[Wine] For what reason the "official" Wine does not support USB ?

[James Mckenzie]

Marc Chamberlin <marc at marcchamberlin.com> wrote:
>Version 1.1.50_1.2rc7-1.1-i586 of Wine broke my ability to use the USB 
>port with a Western Digital Passport disk drive. That prevents me from 
>using the PortableApps tools under Wine on Linux.  It also caused file 
>corruption on my Passport drive and required a significant amount of 
>effort for me to recover. So DO NOT use this version with USB disk drives!!
>
This has got to be a Linux issue.  I use a Passport drive on my Mac without issue.  

Can you look at what Linux does with the drive.  Also, and as far as I know, there is no security software for Linux.  If you enabled the security features of the drive in Windows, the drive should be invisible to Linux.  

>Sure would have been nice if a README or Release Notes had been included 
>with my distro's package (openSuSE11.2) giving me a heads up on this USB 
>issue, especially since it is apparently a known issue to the developers!
>
Known issue to which developers?  Maybe OpenSUSE, but certainly not Wine's as you are the first person to describe this problem.  Again, a Linux issue is not a Wine issue.
 
>I downgraded Wine back to version 1.1.28-2.3-i586 which does work, but I 
>am back to living with some font problems in Thunderbird that I was 
>hoping the upgrade would fix.. Guess I will live with that for awhile 
>longer...

That is a long way back (.50 versus .28).  Do you know when this actually 'broke'?

A regression test is in order.  However, I normally would recommend a backup, but these external devices are usually purposed for this.

James McKenzie