Dolphin on Wine - starting to look good

Though I use WindowsXP at home, it's been many years - and a few jobs -
since I used anything other than Linux at work, and it's always annoyed
me that I couldn't muck around with Dolphin there.

Add to that the fact that "because it only runs on Windows" is about
2028th on my list of "reasons I like Dolphin", and you can see why I
check Dolphin out on Wine with each new update.

With the latest version of Wine, 0.9.36, Dolphin has become usable for
the first time - most of the browsers can be opened without an error
(the help system and the code mentor are still out, but the view
composers and code browsers are fine). Idea spaces work, code can be
executed, the image can be saved. I have had some crashes, but it feels
workable - there may be obvious areas to avoid. Many of the sample
applications run, though the graphics based ones are ruined by a
hamhanded fix I made to get rid of a consistent walkback - perhaps
someone here can offer a more sensible approach.

Here's a quick runthrough of what I did to make it work. Some of this
may be incaccurate, as I did the actual Dolphin install quite a while ago:

Installing Wine - nothing special. As I'm using Fedora, I just did 'yum
install wine'

Configuring Wine - using the winecfg utility, I set Wine to run as
WindowsXP by default, to allow the window manager to control the
desktop, and to run inside a virtual desktop.

Installing Dolphin - I installed Dolphin 6 professional from a .msi. I
forget at this point whether I installed the Windows msi.dll or used the
built in support in Wine. You might try looking at the advice on
http://frankscorner.org/index.php?p=msi which says:

---
You can install .msi files with the msiexec.exe utility. This command is
built into Wine, so you don't have to install Windows Installer from
Microsoft.
If the .msi file is called msifile.msi you just have to type msiexec /i
msifile.msi and the application will be installed.
---

The Dolphin installer had issues with window size - I seem to recall
that it tried to draw its window a million pixels wide, and that setting
Wine to run in a virtual desktop (rather than as multiple OS level
windows) was the solution. You need Wine to run in a virtual desktop
while installing Dolphin, but not afterwards when you're running it.

Running Dolphin - run as 'wine Dolphin.exe -nosplash myImage.img', as it
can't handle displaying the splash screen. The system folder comes up
only about 20 pixels high, and cannot be persuaded to expand. There is
*just* enough room, if you're pixel perfect with the mouse, to open a
new workspace, which is all you really need the system folder for.

When you open a browser, you'll get a walkback, with the failure on

IndexedColor->asRGB:usingPalette

I droppped into the debugger at this point and changed the line

ifTrue: [GDILibrary default systemError]

to

ifTrue: [Color black]

This is crude as hell, but it stops the system complaining. As I say
above, if anyone has a more sensible approach, I'd love to hear it.

At this point I manually killed off the processes I didn't want (the
'panic button' under the Tools menu seems to panic a little too much
), opened one workspace for next time, and saved the image.


It's far from perfect, but it's workable, and I'm too pleased for words.



Steve

On Wed, 02 May 2007 21:29:08 +1000, Steve Taylor <smt2@ozemail.com.au>
wrote:

>
>It's far from perfect, but it's workable, and I'm too pleased for words.
>
>
>
> Steve

Great news. I'd love to stop using Windows but I really love using Dolphin.
If it can be made to run perfectly under Wine then it would be my cue to
finally make the switch (except for the odd game of Half-Life 2 and Day of
Defeat Source). My urge to ditch MS operating systems has been increased 10
fold with the release of Vista.

Mind you it would be even nicer if OA would announce that the roadmap for
Dolphin includes making it cross platform (perhaps by using Qt instead of
native Windows widgets) and making it 64-bit. Not necessarily in that
order.


The Brave Sir Robin.

RUN AWAY !!!

On May 2, 4:29 am, Steve Taylor <s...@ozemail.com.au> wrote:
> When you open a browser, you'll get a walkback, with the failure on
> IndexedColor->asRGB:usingPalette
> [hack snipped]
> This is crude as hell, but it stops the system complaining. As I say
> above, if anyone has a more sensible approach, I'd love to hear it.

How about filing bugs at http://bugs.winehq.org ?
If Wine developers don't know about the problems, they can't fix them.

I've already filed the first bug for you,
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8258
Once that one is fixed, it'll be easier for the wine developers to
look at your other bugs.

> Great news. I'd love to stop using Windows but I really love using Dolphin.
> If it can be made to run perfectly under Wine then it would be my cue to
> finally make the switch (except for the odd game of Half-Life 2 and Day of
> Defeat Source).

Real men play Doom


> My urge to ditch MS operating systems has been increased 10
> fold with the release of Vista.

I'm currently getting a dose of it with some pre-installed XP machines.
Since I do not know what it might pop up next, it's a little hard to
disable it all.

Any specific cautions about Vista?


> Mind you it would be even nicer if OA would announce that the roadmap for
> Dolphin includes making it cross platform (perhaps by using Qt instead of
> native Windows widgets) and making it 64-bit. Not necessarily in that
> order.

I agree to a point. I have been nagging OA for years to create an
Object Arts Smalltalk for Linux. Dolphin is very tightly coupled to
Windows, so a port is probably not what we want. However, starting with
Dolphin for Smalltalk source, to bootstrap the new image, etc., they
could create a very nice system with a modest (to start anyway) MVP
based GUI and a Linux VM. You are probably correct that this could be
done with Qt or wxWidgets.

I still have some hope of being able to get Squeak to fill this role.
With some organization and a lot of work, we might be able to do some
serious spring cleaning on Squeak and end up with something to our
liking. If it started to work, OA might even take interest in building
tools for it??

Failing that, when you guys think Wine is really ready for running
Dolphin apps, let me know. Wow - just looked at my watch, gotta run.

Have a good one,

Bill

--
Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
bills@anest4.anest.ufl.edu

On Thu, 03 May 2007 14:57:11 GMT, Bill Schwab <bschwab@anest.ufl.edu>
wrote:

>
>Any specific cautions about Vista?
>
>Have a good one,
>
>Bill


My experience so far of Vista hasn't been good. I've really tried to get on
with it but I'm failing miserably to do so. I just can't see what all these
years of production have actually produced apart from a pretty (annoying)
GUI, viral DRM stupidity, software and hardware incompatibility, annoying
and badly thought out UAC (see Linux for how this should be), beta only
driver availability, unecessary and annoying changes to machine admin GUI
(how many clicks do I have to do just to change display settings ?!).
You've got me started now so I'll shut up.

Obviously these issues are nothing to do with Dolphin, they just p**s me
off. I haven't tried Dolphin on Vista yet 'cos every time I fire it up I
spend too much time dealing with the other stuff that I get fed up and
reboot back into XP again.

Back to my original post about the Dolphin roadmap thought, there's one
more thing I'd like OA to sort out and that is to make Dolphin fully
Unicode by default, i.e. all strings are Unicode strings, all GUI
components are Unicode capable, all system calls are the Unicode ones etc.
This is the one thing I like about C# and Java, they are Unicode by
default. You don't have to think about it.

The Dolphin application I'm working on has to be able to cope with Chinese
or other Far Eastern characters being entered in the GUI and Chinese file
names and directory names on the file system.


The Brave Sir Robin.
RUN AWAY !!!

On 4 May, 10:20, The Brave Sir Robin <thebravesirro...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

> Back to my original post about the Dolphin roadmap thought, there's one
> more thing I'd like OA to sort out and that is to make Dolphin fully
> Unicode by default, i.e. all strings are Unicode strings, all GUI
> components are Unicode capable, all system calls are the Unicode ones etc.
> This is the one thing I like about C# and Java, they are Unicode by
> default. You don't have to think about it.

+1 - I would like to see that support as well. It easily catches you
out, be it reading in info from the web or users in other countries
entering native characters. Dolphin hides so much complexity for me in
other areas, it would be nice it it did it for this too.

Tim

p.s. Dolphin does seem to work ok on Vista, however I agree that my
experience using Vista so far hasn't been that great either. However
I'm sure that not having the latest hardware has contributed a lot to
that (if you are going with vista, really check that your hardware is
supported with non beta drivers). I can also confirm that ToGo apps
I've created seem to run fine on vista (so developing in XP is fine).

> My experience so far of Vista hasn't been good. I've really tried to
get on
> with it but I'm failing miserably to do so. I just can't see what all these
> years of production have actually produced apart from a pretty (annoying)
> GUI, viral DRM stupidity, software and hardware incompatibility, annoying
> and badly thought out UAC (see Linux for how this should be), beta only
> driver availability, unecessary and annoying changes to machine admin GUI
> (how many clicks do I have to do just to change display settings ?!).
> You've got me started now so I'll shut up.

Rats, it sounds like vista is to xp as xp is to 2k, if not worse.
Thanks for the heads-up.


> Obviously these issues are nothing to do with Dolphin, they just p**s me
> off. I haven't tried Dolphin on Vista yet 'cos every time I fire it up I
> spend too much time dealing with the other stuff that I get fed up and
> reboot back into XP again.

Understood that Dolphin is innocent, but it is also tied to Windows. I
am fairly certain I would be running all Linux servers at this point
were it not for that fact. I would very much like to see a largely
compatible Linux product from OA. At first, I would use it on servers,
so the GUI would be negotiable; presumably it would be MVP, but with
little more than text editors, buttons and simple lists. The base
system could be largely the same (collections, magnitudes, etc.);
sockets could be pluggable across the two systems, and I would want it
to speak STB (again, should not be a problem). It is of course not trivial.

Failing that, I suspect we could organize an effort to modernize Squeak
just enough to give the Dolphin community a soft landing on Linux. A
place to begin would be to see if we can agree on what needs to be done
to it. Toward that end, here is a draft list:

(1) GUI look is not very important to me, nor are native widgets; GUI
feel is important.

(2) native widgets are fine if available, and wxSqueak is moving slowly,
but was far from dead when I last checked. Rob was also talking about
an MVP framework, which would be most welcome (aka required).

(3) reading off the end of a stream is an error and should signal one;
if I can tolerate nil or a truncated collection, I would expect to use
#nextOrNil or #nextAvailable:. OA (well Intuitive then) got this right
from the beginning. I _really_ care about it because there are many
parsing tasks that can have error conditions masked by Squeak's streams.
Raising errors should be the default.

(4) SSL sockets. I have an OpenSSL hack for Dolphin, but it works.
Folks in the Squeak world tell me stunnel is a perfectly viable
alternative; I am skeptical, but need to take a look. Frankly, there
are other OpenSSL services that I use, so access to the library would be
preferred.

(5) Is Squeak's process synchronization sound? It seems to get a lot of
use, but there have been some questions (perhaps resolved) re
SharedQueue and friends.

(6) $_ is legal in selectors and (really important) class names. Ugly,
yes, but important. Squeak's failure to allow them is increasingly
elective over time.

I am sure there is more, but those are the items I can remember. I
would hope that if several of us organized, perhaps even as a squeak
sub-project, we might be able to adapt Squeak to the needs of a Dolphin
user wanting to create Linux servers and simple GUIs. If the
modularization succeeds, it would become that much easier. Any takers?


> Back to my original post about the Dolphin roadmap thought, there's one
> more thing I'd like OA to sort out and that is to make Dolphin fully
> Unicode by default, i.e. all strings are Unicode strings, all GUI
> components are Unicode capable, all system calls are the Unicode ones etc.
> This is the one thing I like about C# and Java, they are Unicode by
> default. You don't have to think about it.

As long as it is done correctly (and I would expect no less from OA)
then I agree.


Have a good one,

Bill


--
Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
bills@anest4.anest.ufl.edu

Has anyone looked at whether the new MS DLR would be an appropiate
path for Dolphin?
There is already someone creating a Smalltalk for the .Net/Dlr
environment at:
http://vistasmalltalk.wordpress.com/ and he seems to be making a lot
of progress for an individual effort.

Mike
On May 4, 7:32 am, Bill Schwab <bsch...@anest.ufl.edu> wrote:
> > My experience so far of Vista hasn't been good. I've really tried to
> get on
>
> > with it but I'm failing miserably to do so. I just can't see what all these
> > years of production have actually produced apart from a pretty (annoying)
> > GUI, viral DRM stupidity, software and hardware incompatibility, annoying
> > and badly thought out UAC (see Linux for how this should be), beta only
> > driver availability, unecessary and annoying changes to machine admin GUI
> > (how many clicks do I have to do just to change display settings ?!).
> > You've got me started now so I'll shut up.
>
> Rats, it sounds like vista is to xp as xp is to 2k, if not worse.
> Thanks for the heads-up.
>
> > Obviously these issues are nothing to do with Dolphin, they just p**s me
> > off. I haven't tried Dolphin on Vista yet 'cos every time I fire it up I
> > spend too much time dealing with the other stuff that I get fed up and
> > reboot back into XP again.
>
> Understood that Dolphin is innocent, but it is also tied to Windows. I
> am fairly certain I would be running all Linux servers at this point
> were it not for that fact. I would very much like to see a largely
> compatible Linux product from OA. At first, I would use it on servers,
> so the GUI would be negotiable; presumably it would be MVP, but with
> little more than text editors, buttons and simple lists. The base
> system could be largely the same (collections, magnitudes, etc.);
> sockets could be pluggable across the two systems, and I would want it
> to speak STB (again, should not be a problem). It is of course not trivial.
>
> Failing that, I suspect we could organize an effort to modernize Squeak
> just enough to give the Dolphin community a soft landing on Linux. A
> place to begin would be to see if we can agree on what needs to be done
> to it. Toward that end, here is a draft list:
>
> (1) GUI look is not very important to me, nor are native widgets; GUI
> feel is important.
>
> (2) native widgets are fine if available, and wxSqueak is moving slowly,
> but was far from dead when I last checked. Rob was also talking about
> an MVP framework, which would be most welcome (aka required).
>
> (3) reading off the end of a stream is an error and should signal one;
> if I can tolerate nil or a truncated collection, I would expect to use
> #nextOrNil or #nextAvailable:. OA (well Intuitive then) got this right
> from the beginning. I _really_ care about it because there are many
> parsing tasks that can have error conditions masked by Squeak's streams.
> Raising errors should be the default.
>
> (4) SSL sockets. I have an OpenSSL hack for Dolphin, but it works.
> Folks in the Squeak world tell me stunnel is a perfectly viable
> alternative; I am skeptical, but need to take a look. Frankly, there
> are other OpenSSL services that I use, so access to the library would be
> preferred.
>
> (5) Is Squeak's process synchronization sound? It seems to get a lot of
> use, but there have been some questions (perhaps resolved) re
> SharedQueue and friends.
>
> (6) $_ is legal in selectors and (really important) class names. Ugly,
> yes, but important. Squeak's failure to allow them is increasingly
> elective over time.
>
> I am sure there is more, but those are the items I can remember. I
> would hope that if several of us organized, perhaps even as a squeak
> sub-project, we might be able to adapt Squeak to the needs of a Dolphin
> user wanting to create Linux servers and simple GUIs. If the
> modularization succeeds, it would become that much easier. Any takers?
>
> > Back to my original post about the Dolphin roadmap thought, there's one
> > more thing I'd like OA to sort out and that is to make Dolphin fully
> > Unicode by default, i.e. all strings are Unicode strings, all GUI
> > components are Unicode capable, all system calls are the Unicode ones etc.
> > This is the one thing I like about C# and Java, they are Unicode by
> > default. You don't have to think about it.
>
> As long as it is done correctly (and I would expect no less from OA)
> then I agree.
>
> Have a good one,
>
> Bill
>
> --
> Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
> b...@anest4.anest.ufl.edu

Also came across this emulator http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ on
a VFP board. Person says that they are using it with good results.