Crossover/WINE Test In Large Rollout

[Dave Richards]

All-

    I am not on this list, so if you would like to respond to me you
will have to reply to me directly.  This is a real world situation where
WINE could be used for a massive sever rollout (hundreds of users) and
is having some problems in our environment.

    The City of Largo, Florida is a large Linux and thin client shop
that has deployed a PC-less network for running out software.  We are
currently doing some R&D into options for running Lotus Notes in our
environment.  Our first choice obviously would be a native client
running on Linux---it doesn't exist.

    We haven't looked at WINE in about 2 years and today the kind folks
at CodeWeavers allowed us to test their new release with the Lotus
Client.

Here are the problems-->

1) Endian Bug.   WINE is not able to detect that the runtime Endian
order might be different than the server.  Our Xterminals are RISC based
and obviously WINE is running on Intel.  All of the colors display
incorrectly because of this.

2) Performance.   On remote displays WINE is *much* slower than it is on
the console.  The Lotus Notes client took over 5 minutes to run remotely
whereas on the console it comes up in about 20 seconds.  I am assuming
that it is making use of some of the XFree extensions for performance
and that perhaps they have to timeout and drop through code in order to
run on our Xservers.  Once it is running, performance is much better,
but the initial startup make it undeployable.

We are thankful for everyone that has gotten WINE this far and that it
works as well as it does considering the complexity of this task.  If
these areas are ever addressed, we would be happy to explore the product
again!

Dave Richards
City of Largo, FL
Systems Administrator