Wine Traffic #172 For 30 May 2003

This is the 172nd release of the Wine's kernel cousin publication. It's main goal is to be as short and concise as possible so I can enjoy my vacation. It also serves inform you of what's going on around Wine (the Un*x windows emulator).

There were 58 different contributors. 29 posted more than once. 28 posted last week too.

Slow news week? Yeah, you could say that. I'm also on vacation, so some of the threads aren't covered completely. Alexandre is also on vacation, so there hasn't been as much CVS activity this week. I'd expect a new Wine release next week but we'll have to see.

Based on last week's IRC meeting Dimi updated the To Do list. The biggest change is moving things from a 0.9 to-do list to a 1.0 to-do list. It certainly makes the 0.9 one seem much more complete:

A new version (v0.9) of the Wine 0.9 TODO is available for your viewing pleasure at:

http://63.138.153.104/wine/Wine-0.9-TODO-0.9.html

The work-in-progress one is available at:

http://63.138.153.104/wine/Wine-0.9-TODO.html

Most important changes in this one is that a bunch of stuff was moved over to the Wine 1.0 TODO:

http://63.138.153.104/wine/Wine-1.0-TODO.html

Any feedback concerning this (rather large) changes is more than welcomed.

Supporting compiled HTML help files has been a bit of a problem with Wine. We've covered this before, most recently in issue #153. Someone wrote to the list this week with some info and wondered if it would be helpful in the effort:

Just wondering if Wine folks are implementing a chm viewer and if you would be interested in a specification on the internal files of CHMs and even relicencing some of the code for my chm decompiler.

all at http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/hhm/

BTW; please cc me in replies since, while i'm subscribed i don't want to get heaps of other wine discussion & so i've turned off mail delivery.

I've already written the major chuck of a CHM viewer - to the point I have a native Windows viewer using nothing but the WebBrowser ActiveX control.

The secondary problem is how to display the HTML + JavaScript needed for a CHM viewer. I've started work on this several times, and so far the *best* (in terms of existing compatability with IE's CSS/JS/HTML 'features') has been KJs and KHtml from the KDE project.

Gecko doesn't cut it - it's quite slow, bulky and worst of all too strict on standards compliance. Nothing you want in a Windows system component. Well, not the last one anyway :)

However KHTML and KJS -are- tied to the QT library. It's quite possible to decouple them (the embedded konq suite already does this to some extent, as does WebCore from Apple's Safari project)... however it is somewhat time consuming. Using WebCore can probably greatly speed this up of course.

I ran into two other problems. First, I have gotten a Windows-native KHTML/KJS viewer running - however splitting it into an API mapping to the existing dll structure is complicated... and I know next to nothing about writing ActiveX objects.

The second is that I never could get an answer from Alexandre as to adding C++ code to WINE itself. It would be possible to write it as a seperate non-core implementation, but many of these DLLs also have non-browser related APIs that need to be in WINE itself. Again, diverting api calls between the versions in WINE and our browser versions is complicated and in this case plain ugly.

Anyway, that's all rather off-topic... we can already build a CHM viewer, it's displaying the HTML/JS that's the problem :)

A bunch of people wrote in to discuss the idea of using KHTML, but the fact that it relies on Qt is a major problem. The solution would be to find a de-Qt'ed version and begin using it. Such a version seems to exist, Mark Westcott pointed out AtheOS seemed to have done such a thing at one point. Mike Hearn felt Internet Explorer itself was easy enough to get running under Wine that it could be used.

Tom Wickline changed the documentation to remove compression when using cvs. Andi Mohr wanted to know why that was done because people on slow connections could definitely benefit from it. Marcus Meissner pointed out cvs was broke, " Because cvs -z3 still hangs at the end of any cvs command. "

A couple people pointed out that compression could be used if the cvs client was updated. Fabian Cenedese gave a pointer to a good client:

If a warning/info goes into the dox then it should be like: "... use cvs 1.11.5 or bigger..." as recently the new version 1.11.6 came out. I haven't tried it though.

Kristoffer Ericson gave a pointer to some software that works with Wine - Ventrilo. From their website:

Ventrilo is a scalable Voice over IP (VoIP) communications system that solves a lot of the problems associated with network latency, packet loss, uptime and administration.

Ventrilo can be used for home / personal applications like talking to friends and family, or playing organized online games where Voice Comm can make them more exciting and productive. It can also be used in an enterprise environment as a productivity tool for conducting long distance group discussions.

Just wanted to point out that Ventrilo (www.ventrilo.com) works in wine with abit of work. Although it requires 3 files (gsm 6.10 codec among other things). The bug i'm left with currently is that when 2 people speak (at same time), it freezes up.

Ventrilo will probobly make a linux version but wanted you all to know.


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Czech

1.	24 May 2003 - 30 May 2003	(1 post)	News: Frank's Corner Milestone
2.	26 May 2003	(1 post)	Updated To-do List
3.	28 May 2003 - 29 May 2003	(25 posts)	Building a CHM Viewer
4.	26 May 2003 - 27 May 2003	(12 posts)	Update CVS Utilities for Compression
5.	26 May 2003	(1 post)	Using Ventrilo

Wine Traffic #172 For 30 May 2003

By Brian Vincent