Wine 1.5.7 Has Dynamic Device Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wine 1.5.7 Has Dynamic Device Support

Two weeks after the Wine 1.5.6 development release where they began work on a Direct3D shader compiler, Wine 1.5.7 now brings several more features for running your Windows binaries on Linux and other platforms...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTEyNTA

[AJenbo]

So is this giving us access to run devices from Wine, or just access to usb disks?

[Gusar]

Hopefully this doesn't mean they've yanked HAL support. I still use that!

@AJenbo: It's about usb sticks and CDs. With this, wine will automatically create a Windows drive letter for the stick/CD, instead of you needing to go into winecfg and manually create a new entry there. Wine used HAL for that, now it can also use udisks2.

[AJenbo]

Thanks that is much less exiting, but still fundamentaly nice. How come you are still using HAL?

[Gusar]

How come you are still using HAL?

1) I prefer pcmanfm-0.5.2 (with a few tweaks and bugfixes) over any other file manager. And well, that version uses HAL for storage device management.

2) I don't like consolekit/polkit. I consider them blackbox voodoo in that you have no idea what exactly they do and how they're doing it. And they're trouble, the Arch forums are littered with threads where people have issues with them.

Those are pretty much the reasons. I have a minimal HAL build, containing just the minimum pcmanfm-0.5.2 needs to do it's magic. Has worked fine since forever and continues to work fine (after an Arch user patched it to work with latest udev, that is ).