Wine and industrial communication like OPC

[Mike Hearn]

> 
> Now I also got some questions from  your answers:
> 
> * Did I understand correctly. Wine doesn't have a built in support for DCom, to be abel to use Dcom I have to add the DCom support from Windows 98 to the Linux system?
> And the problem with that is the MS License, it stops me from distribute those XXX.dll with a Linux product (hardware and software in this case.)

It doesn't stop you, basically the license says "you must have a Windows 
license to use this code". Because it's technically a part of Windows, see?

However a Windows license is quite cheap relative to $3000-$4000 for the 
APIs so maybe this isn't a problem.

You could even buy copies of Windows 98 off ebay or something for 
ultra-cheap living. The license can be for any version of Windows AFAIK.

> * We want to make a OPC server, because other computers want to get information from our system.
> Is there a problem in make a DCOM server, is it the "no user can acsas port under 1024 on a Linux system" problem.

Well, I'm not sure. You can have Wine access ports under 1024 by running 
it as root so that's no problem.

The difficulty may be that nobody has tested network DCOM servers on 
Wine as far as I know, even using Microsofts implementation. So you'd be 
doing some pioneering work :)

> * What I have heard I thought DCom uset RPC??? But Juan Lang wrote that Wine doesn't have support for RPC

There's a bit of confusion here. There are *two* DCOM implementations 
you can use on Wine:

- Wines own, builtin code. This is incomplete and cannot do what you want.

- Microsofts DCOM implementation

Wine *does* have support for MSRPC, and I think it's wire compatible 
with Windows these days and capable of making simple RPCs. However the 
RPC runtime (rpcrt4.dll) is just the first layer of DCOM, all the rest 
don't work right yet.

So you'd have to use native DCOM (microsofts code), for which you need a 
Windows license.

thanks -mike