Cedega Being Replaced By GameTree Linux

An anonymous reader writes "TransGaming Cedega, the software forked from Wine that allows running Windows games under Linux, is being discontinued and replaced by GameTree Linux. This new software is also free. From the new website: 'TransGaming is pleased to announce the continued development of Cedega Technology under the GameTree Developer Program. This repositioning of the technology that powered the Cedega Gaming Service will allow the entire Linux community to gain free access going forward. Cedega is a cross-platform enablement technology that allows for Windows-native games to be executed on both the Linux desktop and embedded Linux platforms.'"

Re:frosty piss

[hedwards]

Yes, they're discontinuing the subscription plan and will be working with developers. Personally, I will continue to not buy anything from them as they don't seem to give much, if anything, back. That may have changed, but Codeweavers at least contributes most of their patches back to Wine.

Re:frosty piss

[clump]

It should be noted that CodeWeavers employs both Jeremy White and Alexandre Julliard.

Re:frosty piss

[cbhacking]

I'm not sure whether those concerns were ever addressed, but Wine implements just enough of the Windows kernel APIs to make the more common DRM schemes work. I'm not sure how it fares on the newest stuff - though it works fine with Steam, which is about as much DRM as I'll tolerate on a game these days - but Securom and so forth were specifically made to work.

Re:frosty piss

[shutdown -p now]

Just a reminder that Cedega is not a repackaging of Wine. It's a proprietary fork, from back before Wine went GPL (which it did precisely because Cedega - then WineX - felt entitled to use Wine as a solid base, but not so keen to contribute their improvements back to the community). For this reason, they cannot port code over from Wine, and has diverged a lot from it since.

I've bought Cedega back in the day when they were superior for Linux gaming, but abandoned them when their they started to noticeably lag behind vanilla Wine in most games that I care about. I haven't been running Linux-only for several years now and don't know how things are today, but from what I heard, the gap has only widened since, to the point that Wine is better for vast majority of games.

What I also recall is that one other reason why TransGaming was very much disliked is due to their "source available but don't dare use it" license. See, they used to provide the code to most of Cedega (IIRC the various DRM bits were excluded), and you could actually fetch it from a public CVS and build it yourself to get a working product for free. However, TransGaming has stated that the source code is made available for "community improvements", and not simply for people using it to get a free if not full-featured version for themselves (that despite the license for the code making no such distinctions!), and that, if source code access would be abused, they'd remove it completely. They especially hated how the various source-based distros (such as Gentoo) provided automated fetch-and-build scripts allowing users to get Cedega for free with a single invocation of the package manager. Given how the product itself was largely based on a community-developed, FOSS code base, it was seen as a particularly offensive slap in the face, more so than if the code was just closed.

Re:frosty piss

[David Gerard]

This is really not safe - in the default setup, for instance, the Z: drive is Unix / (file tree root). Wine DOES NOT SANDBOX in any actually effective manner.

People have run viruses with Wine. Wine is compatible enough to run malware!

Any binary running in Wine can do anything that user can do, like trashing the home directory or filling /tmp .

If you want to be cautious, run it as a different username (with access to your X11 screen). Wine is compatible with toxic waste too.