Still need windows? Windows Messaging Service

[Duane Clark]

John Creegan wrote:
> 
> What I've read suggests that wine is still alpha and that it hasn't cut
> the ties to windows too much yet.

Yes, Wine is still alpha. But I don't think the second part is true; 
many of the programs I try work quite good (I don't run games). I do not 
use a Windows partition, and the only Windows native DLL I use routinely 
is msvcrt. Otherwise, there are a few other native DLLs I use only for 
certain programs.

There are certainly areas where Wine lags quite a bit. I don't know what 
Windows Messaging Service is (isn't that the one spammers were using for 
popups), and don't recall seeing any such message, so I don't know 
whether Wine supports it or it is something that is downloaded or installed.

> For a start I'm going to rebuild wine and allow it to use the windows
> install, just to see what will happen.  Before that I'm going to TAR the
> existing dir structure  including my .wine dir so I can go back quickly.
> 

There is no reason to rebuild Wine. The only part that changes is the 
config files in .wine. I hope you back up your Win partitions, because 
there is a (small) chance that you could corrupt it running it with 
Wine. A better choice, if you really want to try this, would be to copy 
the relevant portions to somewhere on your Linux partition.