Software Engineering with Wine - 2011

Contents

Introduction

Linux and Mac users often are tempted to run Windows apps, but don't like having to buy a copy of Windows, or having to run it in a virtual machine on their computers. This is where Wine comes in. Wine is a clean-room, open source, and free reimplementation of the Win32 API on top of the Unix API.

When Windows games don't work properly, it's common to run dxdiag, a handy little app that comes with Microsoft DirectX; gamers use it to get information about their 3d graphics card and to test to make sure it's working ok.

The project here is to both get Microsoft's dxdiag working a little better on Wine, and to get Wine's dxdiag to be more feature complete.

To try the native (Microsoft) version of dxdiag, do

$ wget http://winetricks.org/winetricks-alpha
$ sh winetricks-alpha dxdiag
$ wine dxdiag

In 2009, cs130 also tried improving Wine's dxdiag. Their code is online at code.google.com/p/yadxdiag, but was never committed to Wine because they tried to send it too late in the term. Let's not make that mistake this time. On the very first week, let's try to submit the smallest possible patch to improve Wine's dxdiag, and keep trying until it gets in.

Related links:

Requirements

The new dxdiag must: