David A's Wine And Europa

Wine and the Europa Knowledgebase

ine is a tool that allows running Windows executables, such as Jerry Johnson's remarkable Europa Knowledgebase on a Linux machine. See http://www.lotus-europa.com/ and http://www.winehq.org/.

Warning: wine 1.0 or later needed for the the Knowledgebase!

The 'refresh' button will get an error and the app will simply die, but the other buttons work fine. You can run the Knowledgebase on the internet directly, but I find it more convenient and faster to use it locally on my machine.

The Knowledgebase is simply the accumulated email (over 70,000 of them) from the lotus-europa mailing list. The tool provides simple ways to search the list (which is very fast) and to keep the local database updated. It sounds like a simple thing, but to a Europa owner it is very useful as it's the only good way I know of to search all the information in the mailing list archive.

If you are running Windows (or a Windows Emulator such as VMWare on a Macintosh) you can simply download and run the Knowledgebase application. But if you are running Linux you will find Wine a sensible way to run The Knowledgebase. Download it (as of this writing the latest file is named "ekb31.exe", an earlier one was "ekb30.exe"). Then download winetricks (if you don't have it) from http://kegel.com/wine/winetricks . The following suffices to get the knowledgebase runnable as it ensures you have all the fonts and VB files you need. You will have to click on 'accept' and 'next' a few times. Do this as yourself, not root! You are installing in ~/.wine not in any system-level directory. You don't need to pre-create ~/.wine, this will create it for you if it's not already created. Lets call this the winetricks-setup.

  echo "set to win xp"
  sh winetricks winxp
  echo "install things the kb needs"
  sh winetricks corefonts
  echo "tahoma not part of core fonts, add it"
  sh winetricks tahoma
  sh winetricks jet40
  sh winetricks vbrun60
  sh winetricks gecko
  wineboot
  wine ekb33.exe

To run the Knowledgebase, you can do:

cd "~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Europa Knowledgebase"  
wine EuropaKB.exe

Some distributions of Linux, such as Fedora, Debian, or Ubuntu have pre-built binary versions of wine.

For the above to actually work you should really have wine-1.0 or later. It's unlikely your distribution will have wine-1.0 already, but perhaps it does!!

The 'refresh' button on the knowledgebase (the one with the two arrows pointing in a circle) won't work and will crash the knowledgebase. This is not harmful to anything, but don't click on that button. That 'refresh' button problem will get fixed (possibly by me) in a future version of wine, but you don't need it so don't click it.

Building From Source

The basic wine download instructions reside at http://www.winehq.org/site/git. You do have to have 'git', a fairly new revision control system, installed (as well as GNU Make, gcc, the usual compilation tools).
Building wine is a simple command for x86 cpu Linux:

./configure && make clean && make depend && make

Then, when that completes, as root, do

#Uninstall any previous wine version at this point,
# which for an install from your source build would be
make uninstall
#Then install
make install

The uninstall will not remove your wine files, which are all under the ~/.wine directory. Nor will the install damage those files.

Then do the winetricks-setup described above to get the knowledgebase installed.

For an AMD_64 or x86_64 system the build is a bit different. http://wiki.winehq.org/WineOn64bit gives the instructions. The problem is that on such machines the default is to build 64 bit and to use 64 bit libraries. But Wine does not work with such, so one has to arrange to build-for, link, and run with 32 bit pointer libraries. That page explains the various tricks applicable to several different distributions.

Mozilla and Wine

As of October 2006, running the Knowledgebase may show a request to install a mozilla tool(gecko). This is appropriate and necessary to run the Knowledgebase, so do it (click 'yes' or 'accept'). The 'winetricks gecko' command mentioned above installs gecko so you should not see this request to install gecko since you did the 'winetricks' commands above (you did, right?).

Possible Problems

Object doesn't support this action

An error panel stating "Run-time error '445' Object doesn't support this action." appears running older Wine, beginning at some point in 2006 ago and up thru wine versions just before 1.0. It's a fatal error and standard wine does not run the Knowledgebase successfully. Use 1.0 or later (and avoid clicking the refresh button) and you won't see this.

Bug 8898 at bugs.winehq.org has some details.

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Wine and Megasquirt

Using wine after the 1.0 release I've been able to run all the megasquirt apps (mtCfg.exe megatune.exe being pretty important). I set wine config to pretend it is win xp. Before 1.0 I did not really try the Megasquirt applications.

I had some difficulty getting serial communications to work. After some fooling around and finally reading the Megasquirt documentation on getting serial communications to work and following directions there (testing a few points with a voltmeter on the board) I replaced the RS232 chip and the serial interface has worked fine since then.

Because I have no serial port hardware on the HP8210us laptop, I bought a cheap USB to serial interface and use it instead. One of the USB ports seems to think it is a mouse even with the USB to serial plugged in (it did not work for me). The port below it recognizes it as a serial device though. No Problems. AFAICT the warning in the Megasquirt documentation to set the buffering in Windows to zero bytes applies to Windows, not to the USB-to-serial device itself.

I am running Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) at present and did "ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 ~/.wine/dosdevices/com1". With Ubuntu Dapper Drake (an earlier release) it might not be so simple.

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