On Mon, 2003-08-11 at 16:28, Bill Bennett wrote: > It all began when I was quoted $1200 for a copy of CorelDraw9 for > Linux. > > I alreadt have a copy of CorelDraw9. For Windows.
> So someone suggested that I use the CorelDraw for Windows using > a Windows emulator. So, you've got a few options. You can use a virtual machine to actually run windows in a window on your desktop, or you can use something like wine. I think wine is awesome so I'll babble about it for a moment :) So, wine is an implementation of the windows APIs and libraries and various other "bits" (thus named c/o my ignorance of windows internals). It was initially intended as a tool for porting windows apps to linux. Since then a few magic pieces of code were added so you can run (some) windows software on linux unmodified. The problem with all this is that Wine is an *incomplete* implementation of the APIs in question. The wine guys are working on it (and they're ninjas), but for now you will probably have to use some "real" dlls to make stuff work usefully. In particular Microsoft's DCOM98 is always handy to have lying around (and it's a free download from Microsoft's website). The status page on appdb is inconclusive. My feeling is that it can probably be coerced to work (since Corel themselves used wine for their linux port), but it sounds like you'll run into trouble with the installer (though there were some MSI patches authored recently. I'd expect this to change). If I were you I would proceed by installing windows 98 inside bochs (which is surprisingly easy these days), then install coreldraw inside that. Then use mcopy to copy the entire drive into a directory on linux somewhere. From here you're looking at a bit of experimentation, but pointing wine at that directory as your C drive would be a good place to start, since it means all the DLLs coreldraw needs should be available to it (and fonts and gadgets). The status page also suggests that the version of wine that shipped with photopaint for linux (and apparently you can download a demo of it for free) will work. It might be that Corel have done a similar thing here and it's just a case of finding the demo version on corel's web site and pulling the version of wine out of it. It can all get a bit nasty but I enjoy tinkering with this stuff. I guess it depends how much of your time is worth $1200. Also, I discovered today that the RedHat RPM packages for wine leave a little to be desired. http://newrpms.sunsite.dk/ has packages for RedHat 9.0 that are newer and more complete than the RedHat ones. There are packages for RH8 there, but they are untested. The other question which I'd be interested to hear feedback on -- are there any open source tools which can do what you need? Things looked kinda bleak last time I played with this stuff unfortunately. HTH James. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
