I really need to begin here with the Statement; “I’m a newbie to this Linux stuff, having started only 2 weeks ago.” See what Leo Laporte will do to you when you’re not looking. So far, I’ve been able to install the SuSE 10.0 OS into a duel boot machine (XP). Travel around the desktop and make most all the installed programs respond the way I think they should. Marcel’s book (Kiss the Blue Screen of death goodbye) is correct, it’s not really that difficult if you take your time and think. I would really like to become more reliant on SuSE, but I really need to get a piece of my XP software working on Linux. I’ve read parts of the book that describe WINE and I’m hoping this utility might be the answer. I have a Windows program call ‘Home Domination’ (http://www.homedomination.com/). This software uses X-10 commands to control lights through-out my house and property. At this time the owner/coder of the software is only a Windows person and does not have the expertise to rewrite/compile for Linux. Question Any ideas or directions would be appreciated. Bill Machia |
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Wine and X10 home control
This may be a bit of a round-about way to answer your questions, so please bear with me.
The "Microsoft Windows" enviroment is a complete operating system, while "Wine" is a basic compatability layer between some (most) application level Win16/32 APIs and a Unixish operating system. There sometimes are things that do not or cannot translate between Windows and Wine. Having said that, Wine has an excellent track record of being able to run most "user level" Windows applications under Linux. However, Wine has difficulties with applications that perform direct access to hardware or install and use system level DLLs.
Your "Home Domination" software may fall into this category. If Wine doesn't know how to access the X10 controller through Linux then "Home Domination" won't be able to access the controller through Wine.
Having said all that, I will point out that the WineHQ has built a lot of capability into Wine, and it may just be a setting problem rather than an impossibility.
So, have you tried (and can you) run other Windows programs with Wine? Can you, for instance, get Wine to run Notepad.exe? If so, then your Wine is probably configured correctly and it may just be the "Home Domination" application that can't run.
Now, to answer your specific questions:]
If you can tell us more about how your Wine is set up, we might be able to help get the program to run. Also, Wine can capture debugging information that would assist in determining what the problem with "Home Domination" is. If you can post your wineconfig file and the log of your execution of "Home Domination", we might be able to give you a more definitive answer.
BTW, WineHQ also provides a set of libraries ("winelib") that you can use on a linux system to compile Windows programs and have them run natively on Linux. The author of "Home Domination" would only have to recompile on a Linux system to get a native linux app, if the app runs at all under Wine.
HTH
--
Lew Pitcher
Master Codewright & JOAT-in-training
Registered Linux User #112576 (http://counter.li.org/)
Slackware - Because I know what I'm doing.
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