On 12/27/06, Wes Morgan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
