Running Internet Explorer 6 and 7 in Wine

Recently I ran into Brian Behlendorf (from Apache) at a conference on medical record systems.  Brian was there demoing a new open source protocol for medical record systems to securely send eachother patient records (NHIN Direct).  Combined, we were the only two who weren’t doctors, vendors, bureaucrats, or hotel staff at the conference.

I introduced myself, and Brian quickly recognized that I could probably help him with a Wine problem.  He needed to run Internet Explorer 6 for the most benevolent reason of all: to prove to a client it didn’t work and that they shouldn’t bother trying to support it.

Internet Explorer in Wine

The good news is these days it’s very simple on the terminal.  On Ubuntu:

• Add the Wine Team PPA:
  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
• Install the wine1.2 and winetricks packages:
  sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wine1.2 winetricks
• Run winetricks:
  winetricks ie6 or winetricks ie7
• Run IE:
  wine iexplore

Using the WINEPREFIX environment variable:

Note that, just like in Windows, you cannot have both ie6 and ie7 at the same time, at least not in the same virtual C: drive.  Fortunately, it is easy to set up multiple wine folders (”prefixes”) for your version of IE to run.  We do this with the WINEPREFIX environment variable.

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-ie6 winetricks ie6 to install ie6 into its own virtual C: drive
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-ie7 winetricks ie7 to install ie7 into its own virtual C: drive
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-ie6 wine iexplore to run ie6
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-ie7 wine iexplore to run ie7

As an aside, Internet Explorer 8 doesn’t currently work in Wine, however once it does there will also be a winetricks ie8 for you to test with.

Making Wine 1.2 Fresh

Those of you who have been using the Wine 1.2 betas may have noticed it looks better.

is now

Giving Windows applications their own Icon

Today, however, I want to show you another kind of icon that until now has been represented by a boring default diamond with a question mark.

The small numbers in the corner show the version of the program when it’s available.  This is a piece of metadata that Windows has supported for years, but since it’s not visible in the user interface no one’s really known about it.

The new icons will be available tomorrow in the next Wine 1.2 release candidate package from my PPA.  My intention in Maverick is to include them by default, before Wine is even installed.

Working together

I’ll be honest: Wine needs your help.  The above work was heavily based on community input (and code by Jan Nekvasil).  I’ve got some more visual and UI changes in store for Maverick as well, but what Wine really needs is help testing its release candidate.

We need to hunt down every application that worked perfectly in older versions of Wine and make sure they haven’t broken.  Literally millions of people will be using Wine’s 1.2 release for at least the next year, and if we allow even one major regression it’ll be the digital equivalent of the vuvuzela.

But while we’ve already found and fixed hundreds of regressions, there are a whole mess of applications we still haven’t tested.  Wine doesn’t really have a QA team to handle this kind of thing – it’s just you and me, folks.

So please, join the Platinum Regression Hunt.  It’s as simple as running your applications in Wine and telling us if they don’t work anymore.

A quick favor if you’re bilingual

Please, a quick favor.  If you’re using a foreign locale and install Wine, you’ll probably see this:

I need the words above translated.

With the exception of a couple of languages they aren’t.  The translations are Ubuntu-specific at this point: they’re neither handled upstream nor through Rosetta.  I was planning to get rid of all of them (more on this later), so I never converted the menu items into our existing translation infrastructure.  But removing them is delayed until Wine 1.2 in some months, so for now what we have needs to be localized and I need to handle the translation manually.

Please post translations here or in this bug report.  If you can do it in patch form that’s great, if not it doesn’t matter.

It’s time to fix the window controls

This is awkward.  We need to talk.

March 3rd was a strange day. It was one day before User Interface freeze for the upcoming Ubuntu Lucid long term support release.  By the end of the day we were supposed to have the entire look and feel of the desktop settled on so people could start writing documentation and books.

This was the same day that Canonical finally released the new theme that had been under secretive development.  It was bold, daring, light-inspired, and perhaps most popularly, not brown.  Jono Bacon, Canonical’s community manager, broke the news.  Mark Shuttleworth followed up on his own blog, thanking three members of the design team for leading the effort.

The most important change, however, wasn’t actually talked about.  The designers don’t blog themselves, and Mark and Jono didn’t mention it directly.  It had to be found in the screenshots, or experienced firsthand by alpha testers.

This is not ok

Soon, the community learned the change was intentional: a bug about the misplaced window controls was quickly marked invalid,  and when the controls briefly reappeared on the right again the change was reverted.  What’s disturbing is that Planet Ubuntu has been rather silent on the topic.  No one’s posted a real defense of this change yet, or for that matter even claimed responsibility. It’s like there’s this collective unease about criticizing something that feels like it came directly from on high.  So, instead, people are just silent.  I’d certainly be if I worked for Canonical.  Perhaps I should be, as I still hope to work for them.

If you read between the lines, you can tell that people aren’t too happy about it.  The most flattering thing a developer’s said about the left-sided Window controls is that they “got used to them after a few days”.  We’re quick to praise the theme (it’s gorgeous), but talking about this major sudden change to the window controls feels like taboo.  That’s incredibly unhealthy for a community project.  It’s like there’s this collective unease and everyone’s worrying if we’re about to release something embarrassing.

This experiment was a failure and we need to realize it

The alpha releases are great places for usability experiments.  Sometimes, they don’t work out.  Put a new user on today’s Ubuntu Lucid and they’ll think it’s fantastic, sleek, and absolutely gorgeous right up to the point where they have to close a window.  That’s where our first impression becomes something awful.

Note: The new card backs pictured above are my doing and are now default (Mads Rosendahl drew them).

A brief summary of the complaints about the left side window controls

Some of these I noticed myself, a few are gathered from various comment threads on forums and blogs over the past week.

• Because the window title isn’t centered, the window controls being placed directly in front of it put it in a weird indented position
• The “slightly off left” location is inconsistent with Nautilus, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Empathy, and every other tabbed program we have, which have close buttons for their tabs on the right.
• The left position is inconsistent with Windows, previous versions of Ubuntu, and even OSX – users have to relearn decades of muscle memory.
• Users who interact with both Windows and Ubuntu machines (or migrate from Windows) will have a much harder time than they did before.
• The buttons are too close to the file and edit menus, making catastrophic misclicks much more likely.  Closing something on accident should be as rare as possible.
• Even without misclicking, a user will have to take more time to use the window control and avoid a misclick.  This is an example of Fitt’s Law.
• The close position is also inconsistent with the power button in upper right.  Currently, “close it down” is something you can always do from the upper right anywhere in the system: within a tab, within a window, and even for the whole computer.  The new window controls break that entirely.
• The new position leaves a lot of empty, wasted space in the upper right of most windows.  While strictly speaking the amount of unused space is the same, it looks much worse when it’s all clustered together.  When the controls are on the right, the extra space can function as a buffer for the potentially destructive window controls.
• Similarly, the upper left of most windows now becomes much more crowded, creating a rather unpleasing contrast to the relatively empty upper right.
• In previous Ubuntus you could close windows on the left if you really wanted, by expanding the small circle menu that’s now gone entirely.  File->Quit is also an option, which is now very close to the close box.
• Gnome upstream has them on the right, causing consistency and developmental problems when we deviate.  This is particularly jarring with the adoption of future projects like Gnome shell and Gnome 3, which will change again how we interact with window controls.
• The current implementation breaks themes not designed for the new button order (which is currently every theme we ship, so even changing the theme back doesn’t help)
• A day before User Interface freeze of a long term support release is the worst possible time to suddenly spring this on everyone without explanation.
• It is very difficult to change them back as we don’t have any UI tool for doing this (the current method is manually editing gconf keys)
• The new position doesn’t actually do anything beneficial.

That last point is the most important.  Other than “looking different” the change doesn’t do anything helpful.  It’s a huge usability loss for an awful lot of people.  Some people get used to it quickly.  Others don’t, and like me end up getting physically angry when trying to use their computer.  I can’t remember ever having my computer make me feel this way for a long time, and I’ve been running Ubuntu alphas for five years now.

Let’s admit we have a problem

Ivanka deserves credit for being the first member of the design team to at least talk about the controls:

Are we smoking crack to think that the learning curve or getting used to a new position is ever going to be worth any real or perceived benefit of new positions?

I’ll leave that question to the reader.

Fixing a build failure

I haven’t posted in a while, so I figured I’d just give a sample of the kinds of things I deal with as an Ubuntu developer.

When a Wine developer wants to implement support for playing mp3 files, the smart thing to do is to use a software library, in this case mpg123.  Wine is a good example of a large and still growing piece of software with a similarly expanding list of dependencies.

It’s my job to make sure all these bits work well together so that Wine can be built in a complete way for you – without mpg123, Wine would have to be built without full support for mp3s, and sound on some apps would simply break.  Sometimes this means packaging software that isn’t in the distribution yet.  Usually it means fixing bugs, and here we can see the true strength of the open source approach.

It starts with a bug report

I was ready to put out a Wine release with its new mpg123 support, but Wine wasn’t building on 64 bit.  This was a case where the mystery was more interesting because it was only partially broken: 32 bit worked perfectly.

I knew right away that it was probably an Ubuntu-specific issue, although other distributions (especially Debian) might also be affected.  I filed a bug upstream to try and nail down the specifics.  Everyone shares their relevant expertise here: a Wine developer notes that it’s a mismatched symbol-header problem, I figure out the cause is Ubuntu’s unexpected use of 32-bit headers on 64-bit systems, a community member provides a temporary workaround patch, an mpg123 developer tells why things were the way they were and how Ubuntu+Wine was the first to expose this problem, and Alexandre Julliard says what he’d ultimately like as a best practice.

This sort of collaboration is exactly what Open Source is about.  Everyone involved could just go to the same bug tracker and simply get to work – it didn’t matter that all 6 of us were in different continents working for different companies on different projects.  Everything is laid bare, easy to see and thus easy to fix.

Getting it done

At the end of the day, getting the fix out to users is what actually matters.  It’s really disappointing when great code like mp3 support just doesn’t happens because of something silly like an out of date distribution library.

So, that’s the final step in the chain – the mpg123 developer puts out a new version of mpg123, and then I have to package that up and put it into the latest Ubuntu alpha.  This is where Launchpad’s ability to have a single bug exist against multiple packages becomes especially helpful: by filing a launchpad bug I could track the changes I had to make to all 3 packages (mpg123, ia32-libs, and then wine).

Technical details for the interested

It’s worth noting that this bug could have been prevented entirely if Ubuntu had proper multiarch support.  Multiarch means the ability to install 32-bit packages directly onto a 64-bit system, rather than having to use special separate 32-on-64 packages like ia32-libs.  Multiarch has been a slow, gradual redesign under development in Debian and Ubuntu for years now, and it just barely missed the Lucid cycle.

This leaves us with the current implementation, which can at best be described as “a tremendous hack.”  32-bit libraries from needed packages are manually added to a giant list.  Then they’re processed by a script and all thrown into one gigantic, 600+ megabyte package named ia32-libs.  This means that any program which needs 32-bit compatibility (such as Wine) has to depend on this massive source package, and any time a single component changes it needs to be manually updated.

However, ia32-libs contains only the library files, not the header files, so when you build a 32-bit application on 64-bit Ubuntu you’re actually building with the header files installed from the 64-bit version of the package.  This is normally fine, as most header files are identical across different architectures, however this wasn’t the case with mpg123.  So we were using a 32-bit library that had different symbols than the 64-bit header file, and the build then fails with symbol errors.

There are quite a few applications for 64-bit Ubuntu that need to make use of 32-bit libraries for various reasons, however Wine is by far the most dominant.  This makes me, the one responsible for Wine, also the official babysitter of ia32-libs and similarly broken packages.  Wine is special in a way, though, as unlike other applications there is no way to fix it by just making it 64-bit — Wine will always need 32 bit libraries in order to run 32 bit Windows applications, which will remain incredibly common for at least another decade.

Alpha 2 ISO Testing begins

So here’s the deal: you want to help contribute to Ubuntu in some small way but don’t want to make much effort or risk your “real” computer.  Enter ISO Testing.

Basically, you burn a disk and attempt to install.  If it works, you click a box, and if it doesn’t, you click another and file a bug.  If the installer finished but turned everything pink and that’s not really your thing, don’t check the box for “serious”.

This is one of the best ways of helping Ubuntu that doesn’t actually involve using it.  So if you have a spare computer, partition, or even VM you can basically spend about 30 minutes after downloading and submit a good test report.

To get started:

• Go here and make an account and then click about 4 buttons.  There’s even a “I’ve started a test so others can try something else” feature.
• A fuller explanation is at the wiki page

Benefits:

Once enough people give successful ISO test reports, the Alpha is released and the coolest of us can start general testing.  That’s where you actually use the installed system and test all the experimental new features like being slightly less brown.  But before that can happen, testers need to know they can install and update without hassle – the daily CDs are frequently unbootable for one reason or another, so that means the alpha CDs need to be good enough to install from.

Also, here is a picture of my cat:

The future of Wine sound

Sound in Wine has been a big issue.  From a user’s perspective, it didn’t work well.  From a technical user’s perspective, there were 3 different drivers to choose from and none of them worked well.  From a developer’s perspective, no sound driver would ever work well.

Wine was a victim of the proliferation of sound drivers on Linux.

At one point, Wine had separate sound drivers for ARTS, ESD, OSS, JACK, and ALSA.  None of them worked right, even if the user could figure out how to configure Wine to use the “correct” one.  Subtle changes to each API and differences between distribution versions made matters even worse.

PulseAudio was supposed to be a solution to problems like this by being the one true Linux Sound System, but in some ways it made the problem worse.  Now Wine needed a separate PulseAudio sound driver, and no one wanted to write sound driver code since the whole thing was a big mess to begin with.  Worse, the most work had gone into making the ALSA driver better, and there were a few technical reasons why it seemed like a good choice to stick with ALSA and use it as a default.*

So, the decision was made to go with ALSA and improve it a bit, and hope that PulseAudio’s ALSA-compatibility layer would work well enough.  That didn’t exactly happen – PulseAudio didn’t actually want to support some “abuses” of the ALSA API, as one dev put it.  Some users took to killing PulseAudio outright every time they wanted to use Wine.

Things got a bit political.  Was Wine at fault here, or PulseAudio?  Should Wine include a PulseAudio driver, even if it was poorly maintained?  What would the default be?  Also, what the hell were we gonna do about the Mac?

The solution, which in retrospect is pretty obvious

Wine wasn’t the only program facing this problem.  Anyone writing or porting a Linux game had to answer the question about how they would play sound – almost none chose to write 7 separate audio drivers.  Instead they all did the smart thing, and used a higher level library.

So, that’s the plan – Wine will use a sound library.  And then we’ll let them worry about actually talking to whatever sound system happens to be working best.  OpenAL is the smart choice here, for much the same reason that OpenGL was the smart choice for graphics.  We get Mac compatibility “for free” too.

Now, why didn’t this happen earlier?  Well, in fairness to Wine, OpenAL didn’t actually exist in a usable form until Wine already had sound drivers for a few years.  A similar thing happened with wikis and distributed version control systems – we eventually saw the light that new open source projects had been following for years, and the project is better because of it.

* As I understand it, a lot of Windows programs expected to be very close to the hardware and at the time many users were having issues with PulseAudio latency.

A brief summary of Wineconf 2009

In bullet point form.

• We’re serious about a 1.2 release in the next few months.  As Alexandre said, “it’s time”.
• 64 bit support will be the major new release goal.
• For most people, having no regressions and working with way more apps than 1.0.1 did will be the actual feature they care about.
• Users will need to make a new Wine installation to migrate from 32-bit to 64/32-bit capable.  It is left to me to figure out and code a humane way to present this.  This is also a convenient time to make their Wine folder case insensitive.
• We’re giving up on separate Pulse/ALSA/OSS/Jack sound driver layers and instead doing the smart thing: passing everything to OpenAL.  Maarten Lankhorst will handle most of it.
• Packagers like me will have to work out CJK font support for our respective distros.  Wine will need manual links to whatever font is actually provided by the distro when it’s in a CJK locale.
• We need some help from Freedesktop.org for solving bug 10841.  Essentially we need a standard way of saying “hey reset the resolution when I’m done, even if I crash.” I was “volunteered” for the task of approaching the respective projects.
• We need user help finishing up the Tahoma replacement font.  It’s still missing some glyphs for certain languages and some users report it as “ugly”.
• VMware is an ally of Wine.  They use our test suite on Thinapp, and even contribute test fixes and new tests back to us.  Tests are just as good as “real” code.
• We need more users to run git update and winetest daily (with their screens unlocked).
• Alexander announced a new patch tracking system to prevent patches from getting lost in the nether (and for devs to know when a rejection occurs)
• By far the largest concentration of wine developers is in the netherlands.  It has something to do with being below sea level, which means global warming is an ally of Wine as well.
• Francois Gouget has promised to teach me every nuance to Winelib so that I can document it properly.
• I need to update about 10 different wiki pages to give them more modern instructions, such as how to get a good backtrace (eg on Ubuntu you install wine1.2-dbg).  A recurring theme to this conference seemed to be that if it’s written in English and concerns the Wine project, it’s probably my responsibility at this point.
• Owen is going to setup planet.winehq.org, since he’s done it before for another project.  There you’ll see my blog and a few others.  I might actually update more than once a month too!
• Andre Hentschel is working on a Wine port to ARM.  I’ll see if I can get him a first generation Pandora (I had the misfortune of preordering two about a year ago, and they may actually arrive sometime next month).
• Jeremy White wants help recognizing people who should come to wineconf.
• I need to make a proper message box to indicate that Wine is loading immediately after a user opens an application (currently there can be about 5 seconds of nothing, resulting in either frustration or opening the application multiple times).  Wine should be sending the signals it needs (with xdg message) already, we just need to have the desktop listen to them.
• I need to make a “Press” page for the website, including an email address for press@winehq.org which will probably direct to me possibly several others.  I’m curious how other projects have handled this – is it a good idea to have multiple press contacts?
• All documentation needs to be moved to the wiki.  From there it shouldn’t be too hard to setup a wiki->pdf->docbook/xml conversion script and have the documentation build automatically based on the latest wiki pages.  Then we can start shipping it with packages again (since offline documentation still matters somewhat).
• I’m going to experiment setting up Redmine for the Wine project.  If I can get it running well on a separate server and have it fully import Bugzilla, the Wiki, and our Git repositories then we can switch to it and start using its nice management features.  Budgetdedicated will provide the server.
• The winehq.org Donation link needs to go to a proper web page that actually says where the money goes and what we’ll do when we raise enough.  Currently it just dumps you off to paypal without explanation.  Amazingly, some people actually give money (enough to partially fund WineConf).  This task is also mine.

I need to finish preparing for the Ubuntu Developer Summit that starts in a few hours, so the bullet points will have to suffice for now.  I’ve got my work cut out for me it seems.

IBM’s Linux Chief says we should focus on everything but winning

Sutor said they need to focus on usability, stability, security, reliability, performance, with some cool thrown in, as well…  I think making it a complete drop-in replacement is a dead-end strategy.

Sutor’s speech on desktop Linux has inspired me.  Accordingly, I’d like to present the…

Bob Sutor Guide to Running a Marathon

• Overall fitness is important on race day. You’ll need to focus on your endurance, your heart, your leg muscles, your feet, your abs, your waist, and some arms thrown in too.
• Running form is important on race day. You’ll need to focus on your breathing, your leg motion, your arm movements, the length of your strides, and some pacing practice thrown in too.
• The training routine is important on race day. You’ll need to focus on finding other runners to practice with, self discipline, getting a top personal trainer, and some knowledge of the track thrown in too.
• Don’t try and win the race.  That’s a dead-end strategy.

You’ll note that Bob left out “compatibility” from his list of things to focus on.  A strange omission, coming from the company that witnessed IBM Compatible computers dominate the PC industry without actually being sold by IBM.  Compatibility then meant being able to run Microsoft with the same hardware and software.  It still does today.

We’re pretty good at hardware.  My girlfriend got confused by the manual that came with her latest printer: it gave 12 steps for Windows, another 12 for Mac, and then an additional 6 for both.  There were no Ubuntu instructions.  Turns out all she had to do was plug it in, the first thing she would have tried if there wasn’t a scary manual making her think printer setup required some sort of shaman dance.  This is a good problem to have, although having to tell your girlfriend to stop shaking her hips at the printer is perhaps an even better problem to have.

Winning

Hardware works, but we haven’t won yet.  We could make every single graphics card, printer, digital camera, and music player work out of the box flawlessly and we’d still miss the market completely. We wouldn’t actually be compatible.  What we have is a software problem. That’s why I work on Wine.

IBM management has never really believed in Wine as a technology, even though their own engineers find it useful. Jeremy White has even said that IBM Managers weren’t very helpful.

For my part, I’m going to ignore IBM’s failed attempt at leadership and focus on what actually matters: making things work for users. Only if we become compatible can we be at least as good. Then people give us a try, and notice we’re actually better. That’s when we win.

Warning: This dialog is deadly, fatal, and could kill you (and then you would die and be dead)

My computer told me to restart today.

Here, let me highlight it for you in case you missed it.

That’s at least five different places where we tell the user to restart.  This is, as I would say to my students, a redundant use of redundancy.

I think we can give our users a bit more credit here.  Consider this version:

That pretty much says the same thing, with no text at all.  But even that may be more than is needed.  Suppose you just ran update manager, installed a system update, and then saw this:

For those of us who’ve used update manager before, this isn’t much of a puzzle to figure out.  The computer is asking for permission to do something, and since we just ran update manager it’s probably a system restart.

What’s important

Whoever wrote this dialog obviously wanted to get across the message that a restart was about to happen.  Well, they succeeded, but now we have a problem of wordiness.  This dialog doesn’t just say restart, it also says this:

So let’s use the example above and improve this dialog a bit, emphasizing what’s actually important:

Not bad isn’t it?  The important bits are in there, and they’re no longer lost within a 3 paragraph beast.  Let’s try and humanize it a bit without losing these advantages.

Same message, much more readable.  Removing the title is an interesting change: now it doesn’t feel like reading a document for homework, but instead something predictable and very easy to understand.  This is just a first draft, of course, but since it’s something literally millions of people will see, I think it’s worth taking a bit of time to get it right.