World Wine News

This week, 133 posts consumed 75 K. There were 25 different contributors. 13 (52%) posted more than once. 11 (44%) posted last week too.

The top 5 posters of the week were:

1. 7 posts in 7K by imwellcushtymelike at googlemail.com (Ken Sharp)
2. 7 posts in 8K by bunglehead at gmail.com (Nikolay Sivov)
3. 5 posts in 5K by julliard at winehq.org (Alexandre Julliard)
4. 4 posts in 1K by ken at codeweavers.com (Ken Thomases)
5. 4 posts in 4K by 00cpxxx at gmail.com (Bruno Jesus)

You might have heard of Red Star OS, the Linux distribution from North Korea. I heard that it includes Crosswin, a simple wrapper around Wine. But how simple is it?

I downloaded the available iso files and had a look. There are two versions of Crosswin shipping as RPMs: 2.0 and 3.0.

Crosswin 2.0

Crosswin 2.0 is based on Wine 1.0-rc5 (2008). The default wineprefix is $HOME/.crosswin/win98, but there is an option in the GUI to use $HOME/.crosswin/win2000 instead. After some research i would say this looks like an old CrossOver (not sure if it still does it like that). WineCfg is reduced to only display the Applications, Libraries and Drives tabs. When starting the Crosswin GUI, you can read "Initializing Windows 98" while in the background the win2000 prefix is created. Crosswin also comes without Wine Gecko, not sure how you would load it without real Internet access. There are also 2.2MB additional fonts and 18MB DLLs.

The GUI seems to have recipes for various applications for installation. There is:

• Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0
• Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0
• Adobe Acrobat Pro 6.0
• Adobe Photoshop 7.0
• Macromedia Flash MX
• Macromedia Fireworks MX
• Macromedia Director 8.5
• Macromedia Dreamweaver MX
• SoundForge 4.5h
• UltraEdit 12.0
• UltraISO 7.21
• WinRAR 3.51
• Mirae 1.0
• Samhung 2.0
• Samhung 3.0
• Sogwang 4.0

The wineprefix already include configurations for some applications, in WineCfg you can see this game focused list:

• Acrobat.exe
• cxwget.exe
• ExeFile.exe
• gta2.exe
• hl.exe
• iTunes.exe
• outlook.exe
• QuickTimePlayer.exe
• s3.exe
• SpellForce.exe
• swep1rcr.exe
• war3.exe
• WoW.exe

On the Libraries tab you can find around 80 DLL overwrites! I wondered what else i could find in such an unclean prefix, so i had a look at the registry. There are some entries related to Valve games. Those can be found in HKCU/Software/Valve/Source/:

• cstrike
• dod
• episodic
• hl2
• hl2mp

The AppDefaults section not only lists the WineCfg applications again, but it also gives some hints how Wine has been further altered. There is "hl1hack" in "hl.exe/Direct3D" set to "enable". Also there is "wowhack" in "WoW.exe/OpenGL" set to "true". Those values seem to origin from /usr/share/wine/crosswin.inf which starts with the line ";; (c) Copyright 2006. CodeWeavers, Inc.". This file also leaks two names: hanhs and RJB.

Crosswin 3.0

Crosswin 3.0 is based on Wine 1.2.2 (2010). The default wineprefix is $HOME/.crosswin, but now you can see in the terminal that they changed the name from "wine" to "crosswin":

WineCfg has the same tabs as in 2.0. The wineprefix created looks much cleaner, except of 17 DLL overwrites and more font tricks. Wine Gecko is still not shipped, but 109MB additional fonts and 20MB DLLs.

The GUI also has less recipes. They are limited to:

• Adobe Photoshop 7.0
• Adobe Photoshop CS(8.0)
• Adobe Photoshop CS2(9.0)
• Adobe Photoshop CS5(12.0)

License violation?

It's hard to tell if people in North Korea have access to the sources, but it's doubtful. Then there are those extra DLLs and fonts. While i have no idea about their licenses, i guess not all of them are easily redistributable.

I tried one year to get wine64 supported on 64-bit FreeBSD, now the fix got in and it turned out be just a one-liner. As a plus this also works on 64-bit Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. The FreeBSD packagers are about to test it and plan to ship a WoW64 setup of Wine. See the bug report for more information.

*Disclaimer: These lists of changes are automatically generated by information entered into the AppDB. These results are subject to the opinions of the users submitting application reviews. The Wine community does not guarantee that even though an application may be upgraded to 'Gold' or 'Platinum' in this list, that you will have the same experience and would provide a similar rating.