Linux overcomes this barrier by supporting POSIX architecture (making easy to port software from UNIX systems) and also by supporting win32 API through WINE.
As it is declared on the home page of the project, WINE is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix.
As WINE it is API Layer based on POSIX, may it be possible to make a Haiku port of it? It could bring haiku a great number of running software (including FOSS, as most of it now has it’s own win32 ports).
I’m interested to hear from Haiku developers about this idea.
…states that “porting efforts (BeWine) used to be pretty strong, but BeOS has severe limitations in Unix call support. The demise of Be further hampered the project though it might come back one day on one of the open BeOS projects.”
Hopefully someone will pickup BeWine or restart a port of Wine for Haiku some day.
Joel isn’t necessarily correct in all cases. There’s quite a bit of software already available for BeOS, thanks to the dedication of many hobby programmers. All that’s missing is a halfway decent office suite, and even then, we’re partway there – all that’s really missing is features in Sum-It and there isn’t a presentation program. Don’t get me wrong, though, WINE would be a nice addition to Haiku. It’s just not the only hope of Haiku being mainstream at some point.
It should be possible but remember X is not part of POSIX…
There is an X11 server for BeOS though so it should be possible to have something usable rapidly.
Or one could try to use http://sourceforge.jp/projects/bexlib/ but it’s not really finished.
There used to be something called WinBe, but it never really got finished either.
it is important that Haiku isn’t just a somewhat nicer “playground” for the same old apps but rather a way of having better apps through use of its services. People would switch to haiku because the haiku apps use translators and attributes and are more responsive. There are UI standards.
There needs to be new ideas like a new system of OLE linking where you can mix different apps so that you can create a spreadsheet in one app, have it embedded your word processor doc and use another spreadsheet app so that you are not locked into a ‘suite’ I would like to see many spreadsheets competing and that will happen only if they don’t have to reinvent the wheel with file format compatibility.
We have to insist on these points otherwise what’s the point of the best scrollbar (taking from another discussion…) if the rest of your computing experience isn’t very good at all?
It is very important that Haiku has strong haiku app development. Those that develop apps for haiku will also want to contribute to the Haiku and that will make haiku a lot stronger.
Problem is that the lack of apps is usually a blocker on OS adoption. And native apps take time to write, so being able to use existing apps lowers the entry barrier. Besides some software is unportable (proprietary…) and just too complex or specific.
As for OLE stuff, the replicant mechanism can easily be extended to allow for generic ones selected on mime-types.
I hate to add yet another expectation rather than one concrete good news, but have you guys heard of the return of GoBe Productive in its ver. 3.04 for Windows? (http://www.gobe.com/home.html, with download for trial). The Windows ver. is impressive in its lightness, speed, close integration, reasonable richness in features to meet practical needs, and compatibility with MS Office.
And it is interesting to know if GoBe Productive for Win is based on GP2 for BeOS, or a totally new work from scratch free of any BeOS relevance.
Readers of this thread may find Mr Jorge Mare’s letter to Haiku fans in Jan, gives more details :
i really know if can be port wine for haiku but without x(is ugly and bother) and do it with the native gui easily? cause in mac is ugly the wine.
what u think i dont know so much about it.
skarmiglione, Wine uses a special intermediate layer called “user/gdi driver” to connect to the host OS graphics engine, read keyboard/mouse input and so on. On the most of the *nix systems the driver used is “wineX11.drv”, which connects to X11 to do it’s job.
But there is an ongoing work on quartz driver for use with native MacOS X graphics subsystem. And also there is ReactOS’s branch called ARWINSS that uses it’s own driver called winent.drv to run Wine’s user32/gdi32 libs on NT-like platform.
So I guess the same model may be used while porting wine to haiku: replacement driver should be written for Wine’s wineX11.drv to use haiku’s native graphics and user input API.
As I probably won’t do anything with it, I rather see someone interested set up a project. If someone wants to do that contact me on #haiku on irc.freenode.net
IIRC the main stumble block for BeWine (apart from more developers I guess) was that Beos lacked some fundamental memory mapping functionality which Wine relied on. From what I understand Haiku does not share this deficiency so from a technical standpoint Wine on Haiku should be doable. Obviously though it will be a huge task and I can imagine that porting such a beast is hardly rewarding in itself. Maybe a subject for a Bounty?
Using wine to run alot of Windows stuff on Linux I can really attest to it’s usefulness where there are no native equivalents.
Maybe it’s not a vital piece of software for Haiku in it’s current stage, but I think that if Haiku wants to attract more day-to-day usage the current lineup of native programs likely won’t cut it. Linux has a huge library of native software compared to Haiku but it’s still a drop in the ocean compared to what’s available for Windows.
