Print Wizard on Wine (was Re: USPS Intelligent Mail barcode packing function?)

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Brian K. White wrote:

> ... 
> I think it's at least worth a shot seeing if printwizard can work this way, 
> since I too reject relying on  any pc or win box as a necessary part of "the 
> system" other than as the end user client, and I don't like requiring any 
> special setup there even. But, printwizard sure would be nice some times...
> I think I'll try this out just to see what happens. There's other options 
> too like putting a reactos image in a qemu or xen or vmware. I say reactos 
> instead of windows and image instead of install because the end result needs 
> to be solid, which imo is not possible, or quickly reproduceable to make up 
> for the fact that it can't be counted on to stay good.

In general we have had (and heard) good success in running our software 
under Wine, although we don't explicitly support it that way. It has been 
a while since we looked at this solution.

The key question, I think, would be the level of printer support available 
under Wine. Unix/Linux in general has very limited printer support 
compared to what Windows provides, and Windows' support for particular 
printers is dependent on drivers provided by the printer manufacturer. 
This is all necessary to provide good device independence, and PW relies 
very heavily on the quality of these drivers. I don't know at this point 
how much of that has been emulated by Wine.

We DID experiment a while ago with Merge Pro on SCO 6. This is a virtual 
machine in SCO into which you can install a Windows system, including 
printer drivers. It proved very robust. The same company has a product for 
Linux called, I believe, Win4Lin.

For what it's worth...

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

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