Fiachra06 writes "I am involved in helping to maintain the computer systems in the local school (200 ~ 250 pupils) in my home village. The children range in age from 4 to 12. The 14 PC's are running either Windows 95, Windows 98, and XP Home Edition and I find this rather abhorrent. The licensing fees to upgrade all the capable machines to XP pro is unreasonable for such a small school. What would the esteemed Slashdot readers think of shifting all these machines to a Linux distro (probably Ubuntu). I have no doubt the children will have no problem adapting to the new OS (although the teachers might), the main concerns are the availability of educational software for them to use, and practicality of maintenance for people who are new to the OS given that I am not there regularly enough to be a full time sys admin. Preferably I wouldn't like to running too much through Wine but it is still an option."

skaet writes "DesktopLinux.com reports that Google is working together with CodeWeavers to bring their photo editing and sharing program Picasa, formerly only available on Windows, over to Linux. From the article: 'The program is now in a limited beta test. If this program is successful, other Google applications will be following it to the Linux desktop, sources say. The Linux Picasa implementation includes the full feature set of the Windows Picasa 2.x software. It is not, strictly speaking, a port of Picasa to Linux. Instead, Linux Picasa combines Windows Picasa code and Wine technology to run Windows Picasa on Linux. This, however, will be transparent to Linux users, when they download, install, and run the free program on their systems.'"

reub2000 writes to tell us that in response to talk of "tainted" code within ReactOS Steven Edwards, ReactOS and Wine developer, has called for a complete audit of the entire source tree in addition to procedure and policy changes. From the article: "One final note, this audit of the code is going to take a long time. It could take years, but it will happen, this project will come out better than it was before. I don't believe anything anyone has done while working on this project was really wrong. Every decision has three possibilities, being moral, ethical and or legal. Sometimes the law in itself is unethical and immoral. If people made mistakes and there was a violation of the law, I question the justice of the law and or anyone that would try to prosecute any of the developers who just want the freedom to learn and create a more free system."

PeterBrett writes "Tom Wickline recently posted to the Wine development list announcing that he'd done some benchmarks comparing Windows XP to Wine. They should be taken with the requisite dose of salt, but Wine has certainly come a long way."

wombatmobile writes "Hiroshi Tanaka, president of Innovative Design and Technology, claims to have perfected a machine that can transform a bottle of just-fermented Beaujolais Nouveau into a fine, mellow wine in seconds. From the article: 'The road, however, won't be an easy one: the company has brought the machine around to Japanese wine producers, restaurants and even sake rice wine and "shochu" sweet potato spirit distillers, but so far only a small shochu maker in southern Japan has agreed to get involved.'

cyberjessy writes "Surprise! The Fedora Core 5 Release will include Mono in the distribution, in spite of Red Hat's opposition. In addition to the Mono runtime, it will also include Mono applications like Beagle and F-Spot. Is the Linux community finally ready to accept Mono? Mono is becoming increasing important due to Windows Vista, which has WinFX (the next .Net Framework) as its core API. This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono. Will Mono achieve what WINE could not?"

blast3r wrote to mention a ZDNet Blog posting by George Ou, stating that WINE is still vulnerable to the WMF flaw. From the article: "All applications launched inside Wine, Cedega, or Cross-Over Office are technically still exploitable. Wine runs on most x86 platforms, including Linux and the various BSDs. The surprising part about finding this flaw in Wine is that they implemented the entire Meta File API without realizing that this could be a security issue. Exploiting a Windows application running inside Wine depends on that application calling the vulnerable function with malicious data."

smooth wombat writes "What makes a good wine? Why do some wines have a smooth, almond-like bouquet while others have a sharper, more acidic bite to them? These questions and more have usually been answered by oenologists who can list the subtle nuances of a particular wine and tell you if it's good or not. However, vinters don't have the luxury of waiting until a wine is ready to be drunk to know if they have produced a good, drinkable product. Lorenz "Larry" Biegler, who teaches chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, in conjunction with industry scientists in Chile, is working on mathematical formulas to automate the fermentation process, adjusting ingredients and conditions to ensure robust flavors and higher yields from grape harvests. The researchers have been collaborating for more than two years and are studying only white wines, since reds are more complex and contain solids that make them difficult to analyze."

Hogwash McFly writes "A huge underground complex that was built as a nuclear refuge for the British Prime Minister in the 1950s has been put on the market. Code-named Burlington, the bunker now has a population of only four maintenance workers, yet sprawls over 240 acres and accommodates 60 miles of roads. Underground power stations supply energy for 100,000 street lamps and amenities include a railway station and a pub called the Rose and Crown. Among ideas suggested for the £5,000,000 bunker include a data centre, wine cellar, rave club or fifties theme park. It is not clear whether a tank for keeping laser-equipped sharks is included, however."

Jeremy White writes "I am happy to report that we have shipped version 5 of CrossOver Office. The most user visible changes are support for Office 2003 and 'bottles' which lets you deploy Windows applications more easily than ever. But under the hood, this release includes all of the major work that went into the 0.9 release of Wine, which also shipped today and is now officially in Beta."

Joe Barr writes "Stephen Feller has a story about WINE on NewsForge this morning ahead of next week's expected Beta release. The WINE project is 12 years old, so it's just about time." From the article: "'Wine has historically had a very frustrating history because it has been alpha software,' White said. 'This is really hard work. We're replicating the work of a billion-dollar company. The reason we're saying it's alpha is because we believe we still have fundamental changes to make on the way the internals work.' Noting that it has not always been easy to install software with Wine's alpha releases over the last decade, White said that once you got something working it has never meant it would continue to do so, or do so properly. There may have been display glitches or things not functioning properly, if a program even worked with Wine at all." OSTG is the parent company of both Slashdot and NewsForge.

mparaz writes "SpecOps Labs, the makers of the "David" Windows emulator previously accused of ripping off WINE, are offering $10,000 to a team who can build a Windows XP emulator in 15 days. " This whole thing reads really strangely to me.

Praxiteles writes "The first cocktail was...grog?! From the article: 'The first cocktail ever was made in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago, using wine, beer, apple juice and honey. Patrick McGovern defined the mix as "grog", an archaic drink that in the United States is sold as the Midas Touch'."

An anonymous reader points out a project called Drivey, which he describes as "a dark and fascinating example of 2.xD [not quite 3d] graphical rendering. This tiny, free [as in beer] demo gives you an amazingly compelling driving experience. To quote the author, 'It was conceived as a driving simulator for old farts like myself, who are kind of nostalgic for the "old days" [ca. 1985] but are not so thick as to believe that the games from the 80s were actually in any way superior to the games we play today.' Even works fine under WINE!"

Wil writes "Here's a good one for the Linux fans -- running Wine on Linux and attempting to download a Windows Genuine Advantage protected file from the Microsoft website works just fine. It seems that Bill Gates has a soft spot for Tux after all, or at least isn't bothered about him downloading updates."

polar_bear` writes "Last week, CodeWeavers issued a "Installer Challenge" to improve Wine "until it can run nearly every Windows program." Linux Magazine interviewed CodeWeavers Founder and CEO Jeremy White about the challenge, Wine on OS X on Intel, the Linux desktop and what is ahead for CodeWeavers. White has some pretty interesting answers."

You may recall that sometime last November we put up a request for questions to be passed on to author, voice actor, comedian, and card shark Wil Wheaton. Seven months and many adventures later, Wil has responded in depth to the excellent queries Slashdot users put to him. If you're curious about what's kept him, what it's like to be a Teen Titan, or how to use the LCARS User Interface, read on for his responses.

Oliver Kayas asks: "I'm a newcomer to Linux specifically the Ubuntu distribution. I have been searching for software that will allow me to manage bibliographies for my thesis. I've come across Kile/Latex however, this only works on KDE and I am using Gnome. Under Windows I was using Endnote 8 which even allowed me to link references to documents on my hard disk so I could easily search for papers I just wanted to read. I know I could use an emulator such as Wine to use Endnote but that defeats the object of switching to Linux. I was wondering if you know of any alternatives?"

An Anonymous Reader wrote "InsideMacGames has posted a response to the news of Apple using Intel processors from both original Mac game developers as well as people who work on porting Windows games to OS X. Some negative and positive feedback is expressed, though it seems there's more uncertainty than anything else at this point. Can the fear of a Wine-like VM solution gutting the biz be balanced by faster CPU speeds?" From the article: "We think Apple's move to Intel is great. For one thing, it demonstrates that Apple is really serious about giving Windows-based computing head-to-head competition. For another, it lays the groundwork for the future of personal computing in a digitally connected home. And, for another, it's going to narrow the gap between the release of a game on Windows and the release on Mac -- maybe to zero."

prell asks: "Our company has approximately 250 Linux desktops, and an array of Linux servers. Recently, we've been presented with the possibility of migrating all or most of these machines to Windows to support one industry-specific application, and we do not want this to happen. Coming to mind immediately were: Wine and CrossOver Office; some sort of multi-user VNC setup; Ndiyo; and VMWare. Keeping in mind that the desktop machines are low-spec (~350MHz CPUs on average), what are our options? How can we preserve our Linux install-base in the presence of a non-canonical Windows program?"