Hogwash McFly writes "A huge underground complex that was built as a nuclear refuge for the British Prime Minister in the 1950s has been put on the market. Code-named Burlington, the bunker now has a population of only four maintenance workers, yet sprawls over 240 acres and accommodates 60 miles of roads. Underground power stations supply energy for 100,000 street lamps and amenities include a railway station and a pub called the Rose and Crown. Among ideas suggested for the £5,000,000 bunker include a data centre, wine cellar, rave club or fifties theme park. It is not clear whether a tank for keeping laser-equipped sharks is included, however."

Jeremy White writes "I am happy to report that we have shipped version 5 of CrossOver Office. The most user visible changes are support for Office 2003 and 'bottles' which lets you deploy Windows applications more easily than ever. But under the hood, this release includes all of the major work that went into the 0.9 release of Wine, which also shipped today and is now officially in Beta."

Joe Barr writes "Stephen Feller has a story about WINE on NewsForge this morning ahead of next week's expected Beta release. The WINE project is 12 years old, so it's just about time." From the article: "'Wine has historically had a very frustrating history because it has been alpha software,' White said. 'This is really hard work. We're replicating the work of a billion-dollar company. The reason we're saying it's alpha is because we believe we still have fundamental changes to make on the way the internals work.' Noting that it has not always been easy to install software with Wine's alpha releases over the last decade, White said that once you got something working it has never meant it would continue to do so, or do so properly. There may have been display glitches or things not functioning properly, if a program even worked with Wine at all." OSTG is the parent company of both Slashdot and NewsForge.

mparaz writes "SpecOps Labs, the makers of the "David" Windows emulator previously accused of ripping off WINE, are offering $10,000 to a team who can build a Windows XP emulator in 15 days. " This whole thing reads really strangely to me.

Praxiteles writes "The first cocktail was...grog?! From the article: 'The first cocktail ever was made in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago, using wine, beer, apple juice and honey. Patrick McGovern defined the mix as "grog", an archaic drink that in the United States is sold as the Midas Touch'."

An anonymous reader points out a project called Drivey, which he describes as "a dark and fascinating example of 2.xD [not quite 3d] graphical rendering. This tiny, free [as in beer] demo gives you an amazingly compelling driving experience. To quote the author, 'It was conceived as a driving simulator for old farts like myself, who are kind of nostalgic for the "old days" [ca. 1985] but are not so thick as to believe that the games from the 80s were actually in any way superior to the games we play today.' Even works fine under WINE!"

Wil writes "Here's a good one for the Linux fans -- running Wine on Linux and attempting to download a Windows Genuine Advantage protected file from the Microsoft website works just fine. It seems that Bill Gates has a soft spot for Tux after all, or at least isn't bothered about him downloading updates."

polar_bear` writes "Last week, CodeWeavers issued a "Installer Challenge" to improve Wine "until it can run nearly every Windows program." Linux Magazine interviewed CodeWeavers Founder and CEO Jeremy White about the challenge, Wine on OS X on Intel, the Linux desktop and what is ahead for CodeWeavers. White has some pretty interesting answers."

You may recall that sometime last November we put up a request for questions to be passed on to author, voice actor, comedian, and card shark Wil Wheaton. Seven months and many adventures later, Wil has responded in depth to the excellent queries Slashdot users put to him. If you're curious about what's kept him, what it's like to be a Teen Titan, or how to use the LCARS User Interface, read on for his responses.

Oliver Kayas asks: "I'm a newcomer to Linux specifically the Ubuntu distribution. I have been searching for software that will allow me to manage bibliographies for my thesis. I've come across Kile/Latex however, this only works on KDE and I am using Gnome. Under Windows I was using Endnote 8 which even allowed me to link references to documents on my hard disk so I could easily search for papers I just wanted to read. I know I could use an emulator such as Wine to use Endnote but that defeats the object of switching to Linux. I was wondering if you know of any alternatives?"

An Anonymous Reader wrote "InsideMacGames has posted a response to the news of Apple using Intel processors from both original Mac game developers as well as people who work on porting Windows games to OS X. Some negative and positive feedback is expressed, though it seems there's more uncertainty than anything else at this point. Can the fear of a Wine-like VM solution gutting the biz be balanced by faster CPU speeds?" From the article: "We think Apple's move to Intel is great. For one thing, it demonstrates that Apple is really serious about giving Windows-based computing head-to-head competition. For another, it lays the groundwork for the future of personal computing in a digitally connected home. And, for another, it's going to narrow the gap between the release of a game on Windows and the release on Mac -- maybe to zero."

prell asks: "Our company has approximately 250 Linux desktops, and an array of Linux servers. Recently, we've been presented with the possibility of migrating all or most of these machines to Windows to support one industry-specific application, and we do not want this to happen. Coming to mind immediately were: Wine and CrossOver Office; some sort of multi-user VNC setup; Ndiyo; and VMWare. Keeping in mind that the desktop machines are low-spec (~350MHz CPUs on average), what are our options? How can we preserve our Linux install-base in the presence of a non-canonical Windows program?"

jrrl writes "For a while now, ordering wine (of the alcoholic variety, not the almost 0.9 variety) online has been a somewhat dicey proposition in some states. But today, the Supreme Court overturned state laws that disallowed direct shipment of wine from out of state. Their reasoning is that the states' 'authority to regulate the sale of alcohol within their borders' under the 21st Amendment does not supersede 'the Constitution's ban on state discrimination against interstate commerce.' States could still disallow all direct shipments, but at least they have to be evenhanded now."

Roblimo writes "For years there's been fear that the Wine Project would get sued by Microsoft at some point, and this fear has kept IBM and other major free software-using companies from participating openly in it. Now the Software Freedom Law Center, headed by Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen, is offering free legal services to Wine (and other FOSS projects) to allay corporate fears and head off potential lawsuits."

IamTheRealMike writes "As WineConf 2005 took place last weekend, the Wine developers discussed the project's direction and future. A new deadline of September 30th for the 0.9 release was set by Alexandre Julliard -- the release promises to bring an end to the system of monthly snapshots and provide a new focus on ease of use and stability. A new GPLd application regression testing tool called CXTest was demoed, as was some of the great Direct3D work being done lately. Finally the CEO of Gupta gave a talk. Gupta have ported their 4GL RAD tools to Linux by working with Codeweavers (who sponsored the event), and their experiences were documented in a fascinating presentation. Overall: big thumbs up, but it's not obvious enough that there's enterprise-level support available for Wine. Check out the group photo and the new Wiki!"

Memorize writes "What's keeping you from switching your desktop to Linux? Linux has been able to run MS Office under Wine for a while now, but Codeweavers just announced Crossover 4.2 with support for Intuit Quicken and Quickbooks. I know that lack of a good bookkeeping app (other than Gnucash) has been keeping a lot of people from switching. It supports iTunes, too. What else do you need?"

ts1920 writes "WineCVS is an extensive script for automated installation of different versions of wine and Cedega. Today it has been updated to support wine installation with latest DX9 features. The latest patch level of the script now includes a profile for installing Wine with Oliver Stiebers Direct3D 9 patchset. A short installation instruction and some more detailed information can be found at linux-gamers.net."

Buddha Joe wrote in to mention that the lack of Windows updates for Wine users is the result of a Microsoft's active targeting of Wine users. ZDNet has the story. From the article: "As the most popular third-party translation technology in use, Wine was the first emulator to be specifically tested for via WGA"

IamTheRealMike writes "In January, Microsoft announced a new anti-piracy initiative called Genuine Advantage. From this summer onwards all users of Microsoft Downloads will be required to validate using either an ActiveX control or a standalone tool. Yesterday Ivan Leo Puoti, a Wine developer, discovered that the validation tool checks directly for Wine and bails out with a generic error when found. This is significant as it's not only the first time Microsoft has actively discriminated against users running their programs via Wine, but it's also the first time they've broken radio silence on the project."

ResQuad writes "Everyone loves Windows viruses, right? Well, the crazy people over at NewsForge (owned by the same people that own Slashdot) decided to try running Windows viruses with Wine. So next time you receive an email virus, strike up Wine and see what you can do (or not)."