Cardbox on the Eee: 4 – what doesn’t work

You have installed Cardbox on Wine on the Asus Eee, and you have set things up so that you can start Cardbox.

This means that you can create your own databases, edit and search them, and access databases on Cardbox servers on the Internet (or on a local LAN server).

Despite this, not everything works. The problems come from the partial nature of Wine’s implementation of some Windows functions.

We would welcome your help with this. Would downloading or installing additional software make a difference? Are there changes to the configuration that will make Cardbox work better?

We are giving away the Cardbox Home Edition licence on the Asus Eee because we want every Eee user to have the benefit and enjoyment of having Cardbox available. Help us to make this happen!

Cardbox on the Eee: 3 – starting Cardbox

When you have installed Cardbox on Wine,  there seems to be no easy way of finding the program so that you can actually use it. Here are some suggestions; but if anyone has a better way of integrating a Cardbox launch into the Linux user interface, please let me know! CrossOver Linux does it perfectly, and whatever CrossOver can do, Wine should be able to do too.

You can type a command to start Cardbox, or you can put a Cardbox icon on the Eee desktop so that you can start Cardbox with a single mouse click.

Cardbox on the Eee: 2 – installing Cardbox on Wine

These instructions assume that you have already installed Wine. Although we talk about the Eee and use screenshots from the Eee, the installation should work the same way on most systems with Wine.

Cardbox on the Eee: 1 – installing Wine

The Asus Eee is a very small, very cheap laptop that runs Linux. It makes a good testbed for software strategies involving cheap mass-computing devices such as the One Laptop Per Child.

Cardbox is a Windows program, and Linux is not Windows. Wine is meant to let Windows programs run on Linux: can it bridge this gap?

Programming note: tooltips again

This posting is of historical interest. It exists to help other programmers who may come across a similar problem.

When you move your mouse over a toolbar button, a small tooltip pops up to tell you what the button does. If the button is disabled then Cardbox also shows a yellow box next to the button, telling you why it’s disabled, in the same way that it does with disabled menu items.

On Windows, the tooltip and the yellow box are adjacent, so that you can read them both. On Wine, the tooltip was in the same place as the yellow box and obscuring part of it.

Cardbox on the Macintosh

We have just added a new section on running Cardbox on the Mac to the Knowledge Base page. This explains the alternatives and gives detailed instructions for installation and use with CrossOver Mac.

CrossOver Mac has turned out to be a very stable and professional package: to continue the metaphor, it could be described as “like Wine, but drinkable”.

Programming note: WS_EX_TOPMOST

This posting is of historical interest. It exists to help other programmers who may come across a similar problem.

When you move your mouse over a disabled (grey) menu item, Cardbox tells you why it’s disabled:

On CrossOver Mac, the yellow explanatory window hid behind the main Cardbox window and couldn’t be seen.

Bugs: viewing online help

Windows Help behaves inconsistently in different configurations of CrossOver Mac.

To reproduce these bugs, open any Cardbox database and do Search > Select. When the search box has opened, press F1 (or fn+F1) to open the online help.

Under Windows you will get this:

Programming note: tooltips

This posting is of historical interest. It exists to help other programmers who may come across the same problem.

Once Cardbox was working under Wine, we found something very awkward about using it. Whenever you moved the mouse onto a button, intending to click it, Cardbox would lose the input focus and you would have to click the mouse twice: once to get the focus back to Cardbox and once to click the button.

Programming note: CoInitializeEx

This posting is of historical interest. It exists to help other programmers who may come across a similar problem.