Cinder on Wine

Cinder is a nifty C++ library for quickly creating complex, interesting 3d interactive graphics. Sadly, it's only available for the Mac and Windows at the moment. If you want to try it on Linux, you either have to port the whole thing (please do!), or try it on Wine. Here's how to get started with it on Wine. Beware, it's a bit rough, but it does let you build and run all the demos that don't use sound or quicktime.

Preparation

See Welcome to Cinder on Windows. That's the procedure we'll follow here, lightly modified.

Also see winetricks.org if you haven't used winetricks before.

Make sure you have very recent Wine (say, 1.5.7). (1.5.6 or earlier probably won't do.)

Make sure you have very recent winetricks by downloading a fresh copy from svn.

Installation

Delete your old ~/.wine directory to make sure old dlls and settings don't get in the way:

rm -rf ~/.wine

Install Visual C++ 2008 Express, the Direct X SDK, and the Platform SDK with the handy command

sh winetricks -q --no-isolate vc2008express dxsdk_jun2010 psdkwin7

That downloads about a gigabyte of stuff (ain't broadband great?) the first time you run it (cached to ~/.cache/winetricks); it then takes about twenty minutes on an i5 to install everything. (Don't mind the many warnings and errors wine prints to the console; wine is VERY chatty.) It will only ask a few questions; do totally default installations when asked, except that when installing the Platform SDK, be sure to uncheck the Samples and Documentation checkboxes, else installation fails.

Download and unpack the last version of Cinder that supported VC++ 2008 with the commands

cd ~/.wine/drive_c
wget http://libcinder.org/releases/cinder_0.8.3_vc2008.zip
unzip cinder_0.8.3_vc2008.zip

The run Visual Studio:

wine cmd /c run-vc2008express.bat

In Visual Studio, browse to the Cinder samples folder in My Computer (c:\cinder_0.8.3_vc2008\samples) and Wisteria\vc9\Wisteria.sln.

Select Release build mode, then build the solution. It should build in under 30 seconds. Ignore the warnings about missing PDB files.

Run without debugging. It should just work!

Visual Studio sometimes crashes on exit. (Don't let it restart, or it'll probably just crash again...) Like I said, this could use a little polish still.

Sound and quicktime don't work yet, haven't looked into why.