Wine 1.3.22 Brings Various Changes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wine 1.3.22 Brings Various Changes

A new development release of Wine is available this weekend for those wishing to take their eyes off the Dirndl project that looks like it may be delayed until next week Monday or Tuesday (but there's a special article planned for Saturday)...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTU1Ng

[allquixotic]

Christ, enough with the Dirndl already. Either just tell us what it is, or stop mentioning it until the company behind it gets their act together. Stop overshadowing every single article with it.

And in other news, 24-bit bitmap support in the DIB engine might help on a project I'm working on, actually...

[GreatEmerald]

What are X files in D3DX anyway?

[Kazade]

What are X files in D3DX anyway?

.x is the 3D model format baked into the D3D API. So what this means is that programs that load 3D models from .x won't require Windows DLLs to run any more.

[pmorph]

Ooh, I hadn't realized the dib engine is in. Time to dust off my old copy of Alpha Centauri!

[Suzuran]

I'm surprised we haven't seen much on Phoronix about the DiB engine, apart from these bullet points on the last several Wine releases. I'm not really sure exactly what it is, but I've known for years that it's a pretty big deal for Wine from a technological standpoint, and they've seen several failed attempts at creating one.

It would be nice to have an article explaining the purpose of the DiB engine and what these advances actually mean for the project.

[AHSauge]

Well a part from DIB not being explained anywhere at Phoronix (wine has a wiki entry about it here), I'm sort of surprised that SecuROM is not mentioned at all. Judging from the list of resolved bugs for 1.3.22, it seems some or most versions of SecuROM is now working. Not that I'm really pro-DRM or anything, but it will make life so much easier installing and using software which utilizes SecuROM.

[allquixotic]

Well a part from DIB not being explained anywhere at Phoronix (wine has a wiki entry about it here), I'm sort of surprised that SecuROM is not mentioned at all. Judging from the list of resolved bugs for 1.3.22, it seems some or most versions of SecuROM is now working. Not that I'm really pro-DRM or anything, but it will make life so much easier installing and using software which utilizes SecuROM.

I doubt that any code supporting SecuROM is done in a way that actually respects the DRM security restrictions that SecuROM wants to place on the OS and the user. It's probably just enough to get the SecuROM code to say "OK" and run the game without crashing.

You can't really enforce DRM with an open source kernel, unless your DRM stack refuses to run without a trusted kernel that is checksummed using a cryptographic hash. And then you have an open source kernel that can't be modified, lest you break your software.

[AHSauge]

I doubt that any code supporting SecuROM is done in a way that actually respects the DRM security restrictions that SecuROM wants to place on the OS and the user. It's probably just enough to get the SecuROM code to say "OK" and run the game without crashing.

You can't really enforce DRM with an open source kernel, unless your DRM stack refuses to run without a trusted kernel that is checksummed using a cryptographic hash. And then you have an open source kernel that can't be modified, lest you break your software.

Actually I think I read somewhere that their only method of resolving SecuROM is to just implement the functions it asks for, and not just give it the answers it wants. Either way, it's working and that's a good thing for people that want to install games etc. with SecuROM.

… and no, you probably can't enforce that type of DRM with an open kernel etc.