Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: wine (Page 3 of 3)

Miscellaneous packages (vlc,wine,wiipresent)

July 21, 2010 / / 12 Comments

Hi!

Just a quick message before I hit the bed,

I uploaded some Slackware packages for your consumption.

  • vlc – the new stable release 1.1.1 became available for download today and my packages are now ready to be grabbed at http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ (this UK mirror hosts the packages with export restrictions – they contain mp3 and aac audio encoders) or http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/vlc/ . Several bugs got fixed and features added. See the VLC ChangeLog for details.
  • wiipresent – this package needed a rebuild (actually the supporting libwiimote needed a rebuild) because of the updated BlueZ stack in Slackware 13.1.
    I use the wiipresent software for presentations (duh)… It allows me to use my son’s Wii controller (the wiimote) as a pointing/navigation device so that I can walk the stage comfortably.
  • wine – this was recently released in a stable 1.2 version, after lots and lots of release candidates. Please note that my wine packages will only run 32-bit Windows binaries. Even the package I created for Slackware64 ! If someone convinces me that it is worth the effort to add support for 64-bit Windows to my wine package, I will add that, but not before. Also note that wine on Slackware64 requires multilib. You could build wine on a pure 64-bit Slackware but then it would only run 64-bit Windows binaries. That is not what I chose to offer you.

I hope you enjoy these updates!

Eric

Better font rendering in Wine

December 16, 2009 / / 8 Comments

I have just bought a Sitecom Multifunctional Print Server, the LN-308. Unfortunately, this printer comes with a MS-Windows based control center application, which you need in order to configure the printserver over the local network.

As a Slackware Linux user, this fact could not defeat me, and I tried my luck with Wine. I built a Slackware package for the latest Wine (1.1.34) and indeed, this application installs and works flawlessly in Wine (on Slackware64 with multilib to be precise).

This is when I found out that the default font rendering in Wine is not as good as when the program would run natively in Windows. To fix this, you need to enable sub-pixel font rendering (font smoothing) in Wine.

You need to make some changes to the “Windows registry” which is emulated by Wine. To start the included registry editor, you either double-click it from within the Wine File Explorer (start "winefile” in an X terminal, browse to the "C:\Windows" directory and doubleclick “regedit.exe") or run it directly from the X terminal prompt with “wine c:\windows\regedit.exe".

Make the following changes to the registry to enable sub-pixel font rendering:

Browse to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop] and create/update the following “DWord” values (note: the DWord values are hexadecimal, which is the default for entering values in regedit.exe). You may have to create several of these, since by default only the “FontSmoothing” registry setting is present:


"FontSmoothing"="2"
"FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000002
"FontSmoothingGamma"=dword:00000578
"FontSmoothingOrientation"=dword:0000000

Then, restart your Wine applications and watch the difference in font rendering. The jagged edges should have disappeared. As an example, here are two screenshots from sections of winefile, before and after the registry hack. Click on the images to see the full version. Thedefault font used in winefile is quite small (6 point) but here it makes the changes in fort rendering even more obvious.

wine_no_smooth_font1

Before font smoothing

wine_smooth_font1

After applying font smoothing

Eric

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