[Wine] Exploration of Wine as a desktop shell

[James McKenzie]

Gullible Jones wrote:
> So, not content with merely having the idea of a Wine-based Linux distro, I decided to try setting up Wine as a desktop shell on top of Arch Linux, with the help of the alternative Windows shell BBLean. Basically I just installed BBLean in Wine and put
>
>
> Code:
>
> exec wine "c:\bbLean\blackbox.exe"
>
>
>
> in my .xinitrc.
>
> First impression: It's darn slow. Really darn slow. And crashes a lot. [Laughing] 
>   
Well this is definitely a start.  However, you do have to have a way to
get to the Linux part.  Not everyone does or should run Windows
exclusive programs.
> Nonetheless, it works... and pretty well considering that's not what it's designed for.
>
> Some things I'm noticing:
>
> - Lots of "fixme" messages in the console. LOTS. Hundreds of them. Never seen so many. I'm thinking maybe it has to do with Arch Linux compiling everything -O2? Or maybe it's just because nobody ever tried BBLean on Wine before. :? 
>   
A lot of the fixme calls are due to the kluges used to get some, if not
all, Windows programs working.  Returning an 'OK' to a call like 'Are
you connected to the Internet' can be the difference between a program
working and a program crashing.  Some programs actually check to for
what kind of connection and Wine will always return "LAN" whether this
is true or not.  Thus, a good effort might be to actually 'flesh' this
out and make the call to Linux for connection type work.

Like others here, please keep on working on this.  An alterative to the
existing Gnome/KDE desktops that runs Windows programs is always
welcome.  Running the Window API in the Kernel is almost as dangerous as
running Windows itself, and can be just as wasteful of resources.

James McKenzie