Bend in the Weather

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/Office Databases - it's not as crappy as the native Linux one then.
• 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.

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.

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 from the Amazon are destroyed each year keeping up with the legal requirement of keeping financial 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!)

Really -- if CUPS-PDF didn't work, nor did 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!

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.

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 some sample print jobs:

• An example MYOB Invoice printed from Wine
• An example MYOB Report printed from Wine
• The sample test print from Linux

So have fun and happy printing from within Wine.

(06:34) Someone set the alarm far too early. Jumped out of bed in a panic & twisted ankle. #

(06:44) Jumped in the shower. I missed, landed on the soap. Other ankle now throbbing. #

(07:09) Walked out front door to grab morning newspaper. #

(07:10) Eyelid meet bee. Eye now swelling. #

(07:11) Bastard paperboy has got the paper in the damn bird bath again. #

(07:15) The same someone who fiddled with the alarm clock has now set the toaster to the 'burn like a crisp' setting. #

(07:16) Forgot to buy coffee, will have to settle for water. #

(07:20) Toothbrush is now black from the charcoaled toast. #

(07:25) Where the hell are my keys? #

(07:29) Tackled dog rugby style after chasing him around the coffee table. Have managed to recover them, albeit full of dog saliva. #

(07:30) Apparently keyless entry into your car doesn't work after being chewed into a black ball of plastic. #

(07:31) Hit head when entering car. Maybe this is why keyless entry was invented? #

(07:43) If you are going to have a road-rage episode, choose wisely. Now sporting a growing fat lip to match my bug bee-eye. Note to self: Don't abuse a boxer. #

(08:17) All car-parks now taken due to the time lost with the boxer. Have to park 4 blocks further away from the office. A great workout for sore and swollen ankles. #

(08:33) Remember the umbrella even if the weather report says there is little chance of rain. #

(08:53) Finally in at work. #

(08:56) The company provided International Roast is a poor substitute for coffee. #

(09:05) Coffeeeeee annnndddd keeeyboardddddds donnnnn't mix. #

We can all dream!

How many times do you get sent MS-Word, MS-Excel or MS-Powerpoint files?
Whilst OpenOffice does an excellent job opening them all, I would prefer them all in an open format natively.

It appears the Dutch may come to the rescue and make that dream a reality.

Reading through IDABC website it appears that the Dutch Council of State are going to open-source an application they have written that allows you to convert flawlessly between Microsoft Office <-> Open Office. It can also convert -> PDF.

At present, the only minor hiccup is images generated to PDF are a little 'darker'.

Really, I am happy to just get MS Office -> OpenOffice.

Really the European approach to OSS is a beacon of light that hopefully is adopted across all regions. The days of proprietry file formats are quickly disappearing. For future generations and long term storage Open Standards in file formats in mandatory.

History will look back at the stand the EU has made against Microsoft and show that their stance was the under swell that pushed many in that direction.

It's great to see South Africa has also filed their appeal against the OOXML becoming an ISO standard. It does show there are some people left within ISO that still have a back-bone and conscience.

South Africa challenges the validity of the final vote that we contend was based upon inadequate information resulting from poorly conducted BRM. Moreover, we challenge the validity of a process that, from beginning to end, required all parties involved to analyze far too much information in far too little time, involved a BRM that did not remotely provide enough time to perform the appointed purpose of that procedure, and for which an arbitrary time limitation was imposed to discuss and resolve a significant number of substantial responses, despite the Directives for not requiring any such limitation as to duration.

It is our opinion that the process followed during all stages of this fast track has harmed the reputations of both ISO and the IEC and brought the processes enshrined in the Directives into disrepute, and that this negative publicity has, in turn, also harmed the reputations of all member bodies of ISO and the IEC.

Let's hope this appeal isn't squashed in a face-saving exercise by ISO. The entire ISO process surrounding the adoption was flawed from the start with many unethical breaches of conduct undertaken during the whole voting process.