headless question, and IPC question
Ken Larson
x1 at larsontechnologies.com
Thu Sep 29 15:46:22 CDT 2005
Alex -
Thanks for the good info. As far as not needing an X server, when I try
to run my exe under wine without one, I get:
wine: Could not load graphics driver 'x11drv'.
Make sure that your X server is running and that $DISPLAY is set correctly.
but yes, the regedit /? trick works fine.
I wonder if there is something obvious I'm missing in the compilation
and linking of my EXE? Where might I look to make sure it doesn't think
it needs a display.
My exe and the wrapped DLL do use sockets and I know that sockets in
windows often need a window handle to do their thing...
My DLL is a true DLL as far as I know, I currently link to it using the
accompanying .lib, but I think I could link dynamically to it.
Ken
Alex Villacís Lasso wrote:
> Ken Larson wrote:
>
>> I'm using wine to access a particular proprietary DLL (I don't have
>> the source for it) on Linux. The way I'm doing this is to write an
>> EXE that wraps the DLL, and makes all of the functions available via
>> socket request and response messages. My linux program has access to
>> the functions of the DLL by sending socket messages to the EXE running
>> under wine. 2 questions:
>>
>> 1. My DLL/EXE uses no calls to pop up graphical windows, so
>> theoretically no display is needed. Of course wine needs a display
>> because it does not know that an EXE won't make such calls. Is there
>> a way to run wine with a null or dummy display - so that it is
>> effectively running headless?
>>
>> 2. The sockets trick was the simplest way I could figure out how to do
>> IPC between a linux process and a wine process. However, is there are
>> any better or faster way to do this? As far as I know I can't use
>> winelib because I don't have the source to the DLL.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Ken Larson
>>
>>
>>
> If your program is a console-only app, it can run without an X server.
> For example, the command "regedit /?" works without defining a DISPLAY
> variable, even in a text console. If you write interesting information
> to a logfile instead of the screen, you could even do "wine wrapper.exe
> &" on the shell and put your app in the background.
>
> About winelib, you could try making a winelib app that loads the DLL
> dynamically. But this would only work for a true DLL (for example
> "propietary.dll") on which you can call LoadLibrary(). If your library
> is a static one such as "propietary.lib", with no companion DLL file to
> load, then all the interesting code is in the LIB file itself and cannot
> be loaded dynamically.
>
> About faster communication, you could try running the Linux app, which
> would fork(). One process runs your GUI or sets up your service, and the
> other could then exec() the winelib wrapper. Before the fork, you should
> set up a pair of pipes, or use socketpair() for communication. If you
> are careful, this can even work for a pure Windows app linked with a
> static LIB file, by connecting your pipe/socket to the stdin/stdout of
> the wine process (see the manpage on dup2() for details).
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Alex Villacís Lasso
>
>
>
>
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