Strategy for fixing Bug #1

[Conrad Knauer]

On 12/27/06, Wes Morgan <cap10morgan at gmail.com> wrote:

> With out-of-the-box Wine and Codex support,
> it would be well-poised to become [...] dominant on the desktop

(Just a nitpick, its "codecs"; a codex is a book
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex).  CODEC is a shortened version of
COmpressor-DECompressor or such (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec))

There was some talk somewhere (I forget where, unfortunately) that in
a future version of Ubuntu that Totem could offer to d/l the
appropriate package with an explanation of why its not included by
default.  This would probably go a long way towards resolving that
issue.

As far as Wine goes, I've been watching it steadily improve in the
last year or so, though I don't think its quite ready to be included
by default in Ubuntu; what would really help would be if companies
that test against multiple Windows versions (e.g. 98, 2K, XP) would
add Wine to the list.  It would be quite an achievement to see Wine
listed alongside a Windows version on a software box :)

There is now a precedent for such things BTW; for Christmas I was
given the Leisure Suit Larry Collection
(http://www.amazon.com/VIVAPE-72480-Leisure-Larry-Compilation/dp/B000AYIP8A/)
which says "Runs on Windows (R) XP" (the LSL games are old DOS ones
that would run far too fast on a modern computer) so put the disk in
Ubuntu to see what on it and I was VERY pleasantly surprised to find
that the way they got it working in XP was by including DOSBox! (the
CD even had a copy of the DOSBox source code on it to comply with the
GPL! =D)

When the '64-bit revolution' comes, will Wine end up being the API of
choice to get old 32-bit apps working right, even in Windows, just
like DOSBox seems to be for DOS apps?

Getting back to your idea of including Wine as a default-installed
Ubuntu program, what sorts of apps would you want to make sure work
with it?  Off the top of my head, I suspect the main reason for using
Wine in Linux would be for games... so WoW? ;)  It would indeed be a
nice 'selling' point to be able to say that a person can run a long
list of current 'Windows' games "out of the box" in Ubuntu.  That
feeds back to my original point about getting companies to test
against Wine...

CK