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WINE—Day 58© Copyright Darrell Anderson. My Adobe Acrobat template for Word does not work under WINE. I receive the strange message “Compile error in hidden module: AutoExec.” Although this message appears in many web discussions, the apparent problem is the template being stored in the Startup directory. I don’t have the template in that directory. I start the template tools manually. The only clue I have is that another person experienced the same problem when running the template macros in Windows 98. WINE is configured to simulate Windows 98. I temporarily changed my config file to simulate NT4 but that had no effect. Back in NT I then used a file monitor and a registry monitor to discern what files the template might be accessing. I then added a couple of files to my WINE Windows directory and added them to my DLLOverrides config section. All to no avail. I need that template. Yes, I probably can learn to print to raw Postscript and then use other tools to create a PDF, but the Adobe macro provides a incredibly convenient dialog box method to customize a PDF document on-the-fly (hint to OpenOffice developers). I looked at the original installation CD and noticed there are different files for NT versus Windows 95/98. Thus, my problem likely is related to having incorrect files installed in the fake Windows 98 environment. I could change to simulate NT40, but everything I have read says that this is not a good idea. Eventually I tried installing Acrobat to my fake drive_d, but I never got past the first stages. As soon as I selected the Browse button to change the installation location (to match the same path on my real D: partition), everything simply quit and disappeared. I have experienced this often in WINE. I could accept the default installation location and then subsequently perform a global search and replace in the fake registry files, but I am at a point where life must move on. Additionally, I am now unconvinced that WINE is a viable solution for me. I admire the efforts and reverse engineering of the WINE developers. I am truly humbled by what I have seen. However, there are too many anomalies and too many crashes. Too many bleary-eyed surfing sessions looking for needles in the informational haystack. The existing documentation does not guide people into the finer details of tweaking WINE. WINE does not clean up well after itself and with several crashes in one session, one must continually kill all the WINE preloader processes left strung about or overall system performance drags to a halt. Trying to master WINE is consuming too much time. Yes, I can use WINE for occasional quick editing with a handful of Word files, or to help me with this journal in a more real-time manner, but I am wary of trusting my important documents to WINE. Perhaps later I will experiment with VNC so that I might run my NT environment concurrently inside Slackware. I expect that option to be painfully slow and unlikely to be a reasonable alternative, however. My safest and sanest choice seems to be rebooting into Windows to work in Word and in parallel slowly learn OpenOffice. Perhaps I ought to surrender to the idea of running and networking two boxes for the next year or so. There is no reasonable way for me to leave Word right now and I want to continue migrating as best I can. Still, without a mail client in Slackware, other than my continuing education there is not much there to keep me productive. I don’t want to run incompatible mail clients in two different environments—that becomes a mess trying to coordinate mail. However, if I run two boxes and I commit to a mail client in Slackware, that would allow me to run my online sessions there. I also could install and run OpenOffice in Slackware. If I do that then KMail seems the logical choice because of the similarities to Eudora and the tight integration into the KDE environment. I probably should look at Thunderbird, but I dislike GTK and I have grown to disfavor the GTK version of Firefox. I have no problems with the Windows version. I ran a quick test of Eudora under WINE and the program runs, although I was not online to test thoroughly. Before I do that I will methodically backup my mail directories and config files before treading into that potential swamp. However, like Word and Excel, fonts in Eudora under WINE are too small and irritating to look at. Eudora provides me a back door if needed, but after the past week I would rather avoid messing with WINE. Another idea is if I network two boxes, then my Slackware box can serve as an internet gateway to my NT box. That allows me to keep using Eudora for a while as well as the Windows version of Firefox while I learn to play with KMail. Finis. |
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