Tech Explorer

Here at Flinders University the main calendaring / scheduling application used is Meeting Maker. My main computer here, as I’ve said before, is my laptop running Ubuntu Linux 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). Unfortunately there is no native Linux client.

Coming back from holidays today I decided to do something a little adventurous and try to run the software under Wine. For those not familiar with Wine the site says:

Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available.

What this means is you can run many Microsoft Windows applications on your Linux machine. It isn’t 100% perfect but it is used in many applications. One of the more famous is Google Picasa for Linux.

Installing Wine was very easy. I just used the Synaptic Package Manager to install it, making sure I had the Universe repositories enabled.

Installing the Meeting Maker software was as easy as downloading the installation package from the appropriate Flinders University website, extracting the files out of the zip file, and executing the following command in a terminal window. Chaning into the directory where I extracted the files first.

wine Setup.exe

So far the everything has been running really well, I can do everything I need to do in the software that I could have done under Windows. Only two small caveats.

• I needed to use the TCP option and not SSL when connecting to the Meeting Maker server. This appears to be an issue that others have experienced. It isn’t a deal breaker for me though.
• The windows of the application are a little ugly, particularly compared to native Linux applications. This also is a known issue and is an issue with Wine itself. It would appear there are plans to fix this is future releases of Wine and Ubuntu.

I can quite happily live with these two issues. The mere fact the installation and use of Windows based software under Linux was so easy was amazing in itself.