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Hi,

I work in a company that develops applications for learning languages ​​on Windows and Apple. We also need to adapt our applications (EXE) to the main Linux distributions (Ubuntu and Fedora & co). Is it possible to encapsulate the application EXE in Wine in a DVD so that the user must do nothing in addition to double click to open the application? The idea is that the user does not even have to install Wine just to put the DVD and double click on the file.

Do you have any ideas?

Thank you for your answers.

Einfachlacm wrote:user must do nothing in addition to double click to open the application

I don't believe you can do this the way you suggest, wine is a part of the OS once installed, not an application. Also a version of wine on the DVD might not be compatible with the distro running on the machine.

Seems to me you will need to script this in some way, first testing whether wine is installed and if so just running the .exe, and secondly if not installed, either prompting the user to install it or attempting to do so via the script. The latter could be tricky if you intend the script to work on multiple distros, you would need to check the distro as it would use different commands to install software, and whether there is an internet connection active?

I might be putting my foot in something bad smelling here but it occurs to me that wine is gpl (is it? last I looked) so provided the vendor supplies the source code they can distribute a binary of wine on their DVD alongside their .exe file. They can then supply a script named "Application for Linux" which provides the appropriate exec line. Just a thought.

Einfachlacm wrote:Hi,
I work in a company that develops applications for learning languages ​​on Windows and Apple. We also need to adapt our applications (EXE) to the main Linux distributions (Ubuntu and Fedora & co).

..We also need to adapt our applications (EXE) to the main Linux
Use a cross-platform development process..

• For example, wxwidgets, java

http://www.wxwidgets.org/
http://www.wxwindows.org/about/name.htm

There are also some ex-windows applications that come with wine as part of their installation, but they also install wine, so it would be visible to any user, even if the application will start itself (under the wine process)..
--I can't remember for sure, but Google skechtup or bliner might have used that method, and there would be others..
http://sketchup.google.com/
http://varatek.com/
bliner

DrHu wrote:

Einfachlacm wrote:There are also some ex-windows applications that come with wine as part of their installation, but they also install wine, so it would be visible to any user, even if the application will start itself (under the wine process)..
--I can't remember for sure, but Google skechtup or bliner might have used that method, and there would be others..
http://sketchup.google.com/
http://varatek.com/
bliner

Thanks for your answers.

This last suggestion is a good option. I thonk that Google Earth and TeamViewer do the same.

Do you know where can i get more information about it?

I believe Mono has the capability to execute some windows apps that support the .net framework without needing WINE.

I know for OSX there's an application called 'winebottler' and it packages windows exe's with the needed binaries to run on any mac...
http://winebottler.kronenberg.org/

I'm not sure if there is a linux equivalent to this, but it might be worth looking into.

rich_roast wrote:I might be putting my foot in something bad smelling here but it occurs to me that wine is gpl (is it? last I looked) so provided the vendor supplies the source code they can distribute a binary of wine on their DVD alongside their .exe file.

I don't think they need to provide the source on the DVD but it must be provided on request and with no more hoops than getting the binary. It's probably simpler to just include a source tarball though

Arcosanti wrote:I believe Mono has the capability to execute some windows apps that support the .net framework without needing WINE.

That's because the core .NET framework is largely platform-agnostic. If the OP's application was built using Windows-specific APIs (via Visual BASIC or Visual C++ for example) then it will need to use Wine. The best option is to build it cross-platform. Java makes that simpler but you can do it by developing parallel projects that are still partially platform-specific, especially if the GUI is built on a cross-platform toolkit like Qt or GTK+.