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[DanielBuus]

Hi

I recently decided to ditch Windows for good. Too much hassle, worthless as a server, and the only reason I kept it around, really, was to be able to run Media Center. I finally decided that even if I couldn't get MC to work in WINE under Linux, it was no longer worth it, and replaced Windows with Kubuntu.

Since then, I've tried different combinations of CrossOver Office and WINE configurations, .dll overrides, etc. to get it stable, and I came pretty close at one point. Just to get it to start, however, I had to find a copy of dwmapi.dll and put it in my WINE system32 dir. Then some prerequsites for Windows Media, etc. And MC would run for a while, but still crash sometimes, and I wasn't able to decipher the trace messages in my console.

Anyway, this evening I wanted to try again, as I installed an even newer version of WINE, learned a thing or two about prefixes, and still seriously want MC to work

This time at first it went not so good as my previous attempts, but I started thinking that maybe I should check for a newer version of MC to install. I'm not giving up, that's for sure The version I tried with previously was .0.79 and .0.96 was released in the meantime, so I tried with that. To my surprise, it didn't crash at startup - no dwmapi.dll needed. Also, the interface seemed stable straight out of the box - no IE installed or anything. It does, however, currently hang after having downloaded performer store with a repeating "fixme" wininet message in the console suggesting I should try installing some kind of IE before getting my hopes too high up

The fact that this newer version seems more compatible with WINE out-of-the-box makes me wonder - also considering a previous post I read somewhere on the forum from someone at J River, stating that, "We like Linux here" or something like that - whether you are doing something actively to try and support MC being installed under WINE?

I'm not sure how many of us would find that useful, but I for one would probably end up with my hands all bloody from applauding and high-fiving everyone

Also, if you do actually play around with this on your end, is there any chance of you throwing some pointers in the way of the forum on helpful dependencies, both .dll-wise and installation-wise, launching tricks for the executable (like disabling some skinning effects or other eye-candy to make MC more WINE-friendly), or any other kind of tips in general that could help those of us Linux lovers in our attempts at getting the best of both worlds?

Cheers,
Daniel

[666JackTheKnife666]

why not run sun's virtual box vm software. it's OSS.

create a vm of xp or pe and install MC14 on that.

[globetrotters1]

why not run sun's virtual box vm software. it's OSS.

create a vm of xp or pe and install MC14 on that.

Interesting... do you know someone here who has such an installation actively running?

Thanks

[JimH]

Interesting... do you know someone here who has such an installation actively running?

Thanks

We run our business on a virtual server with 8 bottles that act like 8 separate machines.  All our web servers run in a single bottle, for example.

[globetrotters1]

We run our business on a virtual server with 8 bottles that act like 8 separate machines.  All our web servers run in a single bottle, for example.

Jim, I was more interested in 666Jack...'s solution for a MC14 installation

As I understood it, he proposes something like
- base Ubuntu Linux as host
- Sun's Virtual Box on top of that
- Windows7 or XP on top of that
- JRiver MC14 on top of that
Base Linux, Sun's VM invisible, Windows invisible, just MC14

Would sound pretty sleek to me and would like to know some experiences with such a setup of someone who really works with this (especially of course problems, limitations and such)

Thanks

[danrien]

Well, I've never done it, but VirtualBox does have a "seamless mode" where it basically removes the desktop on the virtual machine.  However, the other elements of the OS remain in place, in XP's case, the taskbar stays in place and such.  One thing you could try is keeping MediaCenter maximized, getting rid of the taskbar somehow (I'm sure there's a hack or two out there for this), and then treating the virtual machine instance as a running version of media center.  As long as audio pass through works on your Virtual Box setup, you should have no problems!  However, each time you want to start up "media center", it will take substantially longer and take substantially more memory than a true instance of media center would.

[DanielBuus]

This approach is very slow. Especially if you use MC as a video platform, too. Forget about HD content.

I'm still very interested in replies to the OT, though

[666JackTheKnife666]

Sorry I have been on the road for the last little bit and sprint in there infinite evilness closed my evdo internet account for "Roaming Abuse" I am a frigging truck driver .. Duh roam is all i do.... anyway I have not used Sun's vb for that specific purpose but for lot's of other stuff I need a vm for it's worked fine.
I have just ordered a laptop 1tb drive and when I get it i will be doing a duel boot system with win7 and kubuntu distro. once I get it all installed I will set up a vm and try MC14 in it.
it will prolly take me a week or so b4 I receive it.

[John Gateley]

I'm using VMWare fusion on Mac OS X, and listening to MC as I type this. It should work on Virtual Box, or VMWare  player (or VMWare workstation, which I use at work and is awesome because of the dual monitor support).

I had to upgrade from 1Gbyte of memory to 4. Speed may be an issue, but I'm not using MC for video, and it's a macbook, so not terribly powerful anyway.

VMWare has a cool Unity mode where the apps look like they are running under OS X, but I don't use it because of the performance hit. A desktop with more horsepower could fix that. Don't know how things like visualizations would affect it.

Major drawback, of course, is you still have to pay for the Microsoft license.

j

[DanielBuus]

Any hope of a response on the OT from the esteemed jrivers? This'll be my last bump, I promise.

[JimH]

We're not doing anything special for WINE.  No plans to do so.  But if there were something we could do, we'd consider it.

[DanielBuus]

Okay Thanks for the response!

I'm just wondering what you mean by "if there were something you could do, you'd consider it". Do you mean like if something specific was requested by someone, or if some specific obstacle was removed, or something completely different...?

[666JackTheKnife666]

Sorry I  havent replyed sooner folks,

I installed a distro of kubuntu and installed sun's virtual box  then installed win xp in the virtual box VM and then MC14
had no problems doing the install, and mc worked like a charm for me, the only issue I have is that theater view does not currently work in that setup everything else in mc works fine.
there's probably somthing I need to mess with the video setting's to get perfect mc operation I am still messing around with it. will post back if I figure out what I needed to do to make it work.

[JimH]

Theater View is 3D.  You may need to update DirectX from Microsoft.

[Rob L]

I have to admit, I was amazed how easy it is to get apps running under the latest Kubuntu. Some apps just run completely seamlessly.

For me, with the latest MC14, it comes pretty close. But it's not quite stable. Weirdly, it's much more stable when I use the mouse than when I use the keyboard. I'm sure there's something about the keyboard that makes it crash, but I'm not sure what.

For the issue of needing some kind of IE, my WINE install automatically detected that and handled it.

To be honest, there are things I haven't even bothered trying - I think I tried Theater View once, for instance, and it crashed. I didn't really expect to be able to get that working. The DLNA stuff on the other hand, just worked.

It wouldn't surprise me if there were things that you could turn off that make it more stable, but I haven't really played with it enough to say for sure.

[tombert]

My experience: I had MC 12 running in Wine, pretty fine ... but no video and a few crashes sometimes. The developers seemed to be interested (bug of mine: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11108) ... if you try they might help as well ...
With other VMs I wasn't satisfied as well, to slow and too much headaches ...

tom

[Peter_T]

So last night I installed Sun's VirtualBox on my macbook.  Then I installed an old version of XP I had lying around and finally MC. 

I can't believe it took me so long to try this.  As someone who uses MC for it's powerful DB & organizational abilities (& less-so for playback, syncing, or video) this situation is perfect for me.  I haven't tried any higher-level functions, but so far it is working perfect for everything I use it for. 

Woohoo!  MC on my Mac!