Opening the Doors of Wine!

You surely know Wine, it doesn’t stand to me to introduce this very big and important project for the entire community.

That said, if you’ve ever tried to install and use it, you’ve surely noticed that it is kinda criptic and difficlt to use. Just to install any kind of program you have to use the console, not saying that to configure it you have to know the right commands and that is unlikely for a newbye. This becomes even much more a critic point if you come thinking on the fact that Wine SHOULD be used by newbyes, that is, mainly by people used to windows who just migrated to Linux.

The shifting user (From Win to Lin) is the main candidate to use Wine and paradossally it is also the one who will more unlikely be able to do so. and here’s where Wine-Tools came. They where a nice frontend to install software with wine but they became updated, old, and then useless.

I have to say that Wine recently became much more userfriendly, with a remove installed programs app, a simple menù shortcut to the settings dialogue and much more, including a Wine menù entry with installed programs in there but… Crossover, a magnificient implementation of wine closed sourced and available at the cost of 30$, is so much better. But it is not free.

That’s where Wine Doors comes. It is an incredibly promising application that takes the Linux philosophy to windows programs: it is like a Synaptic for Windows applications to have you get the idea. It lists a number of great apps, you choose which one you’d like to install and Wine Doors downloads it and installs it for you!

Wine project has the Wine Apps DB, a database of all windows applications tested with Wine. The goal of the project is to provide a solid and automated guy, written in Python, able to download and install each of the apps working in the Wine Apps DB! When you can’t download an app because it is a commercial one needing an original CD, you just put the media into the driver, tell wine doors to install the app and it will take care of everything.

In this stage Wine Doors is still very buggy, it’s at its original releases, but it is opensource and it already works for a lot of applications! And one of the wonderful things about this program is that everyone can create an application installer for it and I’m doing so for a lot of applications! Some infos about how to do it can be found here and I’m also going to write a better guide myself.

I already create installers for the following programs: Artrage free, Deep Paint, Chaos Pro, Apophysis, A9CAD, Saint Paint Studio, Dream Aquaium, gdiplus library and am working on many others! Even people with little or none ability in scripting / programming can be able to create this applications installers! So you can contribute to the project in verious ways:

1) You can participate to its development with code, it is strongly needed to proceed in the right direction!

2) Donations are needed to buy the licenses of the programs that has to be tested in wine doors.

3) You can create yourself as many application installers as you wish! The more you can create the better it is!

By now all of the applications I contributed are beying tested and analized and maybe in the next repositotyes update my apps will be listed! 😀 I already have an SVN access to the project and often update my apps and that’s really great and exiting for me since I cannot code… but in this project I can strongly contribute with some real and needed work! 😀