How Well Does WINE work for your Slackware?
 

WINE 1.0 was just released recently and I am wondering how well various apps work in WINE for my fellow Slackware users.

Most of the registered testers in the appdb seem to use Ubuntu or SUSE, and it has been my experience that WINE in Ubuntu does not work like WINE in Slackware.

I'm particularly interested in posts from users who are successfully using M$ Office (2003 or 2007), as M$ seems to be doing a good job making sure that OpenOffice can't make documents completely compatible (and yes I do know about CrossOver Office).

If you had to do anything special for your setup (use native dlls, etc) please post instructions so that many Slackware users can benefit.

I've almost got Team Fortress 2 to work. After shooting in the game it crashes.
I haven't tested on other things.

it's on my TODO list :-(

I run Quicken (year 2000 solution)
Jazz Jackrabbit 2
Ignition
Re-volt
DeusEx
Half Life

This was in my mailbox this morning, from Alien Bob:
Get your Wine-1.0 Slackware-12.1 package here.

I've gotten Wenlin 3.0 with the wl341up.exe update to work as well as in Mickey$oft
Windoze eXPeriment with nothing more than the default settings. There is a hack to save
files -- something to do with the filename -- but I forget it atm.

Have tried Adobe InDesign CS2 in 1.0.rc4 -- it installs but does not work well.
You can check out the information from a Gentoo user at Wine HQ appdb for the tweaks.
I'll try it again with Wine-1.0 when I can figure out how to remove everything that is
presently installed (for wine and InDesign) and do a fresh install.

My daughter has a lot of old learning CDs. They now work better in Wine 1.0.rc1 than
they do in Mickey$oft Windoze eXPeriment or Win98. Some of them are:
I should also try Photoshop 7.0. Haven't with latest releases of Wine ...

Photoshop and InDesign, and an ornery bank or two, are all I need Windoze for.

Well, after several years of experience and frustration with using Wine and investing in an NVidia Graphics card, Wine now does 90% of what I want it to do 90% of the time.

DAZ|Studio runs very well despite the rubbish installer that DAZ insist on using. It works as well in Wine as it does in Windows, which is not saying much.
Poser runs OK most of the time but also freezes so badly it locks up Wine, XOrg and Linux. Magic Sysreq key FTW.
I gave up trying to get Pegasus Mail to run long ago, and no there are still no Linux GUI mail clients that are even half as good as Pegasus Mail.
Steam and Half-Life2 and co run great.
Eve-Online works better in Wine than the official CCP Cedega-based client does.

I have yet to test it, though It seems Whenever I run wine on other distros, it seems to run games better than on Vista and Xp for me.

Wine is a beast, it depends on the version and the graphic cards driver.

Currently the programs I run in WINE are:
ies4Linux (for Web development/testing only)
ScreenRuler
TurboRisk
Uno Hearts
e-Sword

I've tried Worms Armageddon and Jazz JackRabbit 2 in WINE before, but the results were not satisfactory. I haven't tested them in a while so perhaps they would work better now. [Edit]JJ2 works fine now[/Edit]

I'll probably be trying out Office 2003 soon.

This is probably because Windows itself uses more resources than WINE does on top of Linux. This is particularly true if you use any Anti-virus/spyware software or if you have viruses/spyware/too-many-auto-updates on Windows.

Great point. I'm hoping that most people will soon be testing against WINE 1.0+. I use Robby Workman's WINE slackBuild to build my package and I am using version 169.12 of the nvidia driver.

I like this, Bruce:

I might put that in my profile. :)

I'd like it if they get UT3 working on there. Maybe they'll do it before UT3 is ported to Linux. Currently it does 'work', but is not playable :(

That'll teach me, next time I'm not buying any game until they release a linux port for it and I see it.

I have Wine 1.0 installed.

Works:
Broderbund 3D Home Architect
ABBYY Fine Read (read works but not scan, I can use Kooka for that)
Astrolog32
Atlantis Nova
XnView

Doesn't work:
Cool Edit Pro (last remaining Windows app)

Is Audacity lacking any features that you need?

Eric

I have Audacity 1.3.5 installed as well. I like it for recording, there aren't the latency issues that there are with windows apps. But for user friendliness and ease of use when editing, you just can't beat Cool Edit (and presumably, Audition). I have hopes for Audacity, it has improved a lot of late, but for now I'm hanging onto Cool Edit (and by implication, Win98 and my i865 chipset motherboard). I have also tried (and abandoned) Ardour.

I may be wrong about this, but I thought there some quality studio suites out there to use on top of Audacity for full editing purposes? LMMS, MuSE, jokosher for instance. Mind you, I haven't used any of them--and they may be GTK specific.

I installed Office 2003 using Wine. Word and PowerPoint seem to work alright (lots of fixmes do appear, though), but Excel won't even fully load. I do have the MS fonts installed and also built WINE with fontforge. I have tried some of the hacks in this Wine Review Article, but I don't know if any of them made a difference (certainly did not with Excel). I'll have to try this again with a clean Wine directory.

One annoyance is that I always have to kill the language bar(?) or else it covers up things.

You don't need excel dammit, use gnumeric, it's got the same interface, it's now stable, it's more accurate, and it's got the same or in some cases more features.

I mean, I would not argue if someone was using M$ powerpoint or even word, mostly because the poor support quality of openoffice. I don't really like openoffice, it's bloated (less so recently), buggy (still buggy), and the export/import system is not very good. But, it's acceptable for any work I'll ever have to do, especially since I export to pdf and give people that instead of the evil '.doc'. Oh, and to put things in context, I'm not saying word/powerpoint are better than openoffice, no, but they're at about the same level, and the inter-compatibility is still not good.

But for excel, you have no excuse not to be using gnumeric, IMO.

Just installed wine-1.0-i486-1alien.tgz ( thanks very much AlienBob! ) to replace wine-0.9.47, the last of many versions I have used. It is a HUGE improvement. My congratulations to the WINE developers.
My specialist apps ( Varian MS WorkStation 5.52, AMDIS32 and MSSEARCH.v.2.0 ) are working very well with just some minor issues. Elements that did not work are now working and stability is much better. I had given up on trying to get these to work in WINE, but they are now very usable.
My next big test will be to try for Varian MS WorkStation 6.6 which requires a MS Access 2000 runtime to be installed. I have never been able to complete this before.

For most documents I use OOo, and I encourage others to use ODF by sending them those formats instead of proprietary formats. However, none of OOo's components are completely compatible with MS office, which like it or not is the standard in most places. In particular, Gnumeric and Calc are not compatible with Excel Macros, and I don't think they work with Crystal Ball yet. While Gnumeric can be manually scripted and Calc can make its own Macros, there is much work to be done before users of this free software can correctly import advanced Excel documents.

That being said, for simple spreadsheets Calc works just fine for me. Gnumeric does sound like it is more compatible with Excel than Calc (the extra accuracy is a plus as well), so I'll definitely have to give it a try (Gnumeric SlackBuild). It seems to be missing pivot tables, unfortunately (I don't use them all too often anyways).

So, for personal documents, and those I share with people using free Office software, I don't need MS Office. For the times that I have to use MS documents I may not have a choice otherwise depending on the features they have in them.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: MS Office is currently the best Office program out there (unfortunately). If I had to use OpenOffice every day I think I would want to defenestrate my computer. ;) AbiWord isn't nearly as good as OOo, and OOo isn't as good as MS Office. Word can be an excruciatingly painful experience. However, it's still better, IMO, than Writer. I prefer the numbering and such in Writer (in Word sometimes you have to insert a page break, followed by backspacing, just to get complex numbering to work -- it's a nightmare), but writing papers with graphs, tables, results, etc. is just easier in Word than in Writer. And it looks better too.

I haven't used Gnumeric in a while, so I don't know how much it has improved. Statistical capabilities are one of the main features of Excel (though there are other spreadsheet programs that do a better job if you're doing pure stats), and importing an Excel graph/table/etc. into Word is dead easy. I hate MS oh so very much, and I'm not a fan of proprietary software, but I just can't be stuck with some of the (IMO) inferior office applications just because they're open source. In addition, if you send a spreadsheet to someone in the real world, if it's not Excel-formatted it's useless. You can export to Excel format, but you'd have to check it anyway -- and if you have to do that anyway, why not just use Excel in the first place and cut the middle-man out?

All of the presentation software on Linux, at least that I have come across, is absolutely terrible. Impress is one of the worst pieces of software I have seen. It's unintuitive and feature-incomplete. PowerPoint is WAY better. I don't make presentations very frequently, but when I do, I use PowerPoint.

>MS Office is currently the best Office program out there (unfortunately).

It depends on your working environment. I'm working with huge texts and lot of data, so in the end LaTeX, Vim, OpenOffice or even Abiword is more than enough.

>Statistical capabilities are one of the main features of Excel

I'm using Statistica, Excel is something for the office. That said, I don't have any problems to use Gnumeric.

>All of the presentation software on Linux, at least that I have come across, is absolutely terrible.

It depends. Do you want to entertain your audience or do you want to inform your audience? I'm a scientist not some financial guy presenting some graphs with nice animations to impress the money department of the company.

>if you send a spreadsheet to someone in the real world

What is your 'real world'? Microsoft campus in Redmond? I'm working in the so-called real world, maybe it's just a different corner, but the world is huge enough, sometimes we have just some narrowed point of view.

By the way most of the time we are using CSV in the 'scientifical world' :-)

As you can see, it depends on _your_ context.

Hi,

I'm currently a grad student and wrote all of my papers this semester using OpenOffice in Slackware... complete with tables, graphics, and importing word documents that were written in MS Office 2007. I just used the command-line odfconverter to import them and everything worked great.

I will also add that I've been testing OpenOffice 3.0 beta recently and it is much better at handling MS Office 2007 documents than previous versions of OpenOffice.

As for WINE, it has worked very well for me under Slackware 12.1. I convert a lot of divx/xvid videos to DVD and I use ConvertXtoDVD under WINE to do it. DeVeDe for Linux works okay but just isn't as good. Using ConvertXtoDVD under WINE you do lose the preview screen but the conversion itself works flawlessly.

Dig

My kids use OOo for school without any problems.
And BTW, the html that Word produces is complete and utter crap.

To get back on topic: I've used (several versions of) Wine for a couple of programs and never had any luck with it. Not installable in the worst case, slow and buggy in the best case.
But it depends on the apps you use, I guess...

Ok, well I guess I haven't gotten any 'advanced' Excel documents, that's my bias.

The reason you have problems with this in Word, or OOo, is because these are functions
of desktop publishing software. And no, Mickey$oft Publisher is not.

You would find yourself able to do that job well if you use true desktop publishing software
such as Adobe InDesign, or even it's predecessor, PageMaker; rather than such a poorly
coded word processor in the first place.

As the little boy learned from his father when asking about M$ Word:

Son: "Daddy, why do they call Word a word processor?"

Father: "Well, son, you know what a food processor is..."

M$ Word was a POS word processor, which Mickey$oft tried to turn into publishing software.
They failed, as usual.

I would *LOVE* to use LaTeX to create my documents, but many profs will ONLY accept MS Word .doc files. Maybe it's just my university that's behind the times, but so be it -- everything needs to be in .doc format.
I fully agree -- however, if I have to present something on someone else's computer (and as a science student and not a professor that happens...;)), PowerPoint is basically the only thing I can use (or something that can convert to PowerPoint). After searching for some presentation software a while back, most of it was either too simplistic (using HTML stuff, for example) or not good enough (Impress). I never use animations in my presentations, but I do use Autoshapes (or their equivalent) to try and explain myself better through images. Impress doesn't do a good job here, IMO. Of course, I could create images in the GIMP or another program, but that's raising the level of complexity (and wasted time) beyond what I need.
Again, my "real world" involves people who have no idea what Linux, open-source, and OOo are. The fact that these people happen to be graduates, professors, or other students is kind of saddening, but true nonetheless. They all have their fancy Macs with Office on them -- and since installing OOo just to read a students' paper is out of the question, I have to provide everything in MS Office format. I suspect the same is true with a lot of people. There are some nice people that accept PDFs, but most don't.
True, most of the time. It's more Word than Excel that seems to be locked into place, and since I need to be sure that the document will be readable, I need to either use Word or export to .doc and check in Word -- but Word is better than most of the alternatives out there (or at least the ones that can be easily exported to .doc format).
I 100% agree with you. Given the choice, I would use a LaTeX kind of solution (still not the best, but cheaper than Adobe. ;)). However, I'm still locked into the format with my peers, and so there aren't many options.
:)

Macros, macros, macros. Does gnumeric support an equivalent macro language? (I'm not arguing, just asking.) Recently I tested gnumeric, calc, and kspread with several of my Excel 97 spreadsheets. Most are basic lists with various simple calculations. None of my personal spreadsheets are complicated. KSpread could not import the simplest of spreadsheets --- cell formulae were converted to values. Perhaps there is a configuration option incorrectly set but as that old adage about first impressions goes ---.

Macros. Which leads me into my post for this thread. I have used past WINE versions with mixed success. I was able to configure Word 97 (Office 97) to run, but not any of my template VBA macros. I could not open the VBA editor. I have several customized Word 97 templates, all built with many macros. Without those macros the templates are impotent. I never could get the VBA environment to function in WINE. Despite all the accolades I read about Office 97 running in WINE, I never read anything about the associated VBA environment. Has anybody successfully ran the Word 97 VBA environment?

The pundits at Microsoft consider Word 97 a dead product, but everything I have customized in that environment through the years continues to work wonderfully for me. Currently I'm using Word 97 in NT4 in VirtualBox, but if I could get VBA to run flawlessly under WINE, I would prefer that route. WINE would require far less overhead than a virtual machine. I enjoy running Slackware and GNU/Linux, but Word 97 is not going away from my computers for a long time.

I have been using Word 97 for 10 years. Throughout that period I seldom experienced crashes or lost documents. I never experienced the trauma of Windows 95 or 98, having gone from WFWG 3.11 straight to NT4. Perhaps that helped me obtain a stable Word 97 environment. Then too, as a long time technical writer, I long ago learned the beauty and power of templates and style tags. I use those tools for all but the simplest of documents. I don't think anybody will accuse me of being a Microsoft shill, but I won't back down from saying that I have been happily productive with Word 97 for many years --- and Word 6 before that. I have written several long documents too. Maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones. Or perhaps I grok Word 97 better than most people.

To that comment I agree heartily.

I installed Office 2003 on a clean Wine directory, but the problem with Excel persisted. This time, instead of using riched* from my Windows installation I used the ones from the riched30 update. This seemed to make no difference. I still used the msxml.msi file as described in the Wine Office 2003 install tutorial (see post #16)

The key for me to get Excel to work was to change some of the Graphics options in winecfg. You either have to turn off desktop control or put Excel in a virtual desktop. After that it loads up fine.

However, there are still problems with Excel.

* Bold - does not show up
* Drop down selections (font, font size) broken - can type in what you want
* Have to close Excel by clicking X or using ALT+f-x then close virtual desktop

Also, supposedly VB (for macros) does not work until dcom98 is installed as well. From what I have read this might mess up other things, so it is a good idea to have office installed in its own Wine directory. The Office uninstall routine seems to fail for me as well, so this is yet another good reason to put it in its own wine prefix directory.

Another interesting bug I noticed is that if I turned off decorations (Graphic option) by Default then turning it on for Excel had no affect.

My Office 2003 wine environment uses Win XP and by default has decorations and desktop control on. The riched* and msxml3 dlls are overridden. The same dlls for Excel are overridden but no decorations or desktop control is used. I have a virtual desktop instead.

I noticed that the fonts in Word don't look quite as good as they should. I'm using the wine and fontforge slackBuilds for my packages, and I also copied my Windows fonts into the Fonts folder under my wine directory. I am assuming that wine is preferring the fonts from the Fonts directory, but I don't know if this is true. I also don't know if there is a noticeable difference between the fonts created with fontforge and my respective native Windows fonts.

Why don't you use the .rtf format?
Any word processor can read that.
Or, if it's read-only, export it as a .pdf file.

heh, grok! One of the first science fiction books I actually finished.

Almost back to the original question.... Along with the release of Wine-1.0 was the release of Crossover Office 7.0. Since it is a major contributor to the wine project it, this was to be expected.

Both Adobe CS2 and Office 2003 work as far as they have been run on cxoffice-7.0 so far. CS2 would not install on previous releases but Photoshop 7 would. I've had office 2003 working on previous releases of cxoffice.

I've used Cxoffice for years, it improves with each release, integrates well on my KDE desktop and with CUPS, is much less bother than Wine and for me it is worth the annual cost for continuous upgrade.

While some might scoff at paying for software used on Linux, I do not, and have required cxoffice up until recently to work on access databases brought home from work. With legacy documents I use Office 2003 but much less these days. My daughter is well versed in both Gimp, O.O, and Koffice but has digital art and media electives at school using adobe plus the usual ms office suite and since I can give her software continuity, I do. She's never had anything but Slack on her desktop and prefers Linux aps in most instances but she lives in an MS world just like I do.

justwantin,

Please use the application name ... Adobe is the company. They make more
than one app with CS2 as it's version. Your post is like some we get here
saying "I'm using Linux-10.3..."

Fair enough.

I thought I was clear but perhaps not. I have run Adobe Photoshop 7.0 in previous versions of cxoffice. With cxoffice 7.0 I have successfully installed Adobe Photoshop CS2 on Slack-12.1.

I don't use it. My daughter does and she hasn't complained yet. There's some features in it that Gimp doesn't have which she uses at school.

I've just started using Photoshop 7.0 in Wine 1.0 in Slackware-12.1 with
my own custom 2.6.25.7 kernel. Although I've used it very little, so far
I've only had one problem. The text tool would not work because Photoshop
under Wine said it didn't have a default font. I used some fonts that are
exe files from SourceForge (from M$ previously released web fonts or whatever)
and installed them with Wine and that issue was resolved. I am using some
custom fonts such as Felix Titling, that I installed to /usr/share/fonts/TTF/
from my Windows XP OS.

I also can't use GIMP, for several reasons ... the most important being that it
cannot handle CMYK.

I noted somewhere along the line that Adobe Photoshop CS-2 would not install correctly if a certain font was not present. I can't say more about that than the following:

Cxoffice will install programs as if they are being installed on a MS OS and when I installed Adobe Photoshop CS-2 it downloaded a font and/or some program other dealing with xml.

I haven't gotten around to sorting out what the xml ap was required for but I'm pretty sure the font was the one required in order for Adobe Photoshop CS-2 to run. Its running on one quarantined workstation until I sort it out to my satisfaction but for the sake of domestic tranquility..............

This is why I use cxoffice. I get myself into enuf strife and paying for something every now and again saves some time and hence is worth the dinero.

i use wine-1.0 to run:
- photoshop 7 (run very good, just had two problems, with fonts and using cloning Stamp Tool, but easy to fix)
- utorrent (for some reason download better than linux clients)
- getright (can be integrated to firefox with flashgot :D)
- winrar (run without problem, also there are a script to integrate with KDE)

Quick fix for photoshop7 fonts: install corefonts with winetricks

there is a access/excel 2003 runtime available - anyone tried on wine1?

I hesitated to reply to your mentions of a product that is not open source, and is
not free, for several posts. However, you persist. This thread is about WINE, and the
OP did put WINE in all caps.

I have already paid for Windows, and would not pay for Cross Over Office to run Windows
apps in Slackware when Wine is free, and Windows runs the two apps that my work requires
(Adobe InDesign CS2 and Photoshop 7.0) natively with no problems.

The fact is that CodeWeavers hired the Wine developer, Alexandre Julliard, to work for them.

From that time until now, Codeweavers' CrossOver products, that are not open source, and
are not free as Wine, get the code first and Wine may or may not get it later.

Now Google is pouring money into the development of Wine, and it is increasingly improved
at a much faster rate than Codeweavers has ever done.

Are you talking about the viewer programs that just let you view Access and Excel files? From what I have heard the MS Office Viewer programs work well in Wine 1.0. Or are you talking about VB, etc?

Bruce Hill,

The way I see it someone asked about using wine and I just noted that I was successfully using a product based on wine and which also contributes to the WINE project. Please note the below from http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Wine

Perhaps the WINE wiki is a bit dated and incorrect.

Licensing is always a debateable issue however may I bring to your attention the following snippit from section 2 of the CrossOver Linux Professional License Grant found at: http://www.codeweavers.com/products/...ertising/eula/ ?

Before you jump to conclusions read the complete section 2 which goes on to say:

Since you're a Maintainer on this list I suppose I should defer to your judgement. Perhaps if you had left it to correcting me for not properly identifying software I would have said OK and left it at that.

I pay an annual subscription fee for Cxoffice which adheres to all relevant licensing, which is based on WINE and which I have run on Slackware systems from somewhere around version 9.0 up until 12.1. This is so I can successfully run windows based software on Slackware boxes which I thought was relevant.

I also do that so I don't have to purchase Windows to use at home

If you want to purchase Windows to run windows based software that's your choice or perhaps your necessity. I have to use Win2k for SCADA interface software which I have no choice but to use. I hope to change that someday.

The only reason I came back to this thread again was because you posted right after me about having a font problem and I thought I was being helpful in discussing it in relation to the cxoffice install, Perhaps providing useful insight?

Silly me.

justwantin,

I believe you didn't clearly understand the CrossOver Linux Professional License Grant.

You quoted from "2. Free Software." under said license. That portion applies to:
That is NOT about Codeweavers' software, which is NOT Free Software. It's about the free
software that Codeweavers uses as the base for CrossOver Linux.

The part pertaining to CrossOver's software code is under "3. Restrictions. The Software":
* bold used for emphasis

This is not the spirit or the letter of "free and open source software". Codeweavers likes
"free and open source" software, such as Wine, Tcl, Tk, iTcl, and Loki because they use it
as the base for their software without having to pay for it's development. Section 3 sounds
more like the Micro$oft EULA, than the GNU.

You have either (a) purchased a copy of Windows, or (b) are violating the law by the
installation and use of pirated software. Which is my point ... since I already paid
for Windows, and the software in question was written for Windows, I would consider it
"not too bright" to purchase CrossOver; where the software written for Windows does NOT
work as good as it does under Windows. Additionally, Wine is free and open source,
unlike Windows XP or Codeweavers' CrossOver Linux Professional.

So I will restate it: CrossOver Linux Professional is NOT free and open source software

I am humbled and bow accordingly ;^)

Exactely, the viewers.
I would like to hear more about them since they are not bound to a separate paid licence, yet allow for 3rd party applications to run without the office suite.
VB (Visual Basic) is sold to COREL? or?

Looking through the appdb it appears that the viewer program for access (Snapshot Viewer) does not work too well, but the Excel Viewer is reported to work fine. The install instructions say you will need the cabextract program. It looks like very easy to install.

Anyone got WINE to work in Slackware63 13.0--maybe with Office 2007? I even made a drive 'D:' in winecfg but when i did 'wine setup.exe' it said setup had a problem.

I tried Wine on Slack32 with spotify and didn`t work

Wine works perfectly well with Slackware64-13.0, you can even compile it. Remember it is a 32-bit program and you will have to install the 32-bit compatibility libraries.

samac

Is there some trick in slackware 13, I installed wine like before but nothing will even attempt to install just says

Application tried to create a window, but no driver could be loaded.
Make sure that your X server is running and that $DISPLAY is set correctly.

>Is there some trick in slackware 13, I installed wine like before but >nothing will even attempt to install just says

>Application tried to create a window, but no driver could be loaded.
>Make sure that your X server is running and that $DISPLAY is set >correctly.

It sounds like you are running it as root. It is set up not to do that, thought it does not tell you. I still do not know the answer to my Office 2007 problem....