Time for an update. After a lengthy delay for personal reasons, I finally did some of the much needed analysis of the issue and attached my results to the WINE bug report. This sudden influx of data appears to have spurred some wonderful WINE-type-people to come and have a look. They've only been looking at it for a very brief period, but I've managed to:

- install DVDp 3.03
- restore from backup
- navigate profiles

However, this was not without some issues, and the application should still be considered unusable. It is promising to get to this stage and I know that I already have something else to try waiting in my inbox. How far this will get us and how much of a workaround will be required (and for how long before changes to WINE resolve it - it at all), I don't know yet.

Regardless, one can only say "hurrah for WINE-type-people-thingy-watsit-ugg"!

P.S. If someone wants to try this out themselves, you might want to give it a couple of days for more progress to be made and PM me for details.

Another update sooner than I expected.

A little further investigation, and with only a minor fix that can (presumably) be applied to any Wine installation, I was able to:

- install
- run (only one error that is dismissed with a single click)
- restore from backup
- navigate tabs / profiles
- download a new profile
- edit a profile
- contribute a change

Ladies and gentlemen, first impressions are that

WE HAVE DVDPROFILER ON LINUX!!!!!

Now before we get too excited, I've already spotted some minor bugs, and the application does run noticeably slower - more testing is clearly needed and I believe further enhancement to performance will be possible with the use of native dlls (for those users ho have a valid Windows license, or course). However, as WINE has multi-platform support, things are looking good for DVDProfiler on MACs and possibly Win98 as well (need to look into that one a bit more).

Again, I'd suggest giving it a few more days, but it would be good if we can get some willing testers to try DVDP out on their distributions (including MAC if possible) over the next couple of weeks and report back with results.

I have a Mac and would like to try it there. I have to warn you though, I have never installed Wine before and from what I read it's a bit more complicated on Max OSX...

You can PM me with details and we can try it "together".

Well, but there is no Beer.

Besides, I'll be using Darwine, maybe that's like Wine without alcohol?

Quoting DariusKyrak:

Quote:
Another update sooner than I expected.

A little further investigation, and with only a minor fix that can (presumably) be applied to any Wine installation, I was able to:

- install
- run (only one error that is dismissed with a single click)
- restore from backup
- navigate tabs / profiles
- download a new profile
- edit a profile
- contribute a change

Ladies and gentlemen, first impressions are that

WE HAVE DVDPROFILER ON LINUX!!!!!

Now before we get too excited, I've already spotted some minor bugs, and the application does run noticeably slower - more testing is clearly needed and I believe further enhancement to performance will be possible with the use of native dlls (for those users ho have a valid Windows license, or course). However, as WINE has multi-platform support, things are looking good for DVDProfiler on MACs and possibly Win98 as well (need to look into that one a bit more).

Again, I'd suggest giving it a few more days, but it would be good if we can get some willing testers to try DVDP out on their distributions (including MAC if possible) over the next couple of weeks and report back with results.

If there is a workaround for W98SE users, then I would be more than happy to try it out for you, as I have no intention of uprgrading this computer just to be able to run 1 program.

Okay, I think that we're at a point where we can say that DVD Profiler works on Linux. There are some bugs which have been reported to the Wine team, some workarounds required, and some things that need more looking into, but I think we're ready!

Instructions in New Thread
I've started a new thread (that Ken will hopefully be pinning) which gives some more details on how to get it working. It's going to be a work in progress for a bit as a few more issues are worked out and I refine the guidelines. I think that it would be a good idea to keep it a pretty clean thread so that it's easy to follow, so can we do all of the musings and working in this thread for the time being?

Outstanding problems
Although DVD Profiler does work, it's not without its problems. Most have workarounds, other you just have to live with, and with some you may be able to help. This is just a brief summary of what the various issues are that still need to be worked on.

* One remaining 'invalid floating point' error *
A fix regarding the Tahoma font gets rid of most of the error messages that were preventing DVD Profiler from running on Linux, but one error message remains. We're not sure what's causing it, but it may be related to the audio/video tab:




Until we can identify the culprit (probably requiring a similar solution to the Tahoma font), you'll just have to okay the error when you start the application.

* Themes *
You'll instantly notice that the themes are not working correctly (e.g. the default 'Blue' theme is actually displayed as grey).  This can be fixed by playing with the appearance section, desktop integration tab of Winecfg. If someone can figure out how to create themes that we can upload into this to give the right colour, we can make it available to all.

Tips: Simply taking the themes from Windows and installing them doesn't work, but try them if you want a laugh. The real colours can be found in the Wine registry files in your home '.Wine' directory.

* Disk Ids *
I've not been able to get DVD Profiler to read disc Ids, although I think that this is a consequence of my lack of knowledge and how my distribution works rather than a genuine Wine issue. I'd be very interested to hear if anyone else can get it working.

* Pop-ups for long names *
We'll all be familiar with the very helpful feature of names too long for their display appearing in a pop-up hen you hover over them. Unfortunately, these pop-ups are an impenetrable barrier in Wine, meaning that you can't select the data item behind them. You can still select them through devious mean, but it's still the most annoying thing about running under Linux.

* Speed *
The application runs noticeably slower under Wine. If anyone finds any tips to speed it up or can report where using native dlls makes a difference (for those with a Windows license of course), I'm sure that we'd all like to hear about it.

* More testing *
The testing that I've done is fairly limited, largely because I don't use a lot of the more funky features of the application. Please give it a good test run and come back with anything that you think is working differently from Windows.

Add your votes to Wine
All of the above problems as well as test reports for different distributions can be viewed and added to here:

http://appdb.Winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=8049

It would be really helpful if you could vote for both the application (on the screen above) and each of the bugs (on the respective bug screens). This will help to raise the profile of both the application and the issues that affect it, making it more likely that they will be addressed sooner.

That's it, time to go ahead and play with your new toy!

Has anyone tried this yet? I must confess that I'm a bit deflated by the lack of response here and to bug reports in Wine (e.g. votes).

Quoting Flapman:

Quote:
I tried to install it but I couldn´t get some things done, f.e. the point "Remember to run Winecfg from a command prompt (not as root) before continuing." didn´t work for me. I couldn´t even find "Wine" anywhere in the Ubuntu menues after installing it.

I found that wine didn't install on my (OpenSuse) menu either, but that could be because it's not actually an application and so there's nothing to run as such. On my disrto, it installed elements in a few locations:
usr/share/wine (core of program)
usr/lib/wine (libraries)
home/[user] (for all configuration info and programs).

Once Wine's installed (which needs to be done as root), just enter 'winecfg' in a (non-root) terminal and it should come back with some response, even if that response is 'command not found' (which would mean it hasn't installed properly).

Quoting Flapman:

Quote:
The link "If all else fails, try manually download Wine_gecko.cab from http://source.Winehq.org/Winegecko.php ..." leads to a 404 Not Found page by the way.

That must have gone down just a day or two after I wrote it. I need to revisit that bit once we've managed to get a couple of people working correctly.

Quoting Flapman:

Quote:
I´ve just startet to understand Ubuntu, specially all these terminal commands and it´s not as easy as I thought. A simple package installation would be less complicated...   

Linux isn't as easy as they would like you to believe. When I moved across I came to the conclusion that I absolutely could not recommend it to your 'casual' user. That being said, it is extremely powerful and clearly has more potential than Windows (short of a complete concept re-write). If they can improve ease-of-use it should be far superior.

You do know that Wine comes as both a package installation and to be compiled from source (see here)? Installation for ubuntu seems straightforward, although I'd rather be using an gui-based installation manager than terminal commands (YaST is my favorite thing about my OpenSuse distribution ).

Stuart