Stop whining about Wine printing!

Wine is a way to run native Windows applications without Windows. The Wine project have been able to replicate the APIs required to run quite a number of applications under their environment. It's one way you can run your legacy Windows applications under your Linux desktop. I daily run Wine for a number of applications for business:

• Windows Lotus Notes for my office Email - it's not as crappy then as the native Linux one then. :-P
• Internet Explorer 6 for those pesky websites that refuse to run without IE (many customer client websites).
• Microsoft Office for some complicated files that get garbled by OpenOffice (but that number is decreasing with every release!)

Other good news about Wine is that 1.0 is just about out the door. (Don't be fooled by the low number - these guys are perfectionists, and it's been a long, long running project!) Here's the blurb off their website:

Friends, vintners, penguins, lend me your ears: We come not to praise Windows, but to celebrate our increasing independence from it. The final release candidate for Wine 1.0 will appear this Friday (13th), and barring catastrophe, Wine 1.0 itself will be released a few days later.

I recently blogged about how hard it is for many small businesses to move off Windows. One way they can (particularly those that are on pre-Vista desktops and don't wish to go to Vista) is to utilise Wine for those legacy business Windows applications that need to run. 8-) This way they can keep their functionality, but move to a more secure, less restrictive (licensing) operating system and a better and more richer computing experience in my opinion. :-) I recently attempted to see if I could run MYOB under Wine. Currently Pauline is stuck on Windows, due to her requirement to run MYOB to do our company books. MYOB ran under Wine without a hitch. :-D Well... until I went to print. It went off to the dark printing gods and spat out an empty plain page -- no matter what I printed. And thus is the reason for this blog post. If anyone does business accounting, you realise printing is a key feature. Many hectares of forests are destroyed each year keeping up with the legal requirement of keeping records accounting records. (Personally we print a lot to PDF -- but still, under Wine this was failing for us!). Scroll through many Linux forums/help sites and you'll hear people whining and complaining about printing under Wine. It seems to have also increased with the introduction of CUPS. From what I could see people where having problems printing to a physical printer most of the time, even though their CUPS printers correctly are represented and available in Wine. (This is exactly what I was seeing -- just blank pages printed). Unfortunately this was going to be a show-stopper. Without a way to print (paper or electronically) for MYOB the idea was dead in the water. I didn't want to run Windows XP in a virtual machine (more on that in my next post over the following days). I decided to sit down and take a bit of a fiddle (that's a technical term!) :-P Really -- if CUPS-PDF didn't work, and my native printers attached, even a Postscript file would be sufficient (I could then feed that into ps2pdf or something similar if I really wanted it in PDF format for Emailing, or just print the Postscript file directly to the printer. I found that within the printing application I could create a virtual printer that printed a postscript file directly to a file in Linux. Okay, that works fine under Linux... Now the big test, did it print fine with MYOB running under Wine? I could see the printer fine (as I could with all the other CUPS printers previously). I bit my bottom lip and hit print. Low and behold... a working report! 8-) Even better I could link the Postscript printer to the CUPS-PDF printer and it would convert it auto-magically into a PDF for me. I since tested a range of applications under Wine and they all seem to be printing. So if you need to print in Wine and don't want a headache, try the local Postscript virtual printer hack. It works well. :-D For those that want to replicate it, here is a series of pictures showing the Postscript printer properties. And if you still don't believe.... here is a sample print job... one in Windows with MYOB and one under Linux