What's the future of win16 compatibility on 64bit GNU/Linux?

[oiaohm]

doragasu open a bug. I don't have a broken kernel. winecfg at a min should not have been taken to failure state.

Yes this kernel breakage is finding a lot of faults where dependance should not exist but turn out to exist.

[dadnotgrandad]

I guess my use of old QuickBooks packages goes along with my 2002 4-door sedan and my 1984 VW Vanagon. When one is retired and my Son is two years away from engineering school, I have to be careful with the cash. My understanding is that the current and somewhat older versions of QuickBooks do not work with Wine running under Linux. If, indeed, QuickBooks 2014 will run under Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit, I will get a copy.

John

[oiaohm]

dadnotgrandad the big difference is your 2002 4-door sedan and your 1984 VW Vanagon can still get brand new parts if you need them. Your old Quickbooks does not get new parts any more. You are doing the equal of trying to run a car when you cannot get new oil filters for it. Yes it works now but its going to fail due to abuse.

http://www.intuit.com.au/quickbooks-onl ... ftware.jsp
Quickbooks on-line yes I know costs again and your data is stored in cloud. Its a major pain that quickbooks does not release a Linux version other than the database server.

In fact if you bought QuickBooks 2014 you will have a major fight importing your data from 2001 even run. dadnotgrandad remember even if did buy Quickbooks 2014 you are basically promising to rebuy 2017/2018. Yes the intuit 3 year support cycle costs of the %^&( @#$. At least 200 dollars spend every 3 years add on cost of Windows and Hardware or OS X and hardware the online version is cheap.

Correctly maintained quickbooks is expensive. Only a nicely profitable business can afford it.

The fact you are retired you really do need to look at gnucash, HomeBank... and see if they will do your functionality.

[doragasu]

OK, I have opened bug 36664.

[Tux33]

I've made this thread a sticky. If Ubuntu's backported the change, we're going to see a lot of users with this problem.

Sorry to confirm this point.
I am a common Ubuntu Studio 10.04 user, and my win16 old Pocket Viewer application is now broken (and my personal data in proprietary format not yet fully moved to FLOSS no more available).

Code: Select all

$ uname -a
Linux baobab 3.13.0-29-lowlatency #53-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT Wed Jun 4 21:27:51 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ wine --version
wine-1.6.2
$ wine u:\sfiwin.exe
modify_ldt: Argument invalide
modify_ldt: Argument invalide
modify_ldt: Argument invalide
modify_ldt: Argument invalide
modify_ldt: Argument invalide
err:module:attach_process_dlls "krnl386.exe16" failed to initialize, aborting
err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for L"C:\\windows\\system32\\winevdm.exe" failed, status c0000005
$ sudo su
# echo 1 > /proc/sys/abi/ldt16
bash: /proc/sys/abi/ldt16: Aucun fichier ou dossier de ce type (no file or directory from this type)
# ls -l /proc/sys/abi
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 juin  21 07:55 vsyscall32

Thanks to all of you for supporting wine !

[dimesio]

Someone filed a bug with Ubuntu for Trusty, and according to the bug report the patch allowing users to enable 16 bit code has recently been backported, but I can't find anything for older versions of Ubuntu. You might want to add a comment to that bug noting that it also affects the LTS versions, too. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1328965

[Bladeforce]

Does anyone know if this is fixed if i update my kernel to 3.16 in Kubuntu?

[Tux33]

I didn't try to update to 3.16, just LTS updates, and patch is now ok:

$ uname -a
Linux baobab 3.13.0-34-lowlatency #60-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT Wed Aug 13 16:15:18 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ wine --version
wine-1.6.2
$ wine u:\sfiwin.exe
modify_ldt: Argument invalide
modify_ldt: Argument invalide
modify_ldt: Argument invalide
modify_ldt: Argument invalide
modify_ldt: Argument invalide
err:module:attach_process_dlls "krnl386.exe16" failed to initialize, aborting
err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for L"C:\\windows\\system32\\winevdm.exe" failed, status c0000005
$ sudo su
# echo 1 > /proc/sys/abi/ldt16
# ls -l /proc/sys/abi
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 août 27 00:16 ldt16
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 août 27 00:16 vsyscall32
# exit
exit
$ wine u:\sfiwin.exe
fixme:hook:SetWindowsHookEx16 System-global hooks (4) broken in Win16
--> my Win16 SW is running correctly !

[phanhan]

That is the problem that I'm interested. because the information So in theory this would only affect 16 bit windows installers in the future? Games from the Windows 95/98/ME/XP era mainly?

Most of the games executables were 32bit so those wont be affected just installing some?

I guess if push comes to shove we'd have to install the game in a virtual program then transfer it to a wine prefix along with the registry settings?

[oiaohm]

phanhan really I missed your post. But for other that read this link I need to provide a few updates.

Very new Linux kernels /proc/sys/abi/ldt16 is no longer required so is a stop gap. If you have to use /proc/sys/abi/ldt16 please serous-ally consider upgrading kernel to newer kernel that no longer requires it.

Win16 programs stopped working because a particular security issue appeared. This is espfix issue. Designing the code to fix espfix in a 16 bit segment on a 64 bit system was fairly tricky. So new Linux kernel have 16bit segment support and secure.

<b>Most of the games executables were 32bit so those wont be affected just installing some?</b>
Wish this was the case. There are a lot of 32bit games that thunk call to a 16 bit library from the 9x time frame. Yes just using a 16 bit library is enough to require 16 bit support.

Linux kernel developers have been very helpful to Wine in this instance. Can we promise that something like this will not happen in future. No we cannot. Its unfortunately the classic X11 method of finding if X feature is required. Break it and see if anyone screams in 6 months.