Anyone tried WINE?

Discussions about using Linux guests in VirtualBox.
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arakula
Posts: 19
Joined: 28. Sep 2007, 17:44
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Anyone tried WINE?

Post by arakula »

Hi,

I have a problem - or think that I have one...

I'm running Debian Etch as a guest inside a VirtualBox 1.5 on a Windows XP Professional host. So far, so good, works nicely, feels quite "real"... but.

Today I tried to set up Wine inside this virtual Debian so that I can test a Windows application of mine in a Wine environment, since a would-be customer tries to run it inside Wine (on a real Linux, that is) and I don't want to set up a complete real Linux machine just for this little test.

Went through the "additional steps to get the latest Wine version into a Debian box", everything went nicely, Wine 0.9.44.whatnot was installed through Synaptic.

When I tried to run my application, it did come up, but... S L O W. Really slow. It takes some 5-10 seconds to build up the initial screen. Reactions on mouse clicks have a noticeable lag (minimum of 0.3 seconds); simply doing some redraws consumes up to 100% of the virtual CPU time. And that is a 1.7GHz Core Duo (OK, the virtual machine doesn't know about the "Duo" part and uses one CPU, but still...).

Trying to run winecfg shows the same behaviour, i.e., switching between the tabs to set the Wine properties takes ages, as well as changing items on the screen.

Is this normal? Has anybody else tried Wine in a Linux guest? Is there anything I can do to change it?
newhere123
Posts: 44
Joined: 22. Jun 2007, 23:21
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Post by newhere123 »

I've never used Wine, so I can't give you a specific answer, but...

Maybe Wine, with conversion from Windows to Linux, is a heavy process, and running it inside a virtual machine produces worse results than it would otherwise (if it comes close to the virtual ram limit).

If your machine would only be Linux, it might be faster. But since your machine is only Windows (not to mention the fact that it does function within Linux) I don't see what the problem is? You can just use it in XP, right?
arakula
Posts: 19
Joined: 28. Sep 2007, 17:44
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Post by arakula »

As said, my goal is to reproduce the behavior of a Windows application when running in a Linux / Wine environment, without having to set up a separate Linux box.

I don't have any problem with my application; it runs perfectly well in a real Windows environment. The problem I have is that Wine inside the virtual Debian is abysmally slow, and I want to know whether that's normal, or a configuration issue that can be easily resolved.
coomac
Posts: 5
Joined: 1. Oct 2007, 07:57

Post by coomac »

Wine is generally not that slow on native linux. Something with the virtual environment must be messing it up. I'd suggest using a live cd rather than a virtual install if you want to test wine.
MaTrIx-X
Posts: 4
Joined: 28. May 2008, 09:08

Post by MaTrIx-X »

Same problem on VirtualBox 1.60 + Ubuntu 1.04 + Wine 1.0, as well as Fedora Core 9

I don't suspect that it is indeed a hardware limitation, but rather a bug of some sort. Winecfg is a basic settings dialog which should take a very minimal amount of system resources.

When I open winecfg or attempt to run something in wine, there is about a 5-30 second delay/lag. Winecfg buttons lag. It's much like trying to run a Windows XP machine with no graphics drivers on a 200mhz.

Host system specs: Windows Vista 64-bit, AMD Athlon64 X2 4000+, 5GB RAM, GeForce 8800GT, VirtualBox 1.60

Edit: This post seems very relevant: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=1600, and in addition, the issue does NOT seem to happen on vmware. Just tried. So that's even further proof that it is not a CPU limitation.
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