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PC Games (Games) Software Wine Linux

Transgaming Announces Cedega Free Trial 26

Posted by Zonk from the mmmmmm-free-wine dept.
ProudClod writes "Transgaming has just announced a time limited demo of their Cedega product (formerly known as WineX), which allows Windows games (including those that utilize DirectX) to be played on Linux. The demo will run for two weeks until 15th November, and will allow gamers to test out the full version of Cedega for that period. The official press release is also available."
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Transgaming Announces Cedega Free Trial More

Transgaming Announces Cedega Free Trial

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  • Time-limited? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FooAtWFU ( 699187 ) on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @03:43PM (#10714627) Homepage
    Out of curiosity: who checks the time? If I set my system clock back whenever I wanted to play a game, would you get to use it indefinitely?
    • And what if you ran it within a VM?
      • > And what if you ran it within a VM?

        The gaming performance would suffer drastically...

        And if you're going to use a VM, you may as well install a bootleg XP and be done with it.

    • Re:Time-limited? (Score:2, Informative)

      by entitude ( 770810 )
      I asked this to the Transgaming dev team, who replied that "It requires some server contact is all [we're] saying..." Sounds like you're out of luck. On the other hand, $5/month isn't exactly expensive.

  • But it's Open Source... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anusien ( 705743 ) <anusien@hCOMMAotmail.com minus punct> on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @03:45PM (#10714656)
    So two things occur to me after RTFAing. First, their time-limited demo isn't that great because you can still build from the CVS sources. Sure it's a pain in the ass, but you can do it, especially if your computer is fast enough to be running the games anyway. As an aside, I'm wondering why they're saying to game publishers: "The Cedega Time Limited Demo gives you the opportunity to test your titles for free.". Shouldn't they be offering it to game devs for free anyway for better advertising? (IE: ID Games tested it and it works out of the box with Cedega).

  • Can they ever accept it? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Deliveranc3 ( 629997 ) <deliverance@level4 . o rg> on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @03:50PM (#10714731) Journal
    Can the Open Source community ever accept closed source paid programming?

    It's also an additional cost on an already expensive hobby.

    If this was open source I could see it working, but like this?

    An open demo of software as powerful as this might be useful in some other system but it's definitly a lock in in this case. The games will all become useless when the software is deactivated.

    I can't see this working, in fact this may be a situation where the windows cracking community might lend a hand.
    • Believe it or not yes. Though apparently one of Transgamings main customers have been boxed distros. But either way they have been making money with previous versions of WineX, this is just a rename.
    • "Can the Open Source community ever accept closed source paid programming?"

      While I can't speak for the community, I paid $40 to CodeWeavers for CrossOver Office. Considering how well it works, I have no regrets spending the cash. And I use OpenOffice almost all the time -- I just have some spreadsheets that only work in Excel. (The latest versions of Gnumeric, Kspread, and OpenOffice Calc fail to work properly)

      (I know, somewhat offtopic...)
    • I don't understand why people are against this kind of thing, and yet I see a lot of people in the linux community being anti - 'closed source paid programming' (to use the above term.)

      Why? I genuinely don't get it - someone is providing a product they have invested their time and effort in; where is the evil in that? I don't see how people can be expected to work for free when there is no open source equivalent of housing and food ;) I know some people manage to, but we don't all have funding from a gove

      • Why? I genuinely don't get it - someone is providing a product they have invested their time and effort in; where is the evil in that? I don't see how people can be expected to work for free when there is no open source equivalent of housing and food ;) I know some people manage to, but we don't all have funding from a government/company/rich person, and yet we still have to eat.

        Because there's always a group of loose-knit hackers that are willing work together and make a free alternative. This is only

        • This is only an exception because Cedega is open sourced already--they're just paying for precompiled binaries and an easy installer.

          Actually, the "free" version of Cedega available in the CVS repository isn't the same as the version available to subscribers, and, now, anyone who downloads the timedemo. The CVS version lacks features of the full version, especially the copy-protection circumvention code.
        • Re: GreyWolf3000
          Thanks for trying to explain, but it still doesn't explain the vitriol displayed by the Linux community. If I'm correct: you are saying that the Linux community hates this, because someone else might do the same thing for free.

          It just doesn't make any sense to me why someone might hate a software developer for actually charging for their work.

          I guess I must be missing something - but it's something I'd like to understand.

          • It just doesn't make any sense to me why someone might hate a software developer for actually charging for their work.

            Charging for software and restricting the freedom of the software are not the same thing.

            The GPL doesn't require that you release your software at no cost, it just guarantees that anyone who receives the software has access to the source code.

            Of course, this means that I can take your code, compile it, and distribute it for free with no legal repercussions.

            So, in a sense, it's not that

    • I'll Pay for Software, but I will not, cannot, should not, sign a draconian, restrictive, arrogant and possibly illegal EULA.

      EULAs are the work of cowboy software makers who write shoddy software, force their way to a monopoly, and then use their monopoly to bend the law and your rights past the point of ductile return.

      I don't mind paying for software As long as I know I'm getting a fair deal.
      I bought it. It's mine. I paid for it. I'll do as I please with it.

      They're putting EULA on video games now. Appa

  • A short review (Score:5, Informative)

    by Spoing ( 152917 ) on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @03:58PM (#10714851) Homepage
    This is a repost of mine from other forums.

    ------

    Sadly, I have to say that I'm not impressed with the demo version. It's a real pain to use, gives no feedback at times if it is doing something. It's also not obvious how to manually run the applications; it's not automatic enough to avoid known problems, and not discoverable enough to find an easy fix.

    One positive comment: Once I was able to get a game working -- Civilization III -- it was much quicker than earlier versions of WineX when I was a subscriber.

    That said, I'd rather have the old interface and the new backend; it wasn't as slick, though I didn't feel as helpless attempting to dig through it.

    Right now, I've been entirely frozen out;

    "Access to the downloaded file is forbidden."

    OK. What does this mean?

    Here's what happened leading up to the above problem;

    1. Installed the demo version. Note: It reports "This product was installed in: /". Installing in root would be bad...so I checked...nope. Not in /.
    2. Ran cedega_timedemo to bring up the menu.
    3. Installed a couple different programs.
    4. Install went fine.
    5. Running the programs returned the "Error=21" message.
    6. Did some hunting on the Internet.
    7. Cedega is incompatable with exec-shield. Exec shield can be turned off (as root);

    echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/legacy_va_layout
    echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield

    8. Some programs worked...kinda. Civilization III would run, fast, though the sound had to be disabled or the background chirping noise would have driven me crazy. (Noted as a defect in Civ III...though does not happen as much in real Windows.) Updated Civ III to latest relase...no change in chirping.
    9. Other programs still reported "Error=21" message. Noted that one last ditch effort that worked for users of the full version was to remove the directory and try again. Nuked the _user_ timedemo directories.
    10. After entering in registration information, this message apears;

    "Access to the downloaded file is forbidden."

    11. Ran uninstall_cedega_timedemo.
    12. Reported some directories had data. Nuked them too.
    13. Reinstalled again.
    14. As before -- after entering in registration information -- the message appears again;

    "Access to the downloaded file is forbidden."

  • What the heck is up with this installer? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Codename_V ( 813328 ) on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @05:51PM (#10716423)
    Is it just me, or is this cedega installer the biggest piece of junk ever made? I tried it as a user, but that didn't work because it prompts me for a password. I mean, at that point alone the thing already stinks, but it gets worse. I enter the root password and it still doesn't work. I try again, nothing. Finally I figure out it's using sudo and enter my own password. Now I'm not a sudoer, so I need to set that up. Try again, and now it can't write to my home directory because it's an nfs share. Ok...why not just run it as root then. But when I run as root, it still tries to run sudo, so now, stupidly enough, I end up having to add root to the list of sudoers. Finally, that got the thing to work. But man, why in the hell not let me just install it as a normal user into my home directory? Would that be so hard? Good luck getting me to pay for junk like this...

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