Installing Acrobat Reader 7 and Acrobat in general

[Kuba Ober]

> In
> reality almost nothing of any importance currently runs on Wine without
> some setup.

Any such "setup" is to work around wine bugs. The proper way to go about such 
problems is to fix wine, not "setup" anything.

> What you probably need to do is to experiment with 
> replacing some of the dlls or adding some from Windows.  This is usually
> what is necessary.  You may also need to install the software in a
> Windows machine and then copy it over.  Start trying things and
> something will probably work.  I have been getting on the Wine people
> because this feature of Wine makes it useless for the average user.
> There needs to be some easy way for someone to report what is necessary
> to get a new version of something running or there needs to be a good
> configurator written.

This is beyond the point. What needs to be done is more wine development so 
that the wine dlls do their job so that you can run windows software w/o any 
special settings. Having an automatic gizmo to copy things over from a 
windows partition etc. is completely wasteful (if that's what you imply). If 
something "doesn't run" it's a wine bug, it's typically not due to a lack of 
configuration or any such thing. [I'm forgetting about audio/video device 
setup for now].

Acrobat under wine needs to be debugged and the missing/misimplemented pieces 
of wine have to be implemented/fixed and that's all there is to it. There is 
and shall not be a "configurator" in this picture. All the configuration that 
wine would ever need shall be provided by the packager, and that's close to a 
no-op typically anyway. I bet most people can live with default 
~/.wine/drive_c setup.

> Wine is a very good program but the Wine group is 
> making a classic programming error in forgetting the user interface.  It
> doesn't make any difference how good it is if you can't get at it!  In
> this case you can't.

User interface? Pray tell, what "user interface" do you have to windows 
innards anyway? So far wine provides more of it than windows ever did. E.g. 
human readable registry files, built-in debugger (not finished but better 
than nothing), tracing that is useful in fixing real life windows apps under 
development (that's one of my main uses of wine), and so on.

Cheers, Kuba