Hi, In order to research the feasibility of moving onto *nix based systems I am currently testing Windows-only applications under WINE 1.1.8 on Mandriva Free 2009. The application I am currently testing is Raxco's DameWare NT Utilities (including DameWare Mini Remote Control), latest version as available after registering. I have found that there is an AppDB entry for DameWare stating that the last few versions are 'Garbage', yet no specific testing results were posted other than comments along the lines of 'Won't start, so nothing else tested' which was rather poor and disappointing. For this disappearing problem exists a part-way solution; see below. As stated I have available to me WINE 1.1.8, highest version taken from the online repositories of Mandriva at the time of writing. I found that I was required to have an EXE installer in order to make WINE start the installation process, MSI files appear unsupported and throw an unrecognized format error. After completing the installation with the EXE installer format I was able to launch DNTU.exe (main program executable) and was briefly greeted with the program's display before it promptly disappeared again. A short run through Google revealed that placing the following 4 files into "~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32" copied from a native Windows XP Professional machine would resolve the disappearing program issue: activeeds.dll activeeds.tlb adsldpc.dll wldap32.dll So now I can roam around inside the application. However there is another issue, it complains there is no network, and thus the usability of the program is reduced to nothing, being a network tool. I noticed that after a few attempts to connect to the network, DameWare NT Utilities will do the disappearing act again, and one has to restart it to continue. I must note that DameWare also possesses a tendency to crash on native Windows machines if left to run for a day or more (forgetting to shut off your workstation past DHCP lease time will do it, for example, or re-plugging the network cable after some time), so you could take that with a grain of salt perhaps, but it is more easily reproduced under WINE. Looking further, I find this: http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-0344b4325219c69636aeffeaa3596d6855283afd Which tells me to edit /etc/hosts if hostname -i reports back addresses starting with '127'. This brings up another problem, the network uses DHCP with 3 day leases. It would then be pointless to add the host's IP address to /etc/hosts as it will be automatically renewed 3 days later, breaking the edit and possibly causing IP assignment conflicts followed by name resolution errors. How would one solve this? Setting the host to static addressing is not an option.
