Has anyone here tried running BeoPlayer in Linux, using a Windows emulator, such as Wine? I'm looking for any helpful hints before I try it for myself... I'm told that Wine configuration can be tricky.

Mark

Wine is pretty good nowadays as long as the programs to be run / devices to be installed don't need any too intimate drivers or don't do something funky with the user interface.

Actually, I was just upgrading my Win/Linux dual boot home machine from Ubuntu 9.04 to the oven fresh 9.10, so I gave it a try. BeoPlayer installer runs through seemingly without problems, although it complains about Media Player 9.0 not being available, so it will miss most of the sources. This will be a problem I guess, I have no idea if MP9 would work if you managed to install it...

BP didn't show up in Wine menu so I navigated to the install directory. I randomly tried to start most of the .exe files (keep in mind that I have never even seen this thing working, I have only Win2000 at home and BP won't install on that). Some of the programs complained that BP is not registered and will not run.

Anyway, I got the B&O icon on the fake Wine tray in the Gnome panel. Clicking it didn't seemingly do anything. All the relevant processes seem to be there, though, so it is possible that BeoPlayer actually was running, only that it couldn't display the user interface. Perhaps that could be worked around with running Wine in some non-window-managed mode, I think it used to have one years ago (meaning it reserved a complete X screen for the Wine desktop - current default scheme just opens an application window, managed by the Linux window manager).

At this point I lost interest, since I don't have any useful digital music anyway If you have more persistence, go ahead and try it - it might be something simple after all.

I guess you could install some real virtual machine provider (like VMWare), run a complete Windows instance under that and install Beoplayer there. It shouldn't be able to know the difference. I just don't know what happens with the pesky Windows activation scheme, if you don't want to run a pirate copy that doesn't care about that...

Thank you for your thoughts. Seems like it's worth trying... but I won't bet any money on it! I'll report on how it goes.

Mark

I had a little more time to play with this. The Windows Media Player part was actually easy - there's a nice script that will allow you to just tick certain Windows redistributable packages, automatically download them (without the annoyance of wading through the Microsoft or any other website) and install them in Wine. Run in a terminal

wget http://kegel.com/wine/winetricks
sh winetricks

...and just install wmp10. The darn thing works!

Beoplayer will need a number of other packages. Dunno exactly which, but I installed .NET 1.0 and the msvcrt* libraries, then ran the setup. It went through without a glitch this time. It installs the tray application to start with Windows, so it will appear once you start any Wine application or run wineboot.

However, when you try to start parts of Beoplayer either through the tray icon or separately, they once again refuse to run since "Beoplayer is not registered". Configuration applet works, though. Highly annoying - if that stupid forced registration part was ditched from the application, it might actually work

Oh dear! I tried installing WMP 10 by the normal method... it partially installed, and although I've removed it, it must have left some droppings somewhere. :(

Mark

Not a disaster - unless you have tweaked something yourself, the complete Wine environment of your user account is contained in the ~/.wine directory. If you just rename that and start over, you will get a clean new .wine created the next time you run a Windows application.

You can use this for manual "checkpoints" as well - before doing something uncertain, make a copy of .wine (including all the contents). If something goes wrong, just remove .wine and copy it from the backup.

In both cases, you should first kill all wine related processes you may still have running.

Thank you, I hadn't come across winetricks. Much easier.

The BeoPort installation now does the file install, followed by:

  "An error occurred during USB driver setup"

I'm clearly going to have to read up on wine, since I need to understand how to configure it.

Mark

Ah! .NET1.1 did not install properly. Maybe I need to wait until I get Ubuntu upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10.

Mark