Legal notice: If you read beyond this paragraph, you do so with the understanding and agreement on your part that all the information and advice in this article are provided entirely at your risk. You absolve and hold harmless the author of this page, Alchemy Mindworks and its related corporate entities, as well as the stockholders, shareholders, employees and suppliers thereof for any loss, damage or expense arising from your use of the information provided herein, including but not exclusive to attorney's fees and costs, however they may occur. You acknowledge that some of the references in this article are to technologies not developed by or under the control of the author of this page or Alchemy Mindworks, and over which they have no control. The lawyers made us say that.

In a perfect world, there would be a single, universal operating system for computers, and it would be stable, flawless, inalterable and supported by its developer at no cost. In addition, in said perfect world, elected officials would be honorable and trustworthy, consumer goods would cost what they're worth rather than what the market will bear and green would be a color rather than a religion.

If such a world existed, we'd live there, and you wouldn't be reading this.

In this world, there are several largely incompatible, funky and effectively unsupported operating systems. Windows is one of them, and while it's the most widely used, there are workable alternatives. The most engaging of these is Linux, which has the advantage of being effectively free and the disadvantage of having a lot of programs available for it, but very little software. Many of the programs require that you be a programmer to use them.

As much as we'd like to port our Windows applications to run under Linux, the reality of doing so is seriously daunting. Linux comes in well over a dozen popular distributions and the Goddess knows how many less widely-used ones. Every one of those distributions exists in innumerable versions, not all of which are backward compatible. Creating a port of one of our applications to run under Linux would involve an undertaking just this side of a total re-write, and thousands of hours of work.

Our apologies to the penguin... it's not likely to happen any time soon.

There is, however, a way to run Windows software — including most of our stuff — under Linux without rewriting much of anything. You can install an open-source, no-cost addition to Linux called Wine, which provides duplicates of the Windows software interface, or API, to Windows applications running on a Linux system. This, in effect, tricks Windows software into thinking it's running under Windows while it stealthily translates all the software's calls and requests into comparable functions that exist under Linux.

This document will discuss installing Wine, installing Alchemy Mindworks applications under Wine and the issues involved therein. Please keep in mind that it, like Wine — and as has been said of late, like Windows — is a work in progress.

Did we mention this isn't a perfect world?

You can find out more about Wine at Wine HQ. Wine is easy to install — most of the time — and considering what it does, it works surprisingly well.

As you might imagine, this isn't the same as working perfectly.

Binary installs of Wine are available for Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora, SUSE, Slackware, Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD and Sun Solaris as of this writing, and the source code for Wine is available, should you wish to compile it under an otherwise unsupported implementation of Linux.

The first important thing to keep in mind about Wine is that it won't be of much use unless the computer it's installed on is running an Intel-compatible processor. This includes pretty much every personal computer on earth, with the exception of older Macintosh systems.

It's also worth noting that while the current generation of Macintosh computers run on Intel processors, they won't run Wine as it's distributed due to problems with the Macintosh implementation of Linux. There is a Macintosh-specific version of Wine, called Darwine, which addresses this — it's addressed in a separate article.

To install Wine, click on the Get Wine Now link in the Download section of the Wine HQ page, locate your implementation of Linux and follow the instructions. If you're using a current release of Red Hat, CentOS or Fedora, you can install Wine, as we did, by opening a terminal window, running su and typing:

Once Wine is installed, you should see Wine as an item in the Applications window of your desktop.

The process of installing Wine will create a folder structure on your hard drive to represent the C: drive of a Windows system. It resides in a hidden directory called .wine in the home directory of the user who installed it. As such, if your user name is sloth, the directory /home/sloth will include a directory called .wine.

If you're new to Windows, it's probably worth mentioning that they're called directories under Linux and folders under Windows, because Windows is just huge on metaphors.

The problem with hidden folders is that they're hidden, and as such, you can't see them. Run the File Browser from the System Tools sub-menu of the Applications menu of your desktop and enable Show Hidden Files in the View menu to enable you to see this directory... or folder... or whatever.

If you double-click on the .wine folder, you should see a folder called drive_c, and within that, folders called Program Files and Windows.

The Windows folder includes libraries that duplicate the core functionality of Windows, as viewed by a Windows application, but none of the software that installs with real Windows. As such, common applications such as WordPad and Paint aren't available under Wine — the latter will prove to be a problem.

Wine is now good to go.

While a simple Windows application will now run under Wine, there are several things that a complete Alchemy Mindworks application will find missing. The first one is a library called msvcp60.dll, which most of our software likes to have on hand. In its absence, applications like GIF Construction Set and Graphic Workshop won't run under Linux, and perhaps more annoyingly still, will not say why they're misbehaving.

You can address this by downloading msvcp60.dll and copying it to the .wine/drive_c/Windows/System32 folder on your Linux system. Alternately, you can have Winetricks install it for you — Winetricks will be discussed later in this article.

The second problem is slightly more obscure. Alchemy Mindworks software stores its documentation as HTML documents, which require a web browser to view them. Linux typically installs with the Firefox web browser, but this is a Linux application, not a Windows application. A Windows application that wants to open an HTML document won't have access to the Linux installation of Firefox.

The first thing you'll need to install under Wine, then, is Firefox. Visit the Firefox web page, download the Windows version of Firefox and double-click on it in the Linux File Browser. It will install under Wine.

As of this writing, some builds of Firefox run somewhat imperfectly under Wine. When you get around to viewing the Manual documents installed with Alchemy Mindworks software, you may note that:

• The animations therein are broken, or don't display correctly.
• The typeface used for body text looks a bit odd.
  
  

Neither of these issues should affect your use of the Manual documents.

You're now ready to install some actual software under Wine. In this example, we're going to install GIF Construction Set Professional 3. The installation procedure discussed herein should be applicable to any contemporary Alchemy Mindworks application.

To begin with, you should have GIF Construction Set Professional 3 patch 25 or better to complete this installation. Earlier versions of the 3.0 software will work, but typically with a few catches and cosmetic nasties. The sordid truth about Wine is that it's not an entirely seamless Windows environment, and we've had to touch up the software to make it workable therein.

Double-click on the gcsp30.exe installer for GIF Construction Set Professional in the Linux File Browser to open it. Work through the installation screens — it's all pretty much self-explanatory. It's a profoundly good idea to allow the installer to install GIF Construction Set to its default folder.

We'd like to take this opportunity to note that if you use Alchemy Mindworks software to do productive work, even if it's running under Linux while it's doing it, you need to register it. Should you enable the Install for Evaluation option during installation, please keep this in mind.

There are two issues you might encounter in running the installer:

1. Toward the end of the installation, a window titled Program Manager may open. Program Manager is a function under Windows that creates desktop icons. As this isn't handled the same way under Linux, Wine will open a window to indicate that something it doesn't quite understand is happening. Just close this window.
2. You'll see a warning about the installer's inability to open the What's New document. It needs Word or WordPad to do this, neither of which are available in a new installation of Wine. You can safely ignore this.
   
   

You might see an Alchemy Mindworks installation advertisement window when the installation is complete. This is part of the installation process.

GIF Construction Set is now ready to rock... mostly.

Installing GIF Construction Set Professional 3 should have created a wine glass icon on your Linux desktop for GIF Construction Set. Double-click on it and GIF Construction Set should run under Linux. Alternately, you can open GIF Construction Set from the Wine sub-menu of the Applications menu of your Linux desktop.

We too were shocked when this actually worked.

In the event that it doesn't work for you — that is, if you double-click on the icon and nothing happens — the most likely cause of the problem is GIF Construction Set proving to be unable to find msvcp60.dll, as discussed earlier in this document. Make sure you've installed it in your \windows\system32 folder.

When GIF Construction Set Professional first boots up, it will probably complain about being unable to find Windows Paint. This is normal — the default installation of Wine doesn't include Windows' ancillary applications such as Paint, and as such you wouldn't expect GIF Construction Set to be able to find it. We'll address this one in a moment.

Pretty much everything in GIF Construction Set will work, with the following exceptions.

1. The Movie import and export functions are a tad obstreperous. As of this writing, the AVI codec support in Wine seems to be broken, and attempts to save an animation to AVI will fail. Attempting to select a different video codec crashes GIF Construction Set. As these are Wine issues rather than GIF Construction Set issues, we can do little but wait for the development people behind Wine to address them. You can save animations to AVI if you disable the Write Compressed Movies item in the GIF Construction Set Profesisonal Setup dialog. The MOV functions should work if you install QuickTime.
2. The Paint function in the Image block edit window won't work, as GIF Construction Set couldn't find a Paint application.
   
   

Also, note that the Help menu may appear at the extreme right end of the GIF Construction Set menu bar under Linux.

By default, Wine will present applications running under it with two lettered drives. Drive C is the top of the Windows folder structure — that is, the contents of the .wine\drive_c hidden folder in your home directory. Drive Z is the top of your Linux directory structure. If you want to work on animations stored somewhere on your hard drive that's not under your .wine folder, you'll need to select drive Z.

If you open the Wine Configuration item from the Wine sub-menu of the Applications menu of your Linux desktop, you can fine-tune some of Wine's stealthier aspects. You can, for example, assign additional drive letters for use under Wine's simulation of Windows. This can save a fair bit of rodent action if you keep all your graphics in a particular Linux directory which you'll want to open quickly from within GIF Construction Set.

You can set the version of Windows that Wine will pretend to be. It's unclear what this setting actually does under Wine — we recommend setting it to Windows XP.

Finally, you can set the font resolution in the Graphics tab. You should leave this at its default value, 96 DPI. Increasing it will loose a number of cosmetic demons and wraiths upon GIF Construction Set, and many other Windows applications running under Wine.

The lack of Windows Paint under Linux is a problem for GIF Construction Set, and it's one that can't be resolved without a bit of stealth. To the best of our knowledge, Microsoft's web page does not include a downloadable installer for Windows Paint.

There are several ways to address this:

• If you don't actually need the Paint facility under GIF Construction Set, disable the Search for Paintbrush item in the Display tab of the GIF Construction Set setup dialog. This will disable the search each time GIF Construction Set starts up.
• If you have access to a Windows XP installation, you can borrow Windows Paint, to be described in a moment
• You can install another Windows paint application under Wine and configure GIF Construction Set to use it whenever you click on Paint, as discussed in the GIF Construction Set Reference document in the Manual. Click on the ? button in the GIF Construction Set tool bar. Being mercenary capitalist swine, we'd suggest our e-Paint software.
  
  

To borrow Windows Paint from Windows XP:

1. Locate MSPAINT.EXE, MSPAINT.HLP and MSPAINT.CHM on your Windows system's hard drive — they can usually be found in the c:\i386 folder. Don't use the MSPAINT.EXE file in C:\windows\system32
2. Copy these files to a flash drive or a floppy, or otherwise move them to your Linux environment.
3. Turn your attention to your Linux system. Use the File Browser application to navigate to your .wine/drive_c/Program Files directory and create a subdirectory therein called Accessories.
4. Copy these three files to your Accessories directory.
   
   

You might want to borrow WORDPAD.EXE while you're doing this — it's handy for opening simple Windows DOC files.

Keep in mind that the foregoing files are part of Windows, and you should have a license for Windows to use them.

We tried this with Paint from Windows 98 as well, and it also ran under Wine.

You can install the current Alchemy Mindworks animation plugins under GIF Construction Set running under Linux... and they'll largely work, too. As you might expect, this statement comes with a few qualifiers:

• When you first open a plugin, a blank window may appear and flash for a second or two. This appears to be a Wine issue. It's harmless.
• Wine comes with a limited and slightly odd palette of fonts, and these are the only fonts that will be available to those plugins that get involved with text. You'll need to select an initial font in the Font combo boxes for these plugins before any example graphics will appear. It's a really good idea to use Winetricks, to be discussed in a moment, to install the Windows core fonts before you use any of the animation plugins.
• The 3D Effects #1 plugin, which relies on Windows' implementation of OpenGL, is a cat in a blender as of this writing — don't go there. It might get better as Wine improves.
  
  

Wine installs with just enough simulated Windows to perform the basic functions of the Windows software environment. It lacks a number of the resources that real-world Windows software likes to have available — and that includes most of the Alchemy Mindworks applications.

There's a third-party script by Dan Kegel called Winetricks that will automatically install many of the things Wine lacks, all without requiring that you search the Internet for files and then figure out where to put them in your Wine directory structure. Winetricks is only slightly more complicated to use than a toothpick, and no trees were cut down to make it.

To use Winetricks, you'll need to:

1. Download Winetricks — this is so obvious as to quite likely obviate the need to mention it, but someone would no doubt have complained if we hadn't.
2. Install cabextract, a command that Winetricks assumes is part of Wine, and which in fact is not as of this writing.
   
   

Neither of these tasks is likely to tax the mind of a liberal politician — much — and they can be performed whilst deep in a coma for the rest of us.

You'll need to open a terminal window and navigate to your .wine directory, as discussed earlier in this article, to install and run Winetricks.

The procedure for installing cabextract varies a bit, depending upon the distribution of Linux you're using. Assuming you have Fedora, Debian or one of the other distributions that's supported by the yum package installer, type:

The cabextract program will be downloaded and installed. You can download cabextract from the cabextract web page if you need to install it manually.

Winetricks is actually an elaborate shell script. To install it on your system, type:

The Winetricks script will download to your .wine directory.

You can use Winetricks either as a command line program or through its interactive user interface. The first thing you should do is run Winetricks as a command line function to install the Windows standard TrueType fonts, which will make a lot of things look nicer under Wine. Here's how to do this:

If you have a fair bit of hard drive space, you can install all the available Windows TrueType fonts like this:

Having done this, it's a really good idea to install all the available Windows media codecs as well, like this:

This involves Winetricks downloading a number of things from Microsoft's web page. Microsoft's installers will pop up windows to let you specify where their contents should be installed. Be sure to accept the default locations for all of them.

If you didn't like the look of installing msvcp60.dll by hand, as discussed earlier in this article, you might want to have Winetricks do it for you:

Here are two more useful Winetricks commands:

These install two Windows libraries that are used by a number of third-party applications, including some of our plugins.

To see everything Winetricks can do, type:

The Winetricks user interface will open. Select the objects you want to install and click on OK. It's a really good idea to make sure you understand what each of these things actually does before you install it.

You can find more about Winetricks at the Wine web page.

The following are the current Alchemy Mindworks applications and plugins, and their likelihood of getting along with Wine. This list pertains to the current releases of our software — many earlier editions were not huge fans of Wine.

The reality of running Windows software under Linux is that not everything Windows does, and hence Windows software expects, is available in the environment of Wine, or works absolutely as it does under Windows. The differences are slight, the issues are trivial... but this is more than enough reason for software to misbehave. Software lives for opportunities like this.

The foregoing represent our tests of our products under Wine, and should not be interpreted as an assurance or guarantee that they'll work for you. Please be sure to test the evaluation copies of the applications you're interested in on your Linux system before you register them.

In running Alchemy Mindworks software under Wine, it's important to keep in mind that you'll be using it in an environment for which it was not designed. Wine is a well-written Windows simulation, and its developers appear to be striving to improve it. None the less, the possibility remains that some of the functionality of our applications may not work correctly under Wine.

Unless you encounter a genuine software bug in our products, these issues pretty much always arise from a not-quite-perfect Windows-like environment, that is, Wine is still experiencing a few growing pains. For the most part, we're unable to provide assistance with Wine-related issues pertaining to our software.

We urge you to evaluate our products thoroughly if you intend to run them under Wine, and make sure that they'll do what you expect of them. Not to put too fine a point on it, if you register Alchemy Mindworks software and then decide that it doesn't get along with Wine, you're sunk.

You can always spot the pioneers... they're the ones with the arrows in their backs.