LinuxTag 2002

[Malte Cornils]

Hi all,

I'm just writing to "report" from WINE's booth during LinuxTag in 
Karlsruhe, Germany. Andreas Mohr and Uwe Bonnes were the developers 
staffing the booth. Generally, there was significant interest and 
high hopes for the WINE project, requests for application support 
was centered on MS Office (Word and Access mainly, also secondary MS 
apps like Visio and MS Project), Lotus Notes (but that one works 
quite well already, although we didn't demo it), WYSIWIG Web editors 
(Dreamweaver, Homesite) and DTP application (very common was support 
for PageMaker, which is the predecessor to Adobe InDesign). 
Illustrator and Photoshop were also common requests. The other 
notable application was Act 2000, which is some kind of Personal 
Information Management Software (and it did not work :)). CAD 
software was also commonly requested, though requests were spread on 
a lot of products.

We tried to analyze most of the problems - I hope I can put in some 
bug reports later. We were able to solve *two* problems - Rhinoceros 
3D modelling software (Andi will mail the patch later) and some 
fixes for BuildCommDCB (for some special hardware development software).

A personal wishlist item: I'd like to have some overview 
documentation for the tricky areas in Wine, like Interprocess 
communication and window management (how to debug this, mainly).

We found out that the wine debugger doesn't really work that well 
yet :-) (for me, it only worked after setting it to not using an 
xterm/wconsole)

Marcus Meissner also stopped by and found out that most apps 
(Homesite, Dreamweaver, Adobe InDesign 2.0) were using encryption to 
protect their application file, we didn't get the decryption 
working. A lot of apps would probably start working if we could 
support "encrypted" binaries. I'll try to put in more detail later, 
however, you can download their trial applications and see for 
yourself :-)

Another area of consternation was installer support, however, most 
InstallShield-based installers worked with a native stdole32.tlb 
(maybe a message to the user that (s)he needs this would be a good 
idea while we can't generate the typelib file ourselves, or is there 
some rewind stuff we could use?).

About games: we showed Half-life, Diablo 2, Starcraft and Grim 
Fandango, we used winex for that, though. Reaction to the 
proprietary extensions of Transgaming (and sometimes Codeweavers) 
were varied. It was a bit sad that most non-game applications each 
had some flaws (the WordArt bug for Office, dibengine problems for 
MS IE, the non-working compiler backend for Visual Studio (could be 
a problem with the specific computer) and well... there weren't many 
more apps we could show because most didn't start up :))

Links to trial applications:
(those I mentioned above)
InDesign 1.5: ?
InDesign 2.0 (PageMaker would also be interesting, get it from the 
same URL):
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/main.html
Illustrator 10:
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/main.html
Act 2000:
http://www.act.com/products/50/freetrial/index.cfm
CoolEdit 2000:
http://www.syntrillium.com/download/download.html?1
Homesite:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/homesite/trial/
(note: registering should not be necessary, click on "continue w/o 
login"
Dreamweaver:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/trial_download/
Rhinoceros 3D:
http://download.mcneel.com/rhino/2.0/eval/default.asp
(this one works great with Andi's patch!)

(and those that were rarely or just once mentioned, and not 
mentioned above)
Gandke & Schubert EAR and GS-Verein:
http://www.gsn.de/download/default.asp
Lemmings Revolution:
http://www.gsn.de/download/default.asp
Mindmap:
http://www.mindjet.de/download/download.php?produkt=mm2002std-g
(with registration)
Q-Stat:
http://www.q-das.de/homepage_e/produkt%FCbersicht_e.htm
(no free download. contacting them via mail requesting a demo per 
snail mail should work)
Xara X:
http://www.xara.com/downloads/xarax/

Photos: We made few. I hope Andi will mail an URL with them to 
wine-devel later.

(I hope I can post some debug logs later and put some entries in the 
bug tracking system. No firm promises though, but you can always try 
most apps yourself)

Yours Malte #8-)