Monday, May 11, 2009

Kudos to wine developers

Yesterday my father was visiting and wanted to show me a CD about Australia. I first thought there were some images or videos on it but it was a MS-Windows .exe file. :-(

I knew I installed wine some month ago. So I just clicked on the file and entered "wine" when KDE was asking for the application with which I wanted to open this file. Really deeply impressed we could navigate through the whole program including animations, music, text, etc.

Kudos to the wine developers. Great work!

Finally I added wine as standard application for .exe files to the file association dialog in KDE4 systemsettings and now I can run .exe files with a simple mouseclick. I'm delighted to see how flexible Linux has become these days.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, wine is coming along great. I think now that it's caught up with most windows features, it'll probably keep pace reasonably well now too, which is great :)

On associating .exe files with wine though... this is quite unsafe. There is wrapper program for wine (in ubuntu, at least) which runs wine on an .exe only after prompting you to ask if it's OK. I'd suggest using that instead.

Ian Monroe said...

Its unsafe for a distro to make a direct wine association by default, but I doubt Thomas plans on clicking on .exe files in Dolphin willynilly. :)

Thomas Thym said...

I agree with both of you. For the grandma it will be better to get a warning before executing .exe-files. Most times at least I know what I am doing and I'm happy to get no "Cancel or Allow" message.
But it would be nice to receive that message if wine is started without my command. No clue how to do that...

Dread Knight said...

Yeah, so flexible my bluetooth is just not working :) hehe