My Info
Name: Brian Vincent
Email: <vinn -at- theshell -dot- com>
Primary obsession: propaganda, Wine Weekly News
Right now I've got a few different projects:
- writing a book about Wine
- I want to put together a 'commercial support' page for WineHQ
- It'd be nice to export our news summaries via an RSS feed.
- Resurrect the interview series. Don't expect to see that before '06
Since I got asked a lot at WineConf about the book, I think I'll write a little summary here.
The book aims at three types of users: regular Linux users, sys admins, and developers. The working title is "Wine: Running Windows Applications on Linux". Honestly, I came up with the chapter outlines and the title in a half hour of inspiration. Six months later I haven't found many faults with either one. I'm writing the first 9 chapters and Ira Krakow is writing the last 5. The Winelib parts are sort of up in the air, but I think we worked out at WineConf how they'll get tackled. The big thing is, no one with Wine thinks Winelib is such as great tool for porting. However, it does make sense to abstract interfaces and build a special Winelib DLL that loads different ones on Windows compared to Linux. That's the approach we'll take.
As far as the book goes, it'll be published by Prentice Hall under the "Bruce Perens Open Series". They've been amazing to work with. All the staff there is very professional and great at what they do. The manuscript is due by 7/15. I'm so glad I went to WineConf2005; I was rapidly approaching burnout on it. Now it looks like we'll come close to that 7/15 date. Of course, that means after editing, reviewing, production, post-production, it will be at least February until it's on shelves. The timing seems perfect to me. Wine 1.0 might come out about then.
Right now we're about halfway done with the book. I think if I can put in a lot of effort in May things will be in good shape. Once I hit the 80% mark I'll probably get anxious to just finish the damn thing.
Update June 04/2005: Well, the 7/15 has now been pushed back to 8/20. I hope that's manageable. I'm finishing off chapter 6, "Integrating with Linux". The next chapter will be another long one, "Enterprise Deployment". Then it gets really easy - I get to cover CrossOver Office and Cedega. Finally, in August I'll come back and re-evaluate chapter 5 - "Installing and Running Applications".
Update Nov. 1/2005: Losing a co-author really sucks. It pretty much made a lot of things stagnate. However, I'm still working on this and the end is in sight. I have edits from technical review (thanks Juan and Eric!) to complete and then chapters 1-4 will be in final manuscript form. Chapters 5,7,8, and 9 are still in development editing. Only chapter 6 remains to be completed - I need to write about 30 pages. On the Winelib front, Chris Riddoch will be writing that. I haven't spent nearly enough time with him, but hopefully I can catch up with him soon.
With regards to Wine, I've spent more time on WWN lately. It's sort of been my writing outlet while I procrastinate on chapter 6. The beta release was fun and for fun I went through and re-read every issue of WWN to put together a little development summary.
Update Jan. 11/2006: Egad. I've been traveling a lot lately. Some for work, some not. Nothing has gotten done regarding the book and no WWN issues have appeared for 2 weeks. I need to get back in the swing of things. But I got the O'Reilly book...
One thing I haven't mentioned to too many people is an update to O'Reilly's Running Linux book. This classic book set the standard for all Linux books after it. In the past they've had just a couple of paragraphs mentioning Wine. Now they want to expand it to 7 pages. I'm writing that for them and will have the draft submitted on May 9th. Of course, I plan on submitting about 9 or 10 pages to see if we can get a little more coverage. The text is just a basic intro to Wine and running apps. Apparently I'm also responsible for writing a section on CrossOver Office, so I'll include a page about that.
Update #1 This is completed. Now I'm waiting on O'Reilly to send me the contract and give me cvs access. Overall it came out pretty good. As a bonus I'll get two free copies of the book.
Update #2: O'Reilly's process for working on books is a complete pain in the ass to use. There's no reason why I couldn't just write 7 pages and hand it off to an editor to include in the book. Instead, they want me to format in docbook, get CVS access, merge the stuff in, etc, etc. It's such a pain in the ass. I'm pretty sure if you wanted to learn how to manage the publishing process you could look at O'Reilly and do everything the opposite.
Update 6/04: Well, O'Reilly decided to completely rewrite about the first page of what I sent them. I have mixed feelings on that because I actually thought the intro was really good. However it probably did need some massaging to fit in with the rest of the book. The rest was hardly touched and I thought that was cool. I think we're done with edits now. In fact, I may be completely done with maybe just a final review just before the chapter goes to production. I never did quite get their cvs access set up, but for 7 pages I couldn't be bothered to jump through all the hoops they wanted (fax md5 of public key to Sweden, sign this, sign that, .. yada.. yada.) Now back to the real book I'm supposed to be working on.
Update Nov. 1/2005: Lots of good news here. First, I got paid, so that's always nice. More importantly, the book is off to print and expected to be on the shelves in December. There were some changes to Wine over the summer that affected the text, such as the addition of theming in winecfg. I pushed the final edit date right up till the end to make sure things were up to date. O'Reilly made the changes and we're good to go. Extra thanks to jwhite and crew for getting me nightly builds of what became CXO 5.0. The book hitting the shelves will cover things in CXO like bottles.
Update Jan. 11/2006: Well, I've got the book in my hand, so it's officially done. I believe it was on the shelves before X-Mas, but Andy just got around to getting me a copy. It's a sweet book and once again O'Reilly did a superb job. The Wine stuff is in chapter 28, pages 872 - 881.