[Wine] For what reason the "official" Wine does not support USB ?

[Marc Chamberlin]

  On 7/15/2010 7:34 AM, James Mckenzie wrote:
> Marc Chamberlin<marc at marcchamberlin.com>  wrote:
>> Version 1.1.50_1.2rc7-1.1-i586 of Wine broke my ability to use the USB
>> port with a Western Digital Passport disk drive. That prevents me from
>> using the PortableApps tools under Wine on Linux.  It also caused file
>> corruption on my Passport drive and required a significant amount of
>> effort for me to recover. So DO NOT use this version with USB disk drives!!
>>
> This has got to be a Linux issue.  I use a Passport drive on my Mac without issue.
>
> Can you look at what Linux does with the drive.  Also, and as far as I know, there is no security software for Linux.  If you enabled the security features of the drive in Windows, the drive should be invisible to Linux.
James -  Thanks for your replies...   I have not had any USB issues 
either, with using my Passport under Linux/Wine until I upgraded to rc7. 
And then I started experience all sorts of problems... Typically, the 
drive would mount OK as far as Linux was concerned, then I would use 
wine to launch to PortableApps control application. That much would 
"appear" to work fine, but then I would launch the PortableApps version 
of Thunderbird, Firefox or some other app and soon discover that the 
Passport drive was no longer writable and act as if it had been mounted 
somehow as a read-only device. (Not true, it was originally mounted as 
read/write) That in turn, of course, lead to these apps crashing and 
locking up the drive. I would have to kill the processes at that point, 
and it was at this point I discovered that the Passport file system had 
become corrupted. Dropping back to an earlier version of wine has 
resolved this and my Passport is again working fine. Therefore I must 
disagree with you as the evidence seems to strongly indicate this is a 
wine issue and not a Linux one...
>
>
>> Sure would have been nice if a README or Release Notes had been included
>> with my distro's package (openSuSE11.2) giving me a heads up on this USB
>> issue, especially since it is apparently a known issue to the developers!
>>
> Known issue to which developers?  Maybe OpenSUSE, but certainly not Wine's as you are the first person to describe this problem.  Again, a Linux issue is not a Wine issue.
As I replied earlier, I inferred this was a known issue from yours, and 
Sven's responses earlier in this thread...
>
>> I downgraded Wine back to version 1.1.28-2.3-i586 which does work, but I
>> am back to living with some font problems in Thunderbird that I was
>> hoping the upgrade would fix.. Guess I will live with that for awhile
>> longer...
> That is a long way back (.50 versus .28).  Do you know when this actually 'broke'?
I use the versions of wine that have been vetted by the openSuSE distro 
and placed in their repositories. These are the only two versions of 
wine available at the moment, for openSuSE11.2.  So no, I do not know 
when this actually 'broke', just that when I picked up the latest 
version - rc7 from their "factory" repository, my Passport drive failed 
on me as described....

(My reasons for trying the upgrade was to see if it might resolve some 
font issues I am having with using the PortableApps version of 
Thunderbird. For example it will not properly display the '<' character 
(less than). The native version of Thunderbird, under Linux, does 
display this and other characters just fine, hence my suspicion that 
this is also a wine issue....)
> A regression test is in order.  However, I normally would recommend a backup, but these external devices are usually purposed for this.
>
> James McKenzie
>
>
     Marc...