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

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:

JSWare

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: Of these, probable fixes for 4125 and 4190 have been posted; the others are being investigated.

The Journal

"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:

DC Proof

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.)


[Back to Shipping Your Windows Application for Linux using Wine]