[time-nuts] TimeLab with Wine: No RS232 interface available

[John Miles]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: time-nuts [mailto:time-nuts-bounces at febo.com] On Behalf Of joerg
> Sent: Saturday, February 07, 2015 7:14 AM
> To: time-nuts at febo.com
> Subject: Re: [time-nuts] TimeLab with Wine: No RS232 interface available
> 
> Thank you all. Unfortunatly I'm still not able to get TimeLab
> in contact with any of my RS232 interfaces. Is there may an
> option when calling limelab.exe to force the usage of a
> defined port?

No, but what I'd suggest doing is sending a bug report/feature request to the Wine team.  Ask them to have a look at the enumerate_ports() method in drivers/shared/gpibport.cpp, which is installed under the directory with the TimeLab executable (http://www.miles.io/timelab/beta.exe).  They can either add support for whatever Win32 API function is failing to work properly in Wine, or, if they find that the problem is in my code, let me know directly at  john at miles.io.  It's always possible that I've got a bug that just happens to work in Windows but not in Wine.  If I can work around the issue without breaking anything else, that's likely to be the best solution for everyone.

Also, try both timelab.exe and timelab64.exe.  The 64-bit version may not have access to some driver interfaces that are only supported by 32-bit DLLs.  This is mainly an issue with NI488.2 GPIB support, though, and I wouldn't expect it to apply here.

Failing that, it costs about US $150 to buy a Windows laptop to dedicate to TimeLab and other Windows apps that have problems under Linux.  At some point you have to start thinking seriously about what your time is worth.

-- john, KE5FX
Miles Design LLC