[time-nuts] TimeLab and Wine: was Re: New 5370A

[Chuck Harris]

Hi Bob,

I just got back from my son's commencement ceremony, and finally
have a little time to maybe give a few pointers.

First, safety prevents one from trying to run too many different
applications within a given wine sandbox (aka bottle).  It is
best to give each application its own sandbox, and let it run on
its own... the same is true sometimes with windows... the cause
of most problems in windows is odd combinations of DLL's provided
by odd combinations of applications.

Second, if you see a completely messed up screen, it is very likely
due to using a non windows compatible font in wine.  It is best
to use the real msoft true type fonts... for whatever reason (most
likely poor documentation), the clone true type fonts aren't very
good clones.

Third, running multiple virtual windows devices on the same linux
machine is simply asking for trouble.

You wouldn't consider running multiple copies of XP under XP, why
would it seem ok to run multiple XP virtualizations under linux?

Each of the virtualizations uses hooks into kernel routines, and
it is likely that they get in each other's way.

I have found timelab to work ok under wine, in its own sandbox,
with no other virtualizations running.

For what it is worth, IMHO, the best version of wine is the one
sold under the name CrossOver, by CodeWeavers.  They are using a
plain version of wine, with some packaging to make the different
applications work better.  They also have a package of scripts to
configure wine for a great number of different packages.  The
scripts pull in any needed windows DLL's, and applications.

It's cheap to buy a years support, and they give all of their
enhancements back to the wine project.

-Chuck Harris

Bob Stewart wrote:
> Hi Chuck, I've renamed this thread, and expect it to die quickly.  I have a bunch
> of things running on my Linux system, so I see a lot of interactions that probably
> don't happen to others.  One thing is that Timelab doesn't like to come up
> properly under Wine.  For some reason, it mostly comes up with the chart/plot
> covering the whole frame, rather than having the legends at the bottom and at the
> right. The biggest impact to me is that it doesn't play well with MPLABX.  But,
> I've seen other problems related to MPLABX, so suspect that the problem lies
> there. Finally, I've noticed some interaction between Timelab and VirtualBox.  I
> was running a Windows XP client, and the client got destroyed.  That's never
> happened before.  OTOH, I was trying to use a clone 82357B from the boxed client,
> so that may have somehow bled into Timelab.  I dunno.  Of course, it could have
> just been a random failure that appears to correlate with Timelab.
>
> Note that I'm not shaking a finger at John.  Wine is essentially the wild west at
> times, and this is one of those times.
>
> Bob
>
>