[school-discuss] Worldbook under Wine

[Jim Thomas <jthomas@bittware.com>]

Hi I've been fooling around with the Worldbook encyclopedia CD (the
millenium edition) trying to get it to run under wine on an RH7.2 box. 
I'm not there yet, but I have made some progress.

During my attempts, I noticed that IBM's name is all over the CD.  I
know Doug Loss sent an email to WBk asking them to port it to Linux, but
I wonder if it would have been more effective to approach IBM instead,
since they have invested heavily in Linux, and they probably have more
clout with WBk than schoolforge.

That aside, here's where I am with Wine.
I could not run the install program on the CD.  It bailed immediately
and complained that I was running an unsupported version of Windows.  So
I installed it on a samba share from a windows box, and copied the
directory to my rh7.2 machine where wine could find them.  When I ran it
(with the CD in the CDrom drive), I got the splash screen and a
registration menu.  The registration menu isn't formatted very well, but
I was able to fill it out.  The last step is to choose a registration
method: modem, fax, mail, or telephone.  I choose mail, and it wanted to
print out a form so I could mail it.  I told it to print to a file
(having no printer connected at the time, and I'm pretty sure my wine
installation is not configured for a printer anyhow).  It would not
print.  So printing could be an issue in the actual deployment.

Once I ran the installation, subsequent attempts to run the application
failed after painting the main menu window, complaining that it couldn't
find the "DAO jet/db engine".  I don't know what that is, so if anyone
has any ideas, I'd like to hear them. When I click OK on the error
window, the main menu window slowly fades and the app terminates.

The CD has a DAO directory with a setup.exe in it.  I couldn't run that
setup.exe under wine either (same error, no suprise).  So I went back to
my windows box and ran it.  It didn't ask any questions - it just did
its business and exitted so quickly I couldn't tell what it did.  I used
the MS find utility to look for new/recently altered files, but nothing
obvious popped out.

I'm going to keep looking, but if any one can share some advice, I'm all
ears (err... eyes).

-- 
Jim Thomas              Principal Applications Engineer     Bittware,
Inc
jthomas@bittware.com    http://www.bittware.com             (703)
779-7770
The sooner you get behind, the more time you'll have to catch up