Migrating User #1 to Linux

My spouse is a Windows user. Specifically, she's a power user of older word processing and web development apps. Recently, we bought a new computer, and are about to reinstall all her applications on it.

This is a familiar dance; we end up doing this kind of clean install once every couple years. Seems safer than moving or copying the old hard drive. Perhaps it's a habit left over from Win9X, when reformatting and reinstalling Windows every so often was needed to recover from the creeping crud.

Now, Wine 1.0 is about to be released, and I happen to be the nominal release manager, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to see if I could migrate her to a Ubuntu / Wine box rather than a Windows XP box.

Windows apps she would need to run in Wine

Quite a few of her apps have Linux equivalents, or aren't needed under Linux, but the ones that really would have to run Wine are listed below, together with their rating from the Wine application database, and links into wine's appdb and bug tracking system.

Vendor Product Appdb Rating Bugzilla search
Adobe Photoshop Elements 1Gold Bugzilla
Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 Bronze (5 is gold) Bugzilla
Adobe Premiere 6.5 Bronze Bugzilla
Apple iTunes Bronze Bugzilla
Apple QuickTime Player Bronze Bugzilla
Audiolib MP3 Recorder
Bradsoft TopStyle Lite
Creative PlayCenter
Some Guy Named JoergMM Exporter
Daniel ValotShisen-Sho
Daniel ValotMah Jongg
dbPowerAmp Music Converter Platinum
dvdshrink.org DVDshrink PlatinumBugzilla
FamilyTreeMakerFamilyTreeMaker 2006 Silver Bugzilla
Final DraftFinal Draft 6 Gold Bugzilla
Hasbro Ultimate Yahtzee (1996)
Intuit Quicken 2006 Gold Bugzilla
Macromedia Contribute 3 Gold Bugzilla
Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 Platinum Bugzilla
Macromedia Fireworks 8 Gold Bugzilla
Macromedia Flash 8 Platinum Bugzilla
Microsoft Office '97 Platinum with workaround Bugzilla
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 Gold with workaroundBugzilla
Moon Software Font Xplorer Bugzilla
Musicmatch Jukebox 9 Not rated Bugzilla
Nattyware Pixie Gold Bugzilla
PowerSturcture PowerStructure
Quark Xpress 4.0 Garbage (but 7 is gold) Bugzilla
Richard SalsburyRoughDraft
Sony Digital Voice EditorGoldBugzilla
TiVo TiVo Desktop GoldBugzilla
Ulead PhotoImpact 4 None yet Bugzilla
Yahoo Flickr Uploader 2.5 is gold, 3 is garbage Bugzilla

Automation

When rolling out a large number of apps, it helps to have an automated install, so I threw one together; see migrating-user-1.sh. It's a ripoff of winetricks, and it installs all the freely downloadable apps from the above list. Not quite sure if they all work yet...

Results

Using that automated script, it seems as if 12 of the 14 apps install and start up well at first glance.

Power Structure installer has a z-order problem, you can recover with alt-tab.

TopStyle Lite gets very confused about not being able to embed IE, offers to save current document on top of its executable.

I'm still installing the above apps and filing bugs.

At this point I'm planning to buy and use Crossover Office 7 to run MS Office, but use Wine 1.0 to run most of the other apps.

Other apps

For completeness, here are the other apps she needs, the ones that don't need to run under Wine.

These have Linux versions:
Audacity
Celtx
Emusic Remote
Firefox
Thunderbird
Opera
Google Earth
Google Picasa
Nero SmartStart
NVu
RealPlayer

These have Linux replacements:
Windows appLinux app
Camtasia Istanbul
Windows Media Playermplayer
McAfee ClamAV

These are bundled with XP, but have clones:
XP appClone app
Spider SolitaireBVS Solitaire CollectionAppDB

These don't seem to make sense to run under Linux, or have no equivalent:
Belarc Advisor
AdAware 2007
Spybot Search and Destroy
Spyware Blaster
Video Ads Blocker (is there a Linux equivalent?)