[Wine]Running Photoshop on a relatively old PC

[Ben Prescott]

> My question is, does Photoshop run on Wine? If it does, what sort of
> problems does it have? Will the performance of a somewhat older PC
> suffer greatly?

I'm running Wine version 20040914 on suse 9.1, and Photoshop 7 works
fine - no tweaks of fudges, thats "off the shelf"; though the actual
installation was done on an older version (dec2003)

I'd imagine photoshop 5 will be pretty good.

There are some issues with floating windows and wine that mean the tool
palette, navigator windows etc tend to get ophaned, don't minimise etc.
If its a relatively old PC, you'll probably not want lots of
applications open, so thats probably not an issue.

Don't try to run it on an older version of wine unless you go back to
december 2003; I couldn't get it to work on interim versions. The
version above, though, tidies up issues such as accessing Adobe for
updates (which used to misbehave and fail). 

Performance maybe improved by starting it with all the noise redirected
to /dev/null

wine '/home/ben/.wine/fake_windows/Program Files/Adobe/Photoshop 7.0/ \
Photoshop.exe' >/dev/null 2>&1

But if it misbehaves, that noise is then useful (if noisy!)

> Another option would be buying a brand new PC with Windows XP,
> Photoshop 7 etc. But I'd like to have another options.

Well, obviously you don't need a new PC with windows to run Linux; its a
needless expense. Suggest you might want to pick up a second hand PC to
get Linux working on initially, experiment etc. If you hit any issues,
you rather need a working PC to surf the web for answers! It might also
be a way to get a second disk ...

Linux is very nice on a fast new PC, though bleeding edge hardware is
sometimes hard to get Linux to support.

Also, try one of the boot-from-CD distributions - that could identify
any serious hardware compatibility issues, and is a no-risk way to
try Linux out. Not sure Wine would be there and / or work though.

eg:

Suse 9.2 - latest - is a DVD image; lots of sites here:
http://tinyurl.com/ysnpt

If you don't want or can't burn the DVD, if you pick your preferred
site, and browse to the directory the DVD iso is in, you'll find two CD
images as well - one for Gnome, one for KDE.

Also, google for knoppix; this seems to be one of the leading from-CD
distributions.

regards, Ben