Installing Acrobat Reader 7 and Acrobat in general

[Holly Bostick]

gslink schreef:
> The user interface is what the user has to do to use the program.  This
> is not supported in Wine.  You will find links from winehq to several
> lists of things that run under Wine.  When you attempt to use these
> lists you will find that many if not most of the programs do not run as is.
> The user outside the Wine world sees a totally false picture of Wine. He
> loads Wine and finds there are NO current instructions on how to use it
> so he presumes Wine to be worthless and goes away.  Even if he persists
> there is still the problem of figuring out exactly how to make many if
> not most of the programs in the will run database work.  The public
> simply won't put up with this.  You can't have Wine so that a user must
> be a priest to load a special dll or to find out what special dll is
> necessary.
> Currently, there needs to be a short document written and KEPT up to
> date.  To install and use Wine do .......  This document needs to point
> to somewhere where the user can get more help.  There needs to be a WIKI
> where postings can be made specifically concerning what is necessary to
> make a program work on Wine.  How do you currently make Office or
> Acrobat work on Wine?  To my knowledge there are currently no large or
> complicated programs that you just load and run under Wine.  You must
> set them all up first.  It doesn't make any difference to the user if a
> program fails because of a sound driver.  Waiting for all this to be
> fixed perfectly means a wait forever and serves no purpose without at
> least simple instructions on how to use Wine now.
> 
> 

I'm sorry, gslink, but I cannot find any reasonable point of mediation
or compromise in your position, as it does not completely make sense to me.

On the one hand (the previous "Commercial Support" thread), you're
against public requests for "support" (in the sense of "help" in various
forms), because Wine is not "ready" in one or more senses.

On the other hand, you admit that Wine needs "support", because it is
not "ready", thus people can't use it.

Am I the only one seeing the circular chain of reasoning here?

All I can get (meaning, "guess wildly") from this (and our previous
conversation) is that you feel that Wine(lib) must be made ready so that
all these supposedly non-working applications can be ported so that they
work transparently, because that's the only solution to this conundrum.

Which would be very nice, I'm sure. However, my position is (as it has
always in fact been), that concerns about the ease or difficulties of
porting applications should be left to the next stage, not this stage
(because Winelib isn't ready, for one thing)-- but that you (meaning,
the project) are perfectly capable and ready to ask for support in
solving problems like the one that you (gslink) have listed above, so
that it *is* solved, and you (the developers) can devote your attention
*to* making Winelib or whatever "ready", in whatever form you feel that
"readiness" should take. I do not believe that every application must
work 'transparently' out of the box *today*, as long as there is
adequate documentation on how to get it to work readily available to the
user.

> Currently, there needs to be a short document written and KEPT up to
> date.  To install and use Wine do .......  This document needs to point
> to somewhere where the user can get more help.  There needs to be a WIKI
> where postings can be made specifically concerning what is necessary to
> make a program work on Wine.

I, personally, am perfectly capable of creating such a document.
Probably right now-- literally, this very minute. As it happens, I just
started (yesterday) documenting a huge comparison list of what I've got
working under Wine vs. under Cedega, and what I had to do (or why it
doesn't work), which I plan to put up on a web page to help users. So a
simple document of "how to get Wine working" is nothing by comparison. I
am not the only one capable of such a document, I am sure. I can think
of at least two other people who hang out on Wine-users who could likely
produce such a document, either alone, or in concert with others (even
though those users may have never thought of doing so, or think that
they're too "inexperienced" to do so). Unfortunately, there is no
publicized and easy-to-understand methodology in place for me or anyone
else to submit such a document, and of course, the only reason that I
know you need one is because I go out of my way to hang out on this
list. If I didn't, I would be ignorant of both things-- your need, and
how to satisfy it-- rather than just the one thing (how to satisfy it).

The wiki will not survive-- OBviously--without user support. The appdb
will not recover without user support.

*But the users do not know that you need their help!* And in all this
discussion of requesting support, the prevailing consensus is against
asking them-- because you're not even thinking about them, even though
the "commercial" supporters you are discussing are ultimately just
users, too.

Who the hell knows about the Wiki?? You, me (because I hang around
here), and the few users who go to the website. But who goes to the
website? "Nobody" (not really, obviously, but proportionate to the
number of people using Wine, nobody).

Why? Because the vast majority of users don't even know the website
exists. Why should they? SuSE (my fallback installation) installed Wine
in the initial install. Gentoo, Debian (and variants), Fedora et.al, all
have some version of Wine in their repositories. So the user just
installs it from there. Half the questions on wine-users come from users
using an insanely old version of Wine, and they don't even know that
it's insanely old. We have to send them to the site to get a current
download-- and don't forget, these are users who've managed to find the
ML somehow, but not the site or its "download" link. I don't even want
to speculate on the number of users who never find the ML nor the site,
nor the current download (which they're probably not even looking for
since they have no way to know that Wine has a montly release schedule).

There is no popup on firstrun that says: "and by the way, if you need
more help, or want to help, head over to http://www.winehq.org !", there
is no documentation included (now that it's been split off from the main
package, and I don't know if it's included in the pre-packaged binaries
available on the various repositories)-- and even if the documentation
was included and gave a reference to the site, man pages are not the
default first search point of this so-called "average (Windows) user",
or are the provided docs HTML and would pop up in a Web browser if a
link to them was automatically generated in the K-menu or GNOME menu
when Wine was installed?

And other than Google, where is the existence of the site, much less its
critical nature, much less the existence of the Wiki or the appdb
published in GREAT BIG RED LETTERS?

If they don't even know about the site, how exactly is the "average
user" supposed to find out that there was a Wiki? It's not like the news
was published anywhere this "average user" might have seen it. Ooh, a
side reference on /. . Yeah, that would cover it.

What about distribution news pages? What about IceWalkers? What about
Freshmeat? What about NewsForge, or "ApplicationWatch" (a
currently-non-existing variant on Distrowatch that would track news
about "important" applications not supported by high-profile websites of
their own)?

Why is the important Wine news not published where the Wine users are,
and in places where potential Wine users are? Why is there no one
creating and maintaining a relationship with Tom's Hardware, whose
Migration to Linux article was a year ago? Or Rage 3D, targeted at ATI
users, who would be very interested in knowing how Wine overcomes or
works around ATI driver bugs (heaven knows, I would)? Or Linux Journal,
whose article about Wine that I found in a Google search is from 1994? I
found an interview with Alexandre published in Linux Gazette from 2000,
and a LinuxWorld article published in 2003.

Where is the current news? Where are the current reviews? Where are the
detailed changelogs (even quarterly) that let a user know that things
are changing and give them some idea of the project's current status in
terms of improvements and regressions (for instance, I know that Deus Ex
regressed a few months back, but there is no way for me to know if that
was fixed without trying it, which I haven't had time for).

This is why I had to get on my soapbox twice in one week, to tell two
different people on two different, unrelated-to-Wine forums that my
reference to Wine was to the WINE project, and not Cedega. Because
people know about Cedega, if they know anything at all. The squeaky
wheel gets the most grease, as they say.

I mean, please. If the project consists only of the development team,
the development team clearly cannot -- and in fact, should not-- be
responsible for managing publicity and administrative issues.

However, it seems obvious that managing these issues is becoming a
critical concern if the project as a whole is going to progress to the
"next level".

So for $DEITY's sake, ask for help. Ask everybody. Loudly, everywhere,
and at every opportunity. You've got a lot of friends-- you've earned
them with all the hard work you've already done. Make new teams. The
documentation team. The legal team. Liasons all over the place to
coordinate one team with the other. Become a not for profit organization
so you can accept money without legal issue (and tax breaks for the
contributors). Start treating yourselves like people doing valuable work
instead of like a bunch of guys diddling around in the garage, because
you are better than that, and have been for some time.

But who is going to take you seriously if you don't act like you mean
business?

I love you guys, but you gotta stop selling yourself short.

Holly