Wine Success...

[DrJ]

I have had two initial successes in getting Windows programs to work on FreeBSD using Wine (the current wine-20050725).

I installed from wine ports (/usr/ports/emulators/wine). First I patched it according to the following:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/free ... 01181.html (http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-emulation/2005-July/001181.html)
otherwise it would give me a Stack Heap error message. I configured it using the config file from Frank's corner,
http://www.frankscorner.org/index.php?p=qa
and set it up as a Win98 OS.

Thereafter, I installed the Windows version of Solitaire from my old Win98 box. The game played fine, though the help menus did not work (for this, that is not a big deal).

Next, I tried something a little more adventurous and useful: complete Acrobat 4.0 from a Windows CD. I copied all the files off the CD over to its own directory within Wine, and ran setup.exe, and away it went!

To test it, I pulled down a fillable PDF form from our local county registrar's office, and opened it with Acrobat. I put in some nonsense in various fields, saved it, and opened it back up with Acroread7 (the Linux version). All of the text I input remained, so the test worked. Note that you cannot save fields in fillable PDF forms with Acrobat Reader (try it!), so this is a big deal to me. I need to fill out a lot of PDF forms.

I've certainly not pushed things yet, and I don't have printing set up. And Wine reports all sorts of errors, none of which seemed to affect execution. Nevertheless, it does work, not only in theory, put also for a useful (at least to me) program.

I must say that the overhead from Wine is enormous. I'm running it on a dual Athlon MP2800, so while it is not state-of-the-art, it is a reasonably powerful machine. I'm sure the program is single-threaded as well. In any event, it ran more slowly than the same program on my 500 MHz Pentium III/Win98SE box. I'd guess performance suffers by a factor of 5 or 10. Unless you have a modern, and powerful, computer, I'd suggest that you forget Wine.

I must say that overall I am quite pleased. More to follow.

DrJ

[DrJ]

Let me give a quick follow-up to my previous note. Performance of programs under Wine seems to be quite good, actually. Earlier I had a rogue process, probably left over from an aborted attempt to register Acrobat from the installation program. That was consuming one entire CPU, and that program was a dhcp client. Those things can bring down a machine, which it did.

Once that was killed, performance was quite reasonable.

Please forgive me for my excitement. However, there have been a few nagging holes that FreeBSD (or PC-BSD) have been unable to fill. Having a way to resolve them without dual booting, using two different machines, VMWare or stuff like that is quite exciting. I guess I gotta get out more...

DrJ

[pcbsdusr]

Good job!

Can you make a pbi package out of it? I'll be one of your guinea pigs. :D

Keep up the exellent work!

Cheers!

RF

[blind javelin thrower]

Please forgive me for my excitement. However, there have been a few nagging holes that FreeBSD (or PC-BSD) have been unable to fill. Having a way to resolve them without dual booting, using two different machines, VMWare or stuff like that is quite exciting. I guess I gotta get out more...
Thanks for the much-needed laugh to start my day.

I wonder why it is that we're willing to spend endless hours tweaking and fine-tuning things, trying new software and sometimes even complete OSes, all the while rebooting countless times during the process ... only so that we may hopefully find the one OS that does it all, and we won't have to boot into another OS every once in a while to accomplish some isolated task.

I keep trying to break this behavior in myself, but I can't seem to do it.

[DrJ]

In general I agree with you. I watch with some amusement as people test Linux distro after distro, which is a manifestation of the same sort of thing. I've certainly played with things on the computer that have no real-world impact.

In this case, though, running Acrobat (and not just the reader) does solve a real problem that I've had that directly affects my ability to raise funding. I had cumbersome work-arounds, but this will make life so much easier.

DrJ

[DrJ]

Good job!

Can you make a pbi package out of it? I'll be one of your guinea pigs. :D

Keep up the exellent work!

RF

Thanks for the compliment, but it seems that sblevin is the guru at that. I'd be happy to work with him on it, but the procedure is pretty straight forward. I also couldn't do any QA/QC, as I'm currently running the FreeBSD 6.0-Beta2 under Gnome 2.10. That's not really representative of what people here use.

DrJ

[DrJ]

Sblevin has me told that a .pbi of Wine does exist. He did not clarify if he used the patch I mentioned, or just the straight version from ports.

I should note that Wine is no panacea. It works sometimes, on programs that are coded cleanly (such as Acrobat 4.0, which is about 6 years old). Others do not work as well, if at all. I have not been able to get any of the components of Office 2000 to work yet. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. Use Wine at your own risk and time.

FWIW.

DrJ

[youlle]

Kris created a Wine PBI, he did it after i failed to create one, as it required kernel patching using the method route i was employing.

[youlle]

http://www.pcbsd.org/packages.php?software=Wine

we just all need to learn to read lol, or learn to click "view all categories" on the packages page.