[Beowulf] MS HPC... Oh dear...

[Robert G. Brown]

On Tue, 13 Jun 2006, Geoff Jacobs wrote:

> Repeat after me: Wine Is Not an Emulator
>
> I'm not sure about Cedega, but WINE dll hell is just as bad as the real
> thing(tm).

Cedega is supra-tree commercial WINE on steroids.  Sold almost entirely
to gamers.  We have several in household and use cedega primarily to
play e.g. WoW.

DLL hell here is surpressed because cedega installs each new game in its
own virtual windows machine, with its own registry, controls, emulation
level settings, and private copies of all game-installed DLLs

The end result is that while DLLs in a game can screw up, break cedega's
wine, do something weird, require patches and much work to get to where
the game functions (a process facilitated by some people paid to solve
the problems on the other end) installing WoW doesn't break Diablo II
(for example) because one overwrites the DirectX version required by the
other, because one has a sound DLL that conflicts with the other's.

If you like, it confines each game in its own PRIVATE hell...;-)

Of course this also completely and utterly defeats the purpose of having
shared libraries in the first place by not, in fact, sharing them.

    rgb

-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu