LinuxConf Europe 2007

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Conference Dinner (Sunday)

Duxford Excursion (Monday)

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Kernel Summit 2007

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Kai Blin - The Wine Project / Samba Team

Teaching Wine the Samba thing

Wine is a compatibility layer for running Windows programs on Linux/Unix without requiring a Windows licence. The project is steadily approaching it's first stable release and more and more Windows programs are working. Now people start expecting Wine to integrate into Windows networks. Remote named pipes, network shares and numerous other features are requested. Samba, as a file and print server for SMB/CIFS clients, provides a lot of these features for Linux/Unix already.

The talk presents the current implementation status of networking features in Wine. It moves on to talk about work planned to further improvements. It will also discuss the difficulties that appear when trying to import features from a project under the GNU Public License to a LGPL licensed project.

Wine uses or will use a couple of different interfaces to Samba that provide an optimal trade-off between functionality and the need to relicense some Samba libraries; those interfaces will be presented in the talk. The interfaces include dispatching the ntlm_auth or net binaries, which avoids having to link to GPLed code. Using the LGPLed winbind client library allows Wine to access some more advanced features. As I will be working on these topics during this summer, we might come up with another way to avoid linking to GPL code, using dbus or similar message protocols was already discussed, DCE/RPC might be another option.

The goal of the talk is to provide up-to-date information about the status of Wine's Samba integration and to show other developers who might want to hook into Samba with some ideas how to do this.

Submitted paper

Paper (PDF) and Paper (tgz) .