[Wine] Wine for mission-critical application

[Martin Gregorie]

On Sun, 2009-11-22 at 16:26 -0600, vitamin wrote:
> ELCouz wrote:
>> -I need an access to the serial port of the computer (real-time).

> You need to test this first. Wine still have some issues with serial 
> ports. And some users reported some incompatibilities between Windows'
> and Linux's serial port implementations that Wine can't work around.
>
Here's my experience with a couple of Win95 applications:

- USB serial adapters can't be used by WINE apps.

- serial ports whose name is in the range /dev/ttyS0 to /dev/ttyS9 can
  be accessed without the need of any symlinks, etc. These are ports on
  the motherboard together with those on PCI cards.

- If you have more than 4 serial ports installed, you need to add 

     8250.nr_uarts=N

  to the kernel boot parameters, where 'N' is the number of ports. 
  If you omit this parameter it defaults to 8250.nr_uarts=4

> You need to test this first. Wine still have some issues with serial
> ports. And some users reported some incompatibilities between Windows'
> and Linux's serial port implementations that Wine can't work around.
> 
Equally to the point, neither the BIOS nor older Windows versions
provide serial port drivers. NT4 onwards may have them: I've never tried
to use serial ports with them. So any older program that uses serial
ports has to contain its own drivers or use a third party library such
as COMM-DRV. This means that, while my apps work OK, yours may not due
to application or library code differences.


Martin