A question about the child board: Wine Tested Commands

[Rod Gobby]

Chris

How do you see the child board working?

Separate threads for each command might take up a lot of room and be too fragmented.

I'm inclined to have one thread per control, form type, topic (e.g. printing), etc.

Power Basic and EZGUI are my only remaining Windows apps not switched permanently to Linux. So now that summer is over, and my hard drive is loaded with vintage Santana, I can start getting into some serious non-graphics testing on Ubuntu.

Rod

[Chris Boss]

Post your comments or experiences any way you like on this forum.
One thread or multiple threads, it doesn't matter.

For example start a Thread in the child forum:

Controls

and post all the control commands that work well (or don't) on Wine.

Start another thread:

Graphics

and post all about EZGUI Graphic commands run on Wine.

[Gary Stout]

Rod,

I would be interested in knowing whether you had to do anything special for PB or EZGUI to work properly running under WINE....in otherwords, were there any special bottle settings? I have tried WINE several times and have always given up on it due to problems. One area of problem that I have had, is that, many or most of my programs use the listview control with grid lines and those grids never seemed to appear.

I have been using Virtual Box for several years now and it always works fine, but if I could eliminate the need for a copy of Windows being installed and just use WINE by itself, that would be great.

Thanks for any light you can shed,
Gary

[Chris Boss]

Gary,

You need to understand the problems of multiplatform development.

Even though Wine emulates Windows, it is still using the Linux UI to display the windows.

This means that if the Linux UI does not support something, Wine is not going to be able to emulate it.

Linux does not support the grid lines of its Listview counterpart, so Wine will simply ignore the request for grid lines.

This is one of the biggest problems with multiplatform development!

A good example of this is a programming language like Real Basic. To be able to create apps on say Windows, Mac and Linux requires some comprimises.

Some big companies have actually dropped multiplatform support because of this.

My wife has been using CorelDraw suite for some time and earlier versions ran on Mac and Windows. The look and feel was never really true Windows like, because they used a UI engine which "faked" a lot of things, so it would work on both Windows and Mac. At one point Corel dropped support for the Mac and that version was much better and a true Windows app and acted like one.

Multiplatform development is not as good as one may think.

EZGUI has an advantage that is uses the simplest of the Windows API's to accomplish things so it tends to run well on Wine. A number of things in EZGUI, likes the sprite engine, are proprietary (not a feature in Windows) so it runs exactly the same on Windows and Linux.

[Rod Gobby]

Gary

I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Wine 1.2 (the latest stable release), PB 9.05, and Ezgui 4.07 & 4.5.

I don't use CrossOver, and therefore don't use bottles (except for the one with Rickards Red in it).

Wine is configured with a C: drive (/.wine/drive_c) and a Z: drive (which gives me access to all the ubuntu directories)

PB and Ezgui install ok, and create ubuntu menu items in:  Applications > Wine > Programs. However, some of PB's incremental updates screw up or delete the PB menu entries, so I get around this by hand coding a launcher for the PB IDE.

The PB IDE and compiler both work ok, and I'm able to create EXE files under Ubuntu and run them under Windows XP with no problem.

I don't use the Ezgui Designer, so I wouldn't know if there are problems with it. But the runtime DLLs seem to work fine. In fact, I have before me a functioning Listview, complete with grid lines.

When creating a Listview I use the "-#FV" options: select full rows, display grid lines, flat edge, vertical scroll bar.

My main application is a "Data Dictionary/Designer/Code Generator" that is currently running at about 500,000 lines of generated code. It can generate itself ok under Wine, but I haven't done any serious testing of the GUI, as this is quite labour intensive.

At the beginning of October I'll get into some serious Ubuntu/Ezgui testing and will post my findings here.

Wine has improved a lot over the past couple of years, so it might be that your grid lines will re-appear if you try Wine again.

Rod

[Chris Boss]

I believe I have an older version of Wine myself.

I have the version of Wine which came with SUSE 9.0 (a commercial version of Linux).

I picked up an full (new in box) retail version of SUSE 9.0 on Ebay some years ago.

I also have other more current versions of Linux, but haven't downloaded the latest Wine yet.

[Rod Gobby]

Having cut my teeth on operating system internals at IBM and Control Data, I've never come to terms with having to work with Windows. Linux, on the other hand, gives me a much more comfortable feeling - particularly the Ubuntu distribution.

Since first using it four years ago, I've noticed an almost exponential improvement in reliability, usefulness, and the number of high class applications that are available. And the reason for this is, I think, that programmers around the world are putting stuff together that they feel passionate about. Unlike MS which tells its hired help what they must do.

I use "Help and Manual", a beast of a Windows package from Germany, for creating documentation in various formats. I had expected to need Windows for running it, but on a whim last week I installed it on Ubuntu, and the thing runs perfectly.

All six of our systems are now running Ubuntu, with one of them dual booting Windows for final testing of Windows-based apps.

Wine is making all this possible, and for us is a much better solution than VirtualBox.

[Gary Stout]

Rod,

That is interesting! I am also running Ubuntu 10.04 and have been using Ubuntu since version 7.04. Also been using Virtual Box for a long time...it also seems to mature with each new release. I have used Ubuntu for my main O/S (and Mint Linux on one machine) for over 3 yrs now. About the only thing I use Windows for these days is PB/EZGUI and one map program. I have found suitable Linux alternatives for everything else. I haven't ever found a programming environment replacement that matches PB/EZGUI....and really don't want to have to learn a new language....I pretty much refuse to try and learn C.

Maybe I will give WINE another try. I would like to make it work.....I did have pretty good luck with the PB compiler the last time I tried it, but if I recall, WINE seems to prefer installation files, which I had for PB, but I think EZGUI was a zip file for installation. Not sure if I ever got that one to work.

The properties that I am using for my listviews are "-#SV"

I guess the "bottle" thing was from Crossover. When I couldn't get WINE to work, I tried the commercial version (Crossover), thinking maybe it would do a better job, but I got about the same results.

Thanks for the tips and the info on the listviews...
Gary