WINE on Michael’s Domain

WINE regression testing

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I am using Textco ’s Gene Construction Kit (version 2.5) do draw my DNA vector maps. Unfortunately this company doesn’t care about Linux users. Therefore I have to use WINE to run the Windows version of the program. Admittedly, I could run VMware, VirtualBox or Parallels, but all that just to run a small program? Unfortunately either the Gene Construction Kit (GCK) is not coded according to standards or WINE is still not able to deliver full compatibility but now and then a WINE upgrade renders the program unable to run. Therfore I had to resort to regression testing to find the version that can still do the trick for GCK. Here is the command listing and what I did:cdmkdir winecvs -z 3 -d :pserver:cvs@cvs.winehq.org:/home/wine checkout wine (password 'cvs')cvs update -PAd -D"2007-06-01 CDT"./configuremake dependmakesudo make installThe source from the date above it the latest that appears to work.

How do I run the Gene Construction Kit under Linux?

Sat, 26 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

There are only a few Mac or Windows programs that don’t have a good equivalent on Linux. One of these few is the Gene Construction Kit (GCK) from Textco . GCK is available for both Windows and Mac. So it should be possible to run it on an i86-Linux machine using wine (a sort of emulator). I tried that and failed (I didn’t try really hard). However, probably any Windows program can be run under Linux using VMware . Unfortunately VMware is commerical and expensive (but there is a fully functional time-limited demo). GCK does run under VMware 4.0/W2K/RedHat9 without problems. The only disappointment in VMware is the “Shared Folders” option. It is much better to share your Linux home directory via Samba and then have it automounted when you log into your emulated Windows OS. I even managed to hide Linux-specific files in my home directory that start with a dot (like .mozilla) by inserting “hide dot files = yes” into the samba configuration file /etc/samba/smb.conf. Although I am using VMware at the moment, I plan to switch to Wine in order to avoid any Microsoft code.

Wine and Crossover Office

Sat, 26 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Being fed up with VMware (because it’s so slow and using half of my memory) I turned to Wine . But Wine appears to be very difficult to set up. Typical Linux. It will work but unless you spend a whole week you don’t get it working. That’s where the Corssover Office application comes in. It’s just a bunch of helper applications to make setting up wine easy. That is with certain Windows applications and most Windows applications are not supported. So I got a demo version of Crossover Office and started installing (as root). The application installed without problems. After installation I started the Crossover Office Setup application. That is the place from where you install your Windows applications. So I wanted to try Microsoft Office XP (as it is licensed for the whole university). I made the mistake to select “Install everything”. The installer forced me to install also Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and a bunch of other crap. Than the Office XP installer stopped to respond in the middle of the process. Waited for 2 hours but the progress bar didn’t move and there was no disc activity. So I had to cancel the setup and leave a mess behind. A second attempt to install failed as well. So I thought to use the Windows uninstaller. Failed as well. Uninstalling from within crossover office failed also. So I thought to uninstall the whole crossover office (there is an uninstall script in the bin directory of crossover office which is hardly mentioned anywhere in the documentation). That worked but apparently didn’t uninstall everything. I still had to manually remove several directories, but worst of all the Gnome menu entries were not deleted. The gnome menu entries are quite a tricky thing since they are not located in one place. Gnome uses some “virtual folder” (vfolder) system to create the menus. That is the menus are assembled on the fly based on several xml files located in several places. But I guess I found all of them and removed the entries manually. I must have made a coding mistake since after this the whole menu was gone. Apparently the mistake was in my ~/.gnome2/vfolders/applications.vfolder-info file. Of course I didn’t have a backup, so I copied the same file from /root/.gnome2/vfolders into my home folder.After that I reinstalled crossover office and only installed Microsoft Word XP and that worked! An nice entry was visible in the menu “Windows Applications/Programs/”. Then I installed Adobe Photoshop 6.01. Installation was painless, but after that, the Microsoft Word entry in the menu had disappeared. Also there was no Photoshop entry under “Windows Applications/Programs/Adobe”. There was only an ImageReady entry. It appears that every newly installed application erases the menu entries of the previously installed application. However the hierarchical folder structure remains, only the last entry ins gone and replaced by a dot in the last menu folder. BTW Photoshop worked as one can start it up from within ImageReady.Both Office XP and Adobe Photoshop are applications that are “supported” by the Crossover Office. Now I tried to install an unsupported application, i.e. the Gene Construction Kit 2.5 (GCK2.5). The first thing was that the Crossover Office complained that the installer CD has some hidden files and that I have to make some changes to the fstab entries as root to enable reading these files. I did that and continued installation. The installer finished and there was a menu entry under “Windows Applications/Programs/Gene Construction Kit 2.5” which was named “Uninstaller”. I concluded that the Uninstaller program had been installer after the GCK2.5 application and thus erased the latter entry. Even more strangely after logging out and in again even the Uninstaller item was gone from the menu. Also all other program entries had disappeared.I figured that all the menu entries are single files in the directory /home/jeltsch/.gnome2/applications. They have the extension .desktop and are xml files with a relatively easy structure. One example:> more Internet\ Explorer.desktop[Desktop Entry]Name=Internet ExplorerType=ApplicationComment=Internet ExplorerExec=/opt/cxoffice/bin/wine “C://Program Files//Internet Explorer//IEXPLORE.EXE” X-Created-by=cxoffice Icon=/home/jeltsch/.cxoffice/dotwine/fake_windows/Windows/Icons/9d75_iexplore.-32528.xpm [jeltsch@mcblpc2 applications]$ more CXTree-Windows_Applications-Programs-Internet_Explorer.desktop[Desktop Entry]Name=Internet ExplorerType=ApplicationComment=Internet ExplorerExec=/opt/cxoffice/bin/wine “C://Program Files//Internet Explorer//IEXPLORE.EXE” X-Created-by=cxoffice Icon=/home/jeltsch/.cxoffice/dotwine/fake_windows/Windows/Icons/9d75_iexplore.-32528.xpm Categories=Application;X-cxoffice;X-CXTree-Windows_Applications-Programs;It appears that all entries that were made by the Crossover Office Installer are still present in this directory. Now I just have to figure out why they don’t show up. Of course I can start the applications by just typing the entry under Exec into the command line but that is somehow cumbersome. To test GCK2.5 I started it from the command line and it really came up. First it asked for the installer CD (some kind of copy protection mechanism). It was in the drive but somehow I had to eject it and insert it again to make it visible. That worked fine and the dialog appeared where I entered my name and organization. But then it miraculously complained: “Could not start the application because there is not enough memory”.Now I have to tackle this problem, because GCK2.5 is probably the most important application for me that has not Linux equivalent.

Debugging GCK2.5 under wine

Fri, 25 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

GCK2.5.9 works with wine (crossover office 2.01 version). The 2.5.9 update doesn’t show the “Could not start the application because there is not enough memory” error. GCK starts up without any trouble and is partially usable. In fact it seems to be fully functional (including Deluxe import) with one big exception: new files cannot be created (quits upon selecting “File - New”. The empty window box where you can select what type of GCK file you want to create (sequence, illustration, etc) is drawn with the title “New Window”, but its not filled with content and the application quits.

Dubugging GCK2.5 under wine

Fri, 25 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The new window that fails to be displayed, contains (when run natievly under W2K) the following text (and radio buttons for the four different file types):Select File Type Contruct (Ctrl-C)Illustration (Ctrl-I)List (Ctrl-L)Gel (Ctrl-G)New File NameOKCancelThe text associated with the different radio buttons appears first in the debug file in the following lines (as determined by the command “grep -n “List” all_output > List_output”, etc): 3890577 Gel3885836 Illustration3881107 List3876329 ConstructThat is within the range where we predicted the error to be. Let’s now look at what happend shortly before and after these commands were issued. After using GCK2.5 under wine a little bit more, I noticed that there is another function that causes the program to crash without error message, namely the “find sequence” function. Also in this case a dialog is displayed in which the user is supposed to type in a nucleotide sequence. Maybe there is something in common for these two crashes which could help to identify the crucial system call that makes the program to crash.

More about GCK2.5 under wine

Thu, 24 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

After working with GCK2.5 under wine I have identified more bugs that make the program quit unexpectedly. However, now I have not been using cross-over office (as its evaluation period has expired and of course my boss wouldn’t spend a cent for Linux programs). So I am using the default installation of wine that comes with Suse 9. I copied over the fake windows directory from the former .cxoffice directory. The following bugs do exist (they always appear when a window opens that requires you to enter alphanumeric values via the keyboard):1. Create new file (I knew about that before). Interestingly the (empty) new file that opens upon program start can be saved without problems…2. Find sequence (one shortly sees the window “Find occurence” and then the program quits)3. Sometimes (not always), when changing the color of a selected sequence the program quits.4. Features -> Make Region5. When selecting a sequence and getting info

Adobe Acrobat 5.0.5 under wine

Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I reinstalled Acrobat 5 to run it under wine. It didn’t work. The reason appeared to be again a plugin: DocBox.api. After removing it everything went smoothly. Already before (using RedHat 9) I have had trouble with a Acrobat plugin (it was WebPDF.api at that time). Most manipulation of pdf files can be easily done with Linux tools, but one thing is tricky: cropping already existing pdf files. That’s why I need Acrobat.

Running wine from a real windows install

Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I thought wine might run better from a real windows install. So I resized my partitions to free some 8 GB space. Unfortunately the partitioning software was not really great as I lost one of my partitions (the one where I had stored all of my downloads…). So I decided to go for a clean start and formatted the whole hard disk. First I partitioned the disk using cfdisk. Then I installed Windows98 from the installer CD onto the FAT32 partition, after that Windows2000 from the installer CD to another FAT32 partition (I wanted to install WindowsXP, but the installer CD refused to boot my computer). After that I reinstalled Suse 9 and copied back my home folder from my backup disk. So far wine works fine (after some minor adjustments in $home/.wine/config and mounting the Windows98 partition withmount -t vfat -o uid=jeltsch,gid=users,fmask=644,dmask=755 /dev/hda1 /media/win98Without giving the uid, gis, fmask and dmask options you won’t be able to write anything to the partition.

Wine and Adobe Illustrator (can't find AIRes.dll)

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Adobe Illustrator didn’t want to start up under wine, because it couldn’t find the file AI90Res.dll. This file is located after the Illustrator install in:~/.cxoffice/dotwine/fake_windows/Program Files/Adobe/Illustrator 10/Support Files/Contents/Windows/SystemI just moved it up one directory and everything started working.

Wine vs. Crossover Office

Thu, 26 Feb 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I have been using several trial versions (2.0.1 and 2.0.2) of Crossover Office . Actually it doesn’t do really much. Admittedly, it really has some handy functions: “Reset Crossover Office” to terminate any stuck wine applications and “Simulate Windows Reboot”. These are actually scripts (located in /opt/cxoffice/bin), that could be largely replaced by own solutions.

KDX under WINE

Sun, 22 Feb 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I tested the encrypted file sharing application KDX under wine. It works perfectly. I wonder why it isn’t on the wine gold list . The reason why it works so well is that it doesn’t rely heavily on the windows base, but does most of the needed stuff (graphics, etc.) itself: KDXClient1110-Win.zip . BTW: I used as a tracker hlsux.bugdave.com.