Jade and Wine

[bdoolan]

Hi,
I'm attempting to run a (windows) Jade thin client on Linux using "Wine". "Wine" is a WINdows Emulator which runs on any Linux distro and directly interprets windows .exe and .dll files. This can be a cost-effective way of running a windows application on Linux.

Jade Thin Client running my app worked first time surprisingly well. Excellent performance and looked just like the real thing.

However, running the Jade Development Environment gave an exception on startup so I couldn't get going. It showed the splash screen, displayed the Jade version number etc but when the signon form was about to be displayed, it exceptioned. The exception was 14015 (File does not contain a image type that can be handled). The same happened with Jade Monitor, again on the signon screen.

Also, there is one form in my app which displays a jpeg (stored as a blob in the database) and I get this exception when I show this form. In the app, the exception was handled in the usual way and it continued normally. However, with the Jade Development Environment and Jade Monitor, the exception meant they never got started.

I was wondering if anyone had ever tried running Jade under Wine on Linux and had solved this problem?

Is there something I need to install to get round this problem?

Jade version was 6.2.17, though I suspect this doesn't matter too much.

Thanks in advance,
Brendan

[allistar]

Is there a reason you're not using the portable GUI (aka Portable Thin Client)? This was implemented primarily to run a Jade client on the Linux platform. There will be a document that explains this somewhere on the Jade website.

P.S. WINE stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator" as it doesn't emulate windows binaries, it provides a reimplemented version of the Windows API.

[murray]

My experience with Wine was a few (3 or 4) years back and I ran into many problems. A lot of the time I had to play around substituting original Windows DLL binaries. I was never entirely successful. No doubt Wine has been developed further, but so has Jade. My experience is that if you solve this immediate problem, another one will take its place, or else something will break later with a newer version of Wine.

As Allister suggested, the Jade Portable GUI provides good support for thin client apps on RedHat and Suse and is currently supported by Jade. JDE runs fine on Portable GUI - I have it in a CentOS VM on a 1GHz Pentium-III at home. It is based on Java and will also run on MS Windows. Be aware that the Jade Portable GUI is deprecated from Jade 6.3 onwards.

[bdoolan]

Thanks for the feedback. I had assumed that Jade Portable GUI only ran on RHEL or SUSE Linux so thought Wine was the simplest way to go. I'm doing this on an Acer 3G Netbook (so fairly low spec) and it runs Linpus. This is derived from Fedora 8 so perhaps I could give the RHEL version a go when I get some time.

Cheers, Brendan

[murray]

Jade will only support the officially specified platforms, but similar distros may work OK enough for non-critical apps. The Jade binaries are compiled against specific libraries in the target platforms, which is why you can't just run it on anything with a Linux kernel and a Bash shell.

There is a listing of the required libraries in Jade FAQ #3506. That looks like it may be a bit old now. You can still get some grief by trying to stick to this - e.g. I remember OpenSuse 10 (not officially supported) worked 98.5% but XML support failed (libexpat, I think?).