USB Support For Wine Is Being Discussed Again

[phoronix]

Phoronix: USB Support For Wine Is Being Discussed Again

Per the latest World Wine News (WWN), USB support for Wine is being discussed yet again but as of right now it's not clear if any new work will materialize as a result of the latest discussions...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=USB-Wine-Support-2015

[droidhacker]

"USB support is one of the most significant sore spots for this open-source project."

... the other sore spot being that no software actually works through wine.

[uid313]

How much effort is needed to get USB support working on Wine?
Is it major work and a full new implementation of USB?
Or can you just utilize libusb or the existing USB support in Linux and just expose it in some quick and easy and clean way?

[Ericg]

"USB support is one of the most significant sore spots for this open-source project."

... the other sore spot being that no software actually works through wine.

I dunno what kind of software you're using droid, but most programs that I try in wine work pretty well. Won't say perfectly, but well enough to use

[The.Enraged]

Just registered to say that USB support in Wine would be much appreciated for Behringer's iNuke Remote Connect software that communicates with their iNuke series amps to adjust EQ and various other settings. The program runs perfectly under wine except that it can't actually apply the settings.

Another possibly useful program would be Logitech's harmony software that's require to program the fancy remote controls. However, I don't know how well that software works under wine.

[Daktyl198]

How much effort is needed to get USB support working on Wine?
Is it major work and a full new implementation of USB?
Or can you just utilize libusb or the existing USB support in Linux and just expose it in some quick and easy and clean way?

The best way would be to just hook into Linux or use a linux-based library. But the Wine devs are stuck on the idea that they can't have per-platform coding, so they'll probably just do it themselves.

Then, of course, they'll delay a half-done implementation in Wine-Staging for a few years while they have full support in crossover just to prove to their customers that it's worth paying for (despite fucking over the open source community).

[GreatEmerald]

Well, is it safe to do it through libusb and such? I'd imagine it would be like with virtualisation, you need to have a lock on the device or some sort of an arbiter so the non-native apps wouldn't interfere with the native ones?

[RoninDusette]

"USB support is one of the most significant sore spots for this open-source project."

... the other sore spot being that no software actually works through wine.

That is an absurd statement. Haha. I was just recording my band using Ableton Live last week through Wine/POL using Jack. 5.7 ms of latency, error free recording.

What I would like to see is to ability to have the USB dongles needed for things like current versions of Reason to work through Wine, but since Wine shouldn't be run as root, I could imagine there are a lot of concerns with bad things happening from malicious software having direct hardware access to anything like that. I was thinking the same thing as GreatEmerald. Have some sort of middleware that is responsible for doing that. Something that can be turned on and off at will (like how virtualbox has a menu to manually "mount", if you will, USB devices on a per-device basis, rather than having anything USB related just feed in there. Idunno. I would be very open to any solution that would pass things like that through, but because of how Wine works, I am not sure if it is actually possible within Wine, if at all. I could totally be wrong, though.

[mike4]

Yes would be cool so I could use RealFlight.

[Turion]

It'd be really nice, if I could finally use my Xbox 360 controller with Wine. There are games working with Wine, but playing on a keyboard is a pain.