.4-RC1.

We will have a final 1.4 release this year and i hope that it will be another great release as more and more Windows application is running on Linux, makes it easier for user to switch to Linux.

hjsplit for Linux

In the past, i have to use Wine in order to ran hjsplit to split/join files, since it's only available on Windows platform, but since November 21, 2010, hjsplit is also available to Linux platform

It's built using Free Pascal/Lazarus, but it has no dependencies to kylix libraries which is unmaintained anymore. It also has so many new features compared to the old version available in Windows such as:

• HJSplit is now able to generate MD5 checksums.
• You can now also specify 'Gigabytes' as units inside the split screen.
• 'Pause' button to the progress form.
• 'Cancel' button to the progress form. This allows you to cancel the current operation (split, join, compare or checksum). When pressing 'Cancel' HJSplit pauses and asks for confirmation.
• The progress display now also explicitly includes the current progress percentage (0% - 100%).
• When you cancel a split operation, the split files that were created during this operation will be deleted. This is to prevent an invalid set of split parts being left on your system.
• When you cancel a join operation, the joined file will be deleted. This is to prevent leaving an invalid joined file on your system.
• Support for very large files. HJSplit for Linux can now split and recombine files of over 100 Gigabytes.

All you need is download the files and extract them and run it and you will get something like this on your desktop:

Star Craft 2 on Linux

Star Craft 2 is now officially available for public and what's great about it is that it works with the latest stable Wine release (1.2). But, according to this blog, it's recommended that you install or upgrade to Linux Kernel 2.6.35 and upgrade your NVidia/ATI drivers to the latest version before trying to run the installer, as it will fix some problems if you used older kernel/drivers.

It's still a good news that Windows games are getting more and more playable on Linux using Wine or CrossOver

Wine 1.2 Released

Even though it's one month late, but finally the final Wine 1.2 is released

This is a major release since 1.0 released two years ago. Since it's considered major, there are a lot of changes in this release. They are:

*** Core functionality

- Loading and running 64-bit Windows applications is now supported on
 x86-64 processors (only on Linux at this point).

- There are now two flavors of Wine prefixes, 32-bit and
 64-bit. 32-bit prefixes only support 32-bit applications, while
 64-bit prefixes support both 32-bit and 64-bit applications. The
 prefix flavor is set at prefix creation time and cannot be changed
 afterwards, since all the files and registry entries are in
 different locations. Backwards compatibility is ensured by
 considering all prefixes created with older Wine versions to be
 32-bit.

- WoW64 file system redirection is supported now. When running a
 32-bit application in a 64-bit prefix, accesses to the
 window/system32 directory are automatically redirected to
 windows/syswow64.

- WoW64 registry redirection is now supported in 64-bit prefixes. This
 allows both 32-bit and 64-bit applications to set platform-specific
 registry keys without stepping on each other.

- All the 16-bit support code has been moved to a set of independent
 16-bit modules. No 16-bit code is loaded or initialized when running
 a standard Win32 application, unless it starts making 16-bit calls.

- The mount manager now reports the actual UUID for disk devices that
 support it instead of a hard-coded one.

- Symbolic links are now supported in the registry.

- The C runtime libraries msvcr80, msvcr90 and msvcr100 used by recent
 Visual C++ versions are now partially implemented.

- Some functions now use a Microsoft-compatible function prologue when
 building with a recent enough gcc. This allows Steam overlays to
 work.


*** User interface

- There are new icons for all the built-in applications, as well as
 for the standard toolbars and images. The icons are based on the
 Tango set for a nicer integration with the native Unix desktop look.

- Animated cursors can now be loaded, though only the first frame of
 the animation is used as a static cursor.

- The mouse cursor is now updated correctly in applications that
 create windows from different threads, like Internet Explorer.

- The standard print and page setup dialogs are working much better
 now.

- There is now an application wizard control panel to manage installed
 applications.

- Rendering of bi-directional text is now supported reasonably
 well. There is also some support for Arabic text shaping.

- Many features of the RichEdit control are improved, particularly
 support for tables, URL detection, cursor positioning, scrollbar
 management, and support for windowless controls.

- Many common controls work better now, particularly the listview,
 calendar and tab controls.

- There is now a partial implementation of the Microsoft Text Services
 framework, which provides better input method support in modern
 applications.

- There is now a proper user interface for importing, exporting and
 managing cryptographic keys and certificates.

- Wine is now fully translated to French, German, Dutch, Italian,
 Portuguese, Romanian, Polish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, and Korean. It
 has partial translations for another twenty languages.


*** Desktop integration

- The XDG standard for application startup notification is now
 implemented.

- The NET_WORKAREA property is now supported to let applications take
 into account the size of the Unix desktop task bars.

- File associations created by a Windows applications are now
 registered with the Unix desktop.

- Application icons are now set with the NET_WM_ICON hint, which
 enables alpha channel transparency under window managers that
 support it.

- Maximizing a window from the Unix window manager is now detected and
 the state is correctly reflected on the Windows application side.

- The XDG desktop screen saver is now launched when a Windows
 application makes a request to start the screen saver.

- Start Menu entries are now properly removed when an application is
 uninstalled.

- Copying and pasting images between Windows and Unix applications
 works more reliably now, and more image formats are supported.

- Launching an external Unix Web browser from a Windows application
 now works correctly.

- MSI files are now associated with Wine to enable launching them
 directly from the desktop.

- The virtual desktop window now switches to full-screen mode when its
 size matches that of the screen.

- The strange window management behavior used by Delphi-generated
 applications is better supported now.


*** Graphics

- Subpixel font rendering is now supported, which greatly improves
 text appearance on LCD screens. The subpixel configuration is
 derived from the system fontconfig and Xft settings.

- Icons with alpha channels are now properly blended in, for a much
 nicer appearance.

- Image lists now properly store the alpha channel of images and use
 it when displaying them.

- The windowscodecs dll has been added, with codecs for the JPEG, GIF,
 PNG, BMP, ICO, and TIFF image formats.

- Many functions are now implemented in GDIPlus. The gdiplus dll is
 now considered good enough to load the built-in version by default.

- Overlays are now supported in DirectDraw.

- Many more capabilities are now supported in the SANE scanner
 backend. This improves scanning support in Acrobat.


*** Audio

- The openal32 dll is now implemented, as a wrapper around the Unix
 OpenAL library.

- There is now an initial implementation of the mmdevapi dll (part of
 the new Vista sound architecture), using OpenAL for sound I/O.

- The msgsm32.acm GSM codec is now supported.

- The ALSA sound driver now works better with PulseAudio's ALSA
 emulation.

- Digital playback of audio CDs is now supported.


*** Internet and networking

- The HTTP protocol implementation has seen many improvements, in
 particular better handling of proxies and redirects, better cookie
 management, support for gzip encoding, fixes for chunked transfer
 mode, support for IPv6 addresses, and better certificate validation
 on secure connections.

- The Gecko HTML engine has been updated to a more recent upstream
 version. Many more HTML objects are now implemented.

- The RPC layer now properly supports server-side authentication and
 impersonation. The COM marshalling/unmarshalling is also more
 compatible. RPC is now supported over the HTTP protocol too.

- There is now an essentially complete implementation of the
 JavaScript language.

- The IRDA network protocol is now supported by the socket layer.

- The inetmib1 dll is now implemented, with support for the standard
 SNMP MIB tables.

- The inetcomm dll now implements the POP3 and SMTP protocols, as well
 as better MIME support.

- Extended mail providers are now better supported, particularly the
 native Outlook provider. Mail attachments are also supported now.

- Many undocumented functions in the shlwapi dll have been implemented
 for improved Internet Explorer support.


*** Direct3D

- FBOs are now used by default for off-screen rendering in Direct3D.

- Backbuffers larger/smaller than their associated window are now
 correctly stretched.

- A large portion of the d3dx9 dlls is now implemented, most notably
 the shader assembler, .x file support, functions for fonts, general
 3D math, mesh handling, and sprites. A start has been made with the
 texture and effect functions.

- Fog handling has improved a lot.

- Various YUV texture formats are now supported.

- wined3d contexts are now managed per-thread, and play nice both with
 other wined3d instances and opengl32 GL contexts. Contexts are
 checked for validity before being used (e.g. if the associated
 window is destroyed.)

- Point sprite handling has improved a lot.

- The shader source is now dumped on GLSL compile/link failures. This
 is mostly to help driver developers, like Mesa, with investigating
 GLSL bugs triggered by Wine.

- The graphics card detection code is improved, and many more graphics
 cards are now recognized.

- User clip planes are now supported in shaders. This allows proper
 water reflections in Half-Life 2.

- There is now an initial implementation of Direct3D 10, including the
 dxgi, d3d10core and d3d10 dlls.  Most of the work so far has gone
 into parsing d3d10 effects and SM4 shaders.

- Shadow samplers are now properly supported. This fixes shadows in
 StarCraft 2.

- There is now a shader based implementation of D3D fixed function
 fragment processing. This avoids some limitations of the previous
 OpenGL fixed function based approach.

- Partial updates of surfaces with compressed formats are now properly
 supported.

- Many new OpenGL extensions are now supported. These include:

  - EXT_provoking_vertex/ARB_provoking_vertex. This allows the
    correct vertex color to be used when flat shading is enabled, and
    helps Civilization IV in particular.

  - EXT_vertex_array_bgra/ARB_vertex_array_bgra. This allows for more
    efficient handling of BGRA (D3DCOLOR) data in the fixed function
    pipeline.

  - EXT_draw_buffers2. This enables independent color write masks
    when multiple (simultaneous) render targets are in use.

  - Various nVidia extensions to ARB vertex/fragment programs. These
    allow SM3 support with the ARB vertex/fragment program shader
    backend.

  - EXT_texture_compression_rgtc. This adds support for the ATI2N
    (also known as 3Dc) compressed texture format.

  - ARB_texture_rg. This allows for more efficient support of the
    R16F, G16R16F, R32F and G32R32F texture formats.

  - ARB_framebuffer_object. This is mostly the same as the existing
    support for EXT_framebuffer_object, but improves rendering with a
    depth/stencil buffer larger than the color buffer(s). It helps
    (among others) Splinter Cell,

  - ARB_sync. This adds support for multi-threaded / cross GL context
    event queries used by Dragon Age: Origins.

  - ARB_half_float_vertex. This adds support for 16-bit floating
    point vertex formats on cards that don't already support
    NV_half_float. It helps Supreme Commander.

- There is now a general framework for supporting variations/quirks in
 GL drivers.


*** Built-in applications

- The Wine debugger now displays a crash dialog to let the user know
 that a crash happened before dumping the backtrace information.

- The Wine debugger now uses the Dwarf exception unwinding data for
 more reliable backtraces.

- The file dialogs in built-in applications are now resizable.

- Regedit can now import from and export to files in Unicode format.

- Wineboot now displays a dialog while creating or updating the prefix
 directory to let the user know that something is happening, since
 the update can take some time, particularly with 64-bit prefixes.

- Text replacement is now implemented in Notepad.

- The print preview feature in Wordpad now works much better.

- Navigation in help files now works better in Winhelp. Many graphical
 glitches have also been fixed.

- The Winecfg dialogs have been tweaked so that the application is
 usable in a 640x480 desktop. The About panel has been redesigned
 with better graphics.

- The command-line parser in cmd.exe is more compatible now, which
 should enable more Windows batch files to execute correctly. There
 is also a regression test suite for it.

- Rpcss now implements a proper RPC endpoint mapper.


*** Build environment

- The Wine IDL compiler can now generate correct code for all the
 standard IDL files, including proper exception handling. A large
 number of COM proxies and servers are now automatically generated
 from their IDL definitions.

- The fake dll placeholders are now built at compile time, instead of
 being generated every time a Wine prefix is created. This makes it
 possible to install a placeholder for every supported dll, which
 should avoid many failures in installers that check dll versions.

- configure now supports the --disable-tests option to prevent
 building the test suite. This allows for faster compile times,
 particularly when bisecting a regression.

- The cross-compiled tests are now built against the Wine import
 libraries instead of the Mingw ones. The latter are not compatible
 enough for our needs.

- winegcc now handles resource files just like normal object files and
 links them into the final binary without requiring special build
 rules.

- winebuild and winegcc now fully support Solaris.

- Wine now builds properly on Cygwin, though some of the resulting
 binaries do not work correctly.

- Makefiles are now created as needed during the build process,
 instead of being all created together at configure time. This makes
 it unnecessary to run 'make depend' in most cases.

- winemaker now has better support for Visual C++ project files.


*** Miscellaneous

- The OLE storage implementation now supports transacted storage, with
 proper commits and rollbacks. This enables support for Microsoft
 Office documents containing macros.

- The MSI installer now supports patches, which enables the
 installation of service packs for many applications. Many more MSI
 standard actions are also supported now.

- The rsaenh dll now supports the SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512
 encryption algorithms, as well as CALG_SSL3_SHAMD5 hashing.

- OLE database objects are now implemented, which fixes the clipart
 functionality in Microsoft Office 2007.

- Copying and pasting OLE objects across applications works better now.

- Support for cryptographic signatures and certificates is improved,
 including support for certificate trust lists.

- The Task Scheduler service is now implemented.


*** Performance

- Bitmap stretching and alpha blending is now done through Xrender
 when possible, which avoids a time-consuming round-trip of the
 bitmap bits from the X server.

- Startup time for MSI installers that contain a large amount of
 strings is much improved.

- Setting the processor affinity for threads or processes is now
 supported, which improves multi-core performance for applications
 that take advantage of it.

- Loading large symbol tables in the Wine debugger is much faster
 now.

- FBO handling has improved significantly. Recently used FBO
 configurations are now cached, which is a major performance
 improvement.

- Loading shader constants is more efficient now. This improves
 performance for (among others) Half-Life 2, Counter Strike: Source,
 and Source Engine games in general.

- The performance of sRGB samples is improved, this particularly helps
 Source Engine games.


*** Platform-specific changes

- Joysticks POV switch and axis remapping are now better supported on
 Linux. Joysticks are now supported on Mac OS X too.

- The various DVD I/O controls are now implemented on Mac OS X.

- The network routing and statistics functions in iphlpapi are now
 implemented on Solaris and FreeBSD.

- Mach-O debugging symbols (the format used by Mac OS X) are now
 supported in the debugger.

- Event ports are now used on Solaris for improved wineserver
 performance.


*** New library dependencies

- The libgnutls library is now used for encryption and certificate
 validation in secur32.

- The libgsm library is now used for the GSM codec support.

- The libmpg123 library is now used for mp3 decoding (except on Mac OS
 X where CoreAudio functions are used instead).

- The libopenal library is now used for the openal32 dll
 implementation, as well as for the mmdevapi dll (Vista sound
 support).

- The libtiff library is now used for TIFF image decoding in the
 windowscodecs dll.

- The libv4l1 library is now used for video capture in DirectShow.


*** Backwards compatibility

- The wineshelllink helper script has been removed. All the menu and
 desktop integration is now handled by winemenubuilder.

- The deprecated wineprefixcreate script has been removed. Wine prefix
 directories are created automatically as needed.

- Old LinuxThreads setups are no longer supported. Wine now requires
 the modern NPTL threading that has been standard on Linux for many
 years now.

- The PBuffer option for off-screen rendering has been removed from
 Direct3D. This code was unmaintained, and offered little advantage
 over the "fbo" or "backbuffer" modes.

Another Behind-Schedule

Wine is now behind-schedule again. It has been more than two weeks since last release on April 16, and still no sign of 1.1.44, the next development release which should be released last week. I do hope that it will have a nice features compared to 1.1.43 since it has taken more than normal development time to release this version.

Wine 1.1.43 Broken?

I'm not sure about this, but ever since i upgrade to Wine 1.1.43, Flashget has become more prone to crash or hang without any clear reason. Today, i deleted my .wine directory and reinstall old version of Flashget (new version don't work) and see whether it's working or not.

If it doesn't work, then i guess i'll revert back to 1.1.42 which works fine on my desktop.

Wine 1.1.36

Another development version of Wine (1.1.36) has been released. This time, it has completed the separation of 16 and 32-bit codes, improvement on Improved Shader Model 4 support, fixed lots of memory leak, improvement on MinGW debugging support, and also bunch of MSHTML fixes.

See the complete announcement here and get it here. I have download it, compile it using SlackBuild script, and then upgrade the current version with the latest one

One Week Late

Wine development version is scheduled to be released every two weeks, but it's almost three weeks since the last release, which was on October 23. If they follow the normal biweekly schedule, it should have been released on November 6 and by tomorrow, it will be a three weeks schedule.

I am not sure what took them to have one week delay on the next development release (1.1.33), but what i'm sure is that they keep working to make Wine works better with more and more Windows applications and also implementing many Windows system calls inside Wine.

So far, they have managed to make a great release and i'm looking forward to see much better improvement on every release

Wine 1.1.30 to Support OpenAL

Wine 1.1.30 has come out even though it's coming quite late with more than two weeks as promised. But as the result, there are so many improvements on this development snapshots. Some of them are:

• Support for OpenAL.
• Many improvements in HTML and JavaScript support.
• Many common controls fixes and improvements.
• More Direct3D 10 work.
• Better MAPI support.
• Various bug fixes.

Looking great on each release

Wine 1.1.28 Released

Two weeks has passed and new Wine release (1.1.28) has been released to the public. It's available now from the Sourceforge and ibiblio site.

What's new in this release :
- Support for IRDA protocol.
- Faster initial wineprefix creation.
- Axis remapping with evdev joysticks.
- More image formats in WindowsCodecs.
- Various bug fixes.

I would like to thank Kyle for building the Wine packages using SBo and send it to me to get tested. He's very happy that CS bug has finally been fixed, so he doesn't need to manually patch the package

Wine 1.1.27 Released

Two days after my post about Wine's delayed package, today they released another bi-weekly version, 1.1.27. It comes with a new gecko engine. I think this is the main reason why it's coming so late this time.

Anyways, it's time to test it and see if it broke something. Let's have 1.1.26 ready just in case it got a regression

Out of Gas?

In their usual timeline, Wine developers release a new development version every two weeks, but since the last release (1.1.26), the two week periods are already surpassed. The two weeks limit should be reached at July 31 and it's almost three weeks.

Are they running out of gas or what? Nobody knows and i think it will be explained in the next development release of Wine.

Slackware packages for Wine was stopped updating since 1.1.24, but there is a new release for 1.1.26. On SlackBuilds project, it's even worse. The last update was for 1.1.17.

Wine 1.1.11 Released + New Design

New development version of WINE (1.1.11) has been released yesterday. It has better support on IE 7 and 64 bit cross-compilation using MingW64, new UI for crypto certificates, and many improvements to Direct3D and MSI Installation.

Along with the release, WINE project has a new shinny web design, which i say very cool. Once the home page loaded up, you will see a bigger logo of WINE project with dark red background. It uses better usability due to new font being used on the web site. The animated image kinda rough, though. I think it's minor, but you will see it clearly when you hover your mouse over the icon.

In overal, the new design look good (for me). I hope you enjoyed the new design as well.

Wine Support For Chrome

For those who wanted to use Google Chrome on Linux platform, you will be pleased to hear that the latest Wine build (1.1.4) has better support for Google Chrome. I haven't tested this yet, as the Slackware version hasn't come out yet at the time i write this post, but when it's out, i will try it out. Let's hope it works like charm, while waiting for Google to publish the Linux edition (which i think will use Wine like their Picasa product as well).

Wine 1.1.1 Released

Two weeks have passed since Wine 1.1.0 was released, and here comes another release from their two-weeks cycle, Wine 1.1.1. As usual, many changes has been incorporated in this release, but here's some overview on this version:

• Fixes for Photoshop CS3 and Office 2007 installers.
• More progress on gdiplus.
• Support for Unicode files in regedit.
• Improved video playback.
• Many Richedit fixes and improvements.

Go get them here

Wine 1.0 Released

Well, it's not just Firefox who had their milestone, but also Wine project. After long development cycle (about 10 years or so), they have finally decided to release their first 1.0 version. 1.0.1 will come up shortly and 1.2 is on their queue list. Congratulations for Wine project team. The 1.0 didn't close all the blocker bugs, but it will be a good base to fix the next version to be a better version.

Wine 0.9.60: It's About Time

Two weeks since the last Wine release and here comes another release which is closer to 1.0 release in June. The highlight changes in this release are:

• Better support for Windows IMEs.
• Option for Windows-style window decorations.
• Improved system tray behavior.
• Window management fixes.
• Improved quartz audio support.
• Better support for launching apps from Unix file managers.

I had some troubles after upgrading to 0.9.59, mostly with Systray icon. Some application which usually reside at Systray is no longer there, so it's confusing to look for the application. I hope it will be fixed in this version as it's one of the highlighted changes in this release.

Slackware package is already available, build by Ken. It's quite fast, since usually i have to wait several days before the distro-specific build is ready

Update (9:18): The system tray problem has been resolved in this version. Yeeeaa...

Wine 0.9.59 Released

Every two weeks, Wine developers released an incremental updates to Wine and right now, they are aiming for 1.0 release after this long journey. The latest update is 0.9.59 which should bring more improvement on .NET Framework and also services.exe processes (which is one of the critical process in Windows operating system).

On every release, i always download them and install it on my system. I tried to use several Windows application to be tested on Linux and the result is outstanding. On most cases, the error or warning messages decreased on every new version and layout problem seems to be gone. While it's not for every application, the result is magnificent. I'm quite confident that when the time 1.0 gets released, it will support quite a lot of application (not just installable, but also similar with the native Windows version).

CrossOver Games For Linux

Taken from Phoronix:

CodeWeavers, the company known for their WINE patronage and WINE-based CrossOver Office product designed to run Windows Office applications on Linux, has kicked their foot in the door into the Linux gaming sector. CrossOver Games uses WINE and is very similar to CrossOver Office in fact, but the difference between their two products is that CrossOver Games will be updated much more frequently and is designed just for Windows gaming software.

So in the future, most games in Windows are playable in Linux as well (with some amount of money to buy the license of course).