[aklug] Re: Adventures in wine

I've kept kind of an occasional eye on wine over the years. In the last ye=
ar or two has seen great improvement, particularly on programs that have be=
en around a while and are well established, and haven't done the lemming th=
ing into .NET. For example, the one windows app that I routinely use is a =
graphics viewer called Firehand Ember didn't work for a long long time, lot=
s of problems, barfs, segfaults, branch-and-hang, then suddenly last year i=
t works very well in wine (finally).

Unfortunately, I have to use a lot of stuff professionally that -doesn't- w=
ork in wine. At all. Typically these are niche programs (programs that co=
nfigure PLCs or some other field device or controller), or that require spe=
cial hardware (modbus or similar protocol analyzers) or something that requ=
ires a hardware key/dongle. I have never succeeded in getting wine to work=
 with one program that uses a PCMCIA based key.

Anecdotally, anything that requires .NET2 is flakey, and anything that requ=
ires .NET3 is a nonstarter (recent quicken, quickbooks, turbotax).

Also anecdotally, virtualbox can be configured to work 'transparently', tha=
t is it runs the program in the guest system, but the user sees it as worki=
ng like it is on the gnome/xfce/fluxbox/whatever desktop, not in an XP desk=
top 'box'. I haven't seen the need or taken the time to check this out mys=
elf so it may be total bs. And even if it isn't, you still have to install=
 the guest os with all it's baggage anyway.
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Received on Thu Apr 9 09:46:22 2009