Testing Small ISV apps on Linux with Wine
In December 2005, I evaluated Windows apps from a number of small
ISVs to see what problems they turned up in Wine-0.9.4.
Raizlab's Magic Gallery
and
Magic File
are photo and file manipulation programs written in Visual Basic.
The author contacted me after I posted a call for volunteers
on a developer mailing list. Both programs, as well as one from
a different vendor, suffer from similar OLE problems,
so I filed a bug report:
- 4054 Magic Gallery complains "Object or class does not support the set of events". Using native OLEAUT32 helps up to a point.
JSWare's WEB-ED
is an HTML/CSS/Javascript/VBScript editor written in Visual Basic 6.
The author contacted me after I posted a call for volunteers
on a Visual Basic mailing list. After some discussion, six
bugs were filed, three by me, three by the author:
- 4063 wine crashes on exit from webed.
- 4125 ChooseColorA dialogue not fully functional
- 4141 Tiny VB program fails to invoke color picker
- 4142 VB6 installer cannot install runtime
- 4144 Numerous RichText problems
- 4190 wine didn't support calling functions with 15 parameters via 'ole automation'
Of these, probable fixes for 4125 and 4190 have been posted;
the others are being investigated.
"The Journal" is a little notetaking
application written in Delphi.
(I ran into it in ToDoOrElse.com,
a blog about the life of the small ISV.)
In 2001, a user submitted
notes on how to run it on a dual boot system in the ISV's newsletter.
Back then, the installer didn't work under Linux, but
in my testing with modern Wine (0.9.4), the installer works fine.
The only real issue I've found so far is a redraw problem,
and that's easy to get around by changing one setting in the app:
- 4145 redraw problem in "The Journal"
DC Proof is educational software
that introduces students to the foundations of logic and proof.
It's free for personal use. A little light testing showed
that it runs into problems with Wine's riched20 dll.
(Using a copy of riched20.dll from Windows makes the problems
go away, but that's just a workaround until Wine's riched20.dll is fixed.)
- 4058 DC Proof vb app hangs after richedit trouble
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