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!

Getting Started

Cardbox comes with a “Getting Started” guide that gives you a guided tour of the program and what it does. This is an Adobe PDF file called getting.pdf. Cardbox provides the command Help > Getting Started to allow you to view this without having to navigate to the file itself. On Windows, this command works. On CrossOver Mac, this command works. On Wine on the Asus Eee, it doesn’t.

To read the Getting Started guide:

1. Go to the Work tab of the desktop and open File Manager.
2. If you can’t see a folder called “.wine“, open the View menu and turn on “Show Hidden Files”.
3. Navigate into .wine, then drive_c, then Program Files, then Cardbox 3.0.
4. You will see a file called getting.pdf. Double-click on it.

Online help

Online help doesn’t work. This is a serious problem, because Cardbox is richly provided with help. At a time when many software manufacturers were turning their help into a hurriedly reformatted version of the manuals, we have spent time and effort creating context-sensitive help for every menu item and every command window, and (especially important) for many error messages. Most of the time Cardbox is simple enough for you not to need help, but when you do need it, it is absurd to be deprived of it.

The first time you try to display online help, the system will ask you if you want to download and install the Gecko engine to display the HTML in the help. If you say No, you will have a help window that has a table of contents but no readable articles. If you say Yes, the Gecko engine will be downloaded and installed: as soon as it tries to display a help page, an error will occur. Before Build 4261 of Cardbox, the error would crash Cardbox; from Build 4261 onwards, Cardbox traps the error, tells you that you can’t view Help, and carries on working. But it is not possible for Cardbox to cure the fundamental bug that stops help pages from being displayed.

Possible cures

This blog posting details the problems that CrossOver Mac has with displaying online help. You’ll see that downloading and installing Microsoft Internet Explorer appears to install enough working DLL files to allow help to be correctly displayed.

In theory it should be possible to do something similar on Wine, but my attempts on the Asus Eee have failed. Unfortunately the hopeful-sounding ie4linux scripts tend to stop halfway through installation, and in any case the new files are installed in a separate space from the one in which Cardbox was installed, so the Cardbox environment is unaffected.

It may well be that there is a way round these problems, and I’d welcome any solutions, possibly as comments to this blog posting.

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.

Typing a command

If you open a terminal window (for instance, on the Eee, you can press Ctrl+Alt+T), the following command line will start Cardbox:

/usr/bin/wine /home/user/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Cardbox\ 3.0/cardbox3.exe

assuming that the locations into which Wine was installed are the same as they were when I tried it on my Asus Eee.

After Cardbox has finished, the terminal window may still be sitting there with a lot of Wine messages in it and not even a command prompt. You can simply close it, or if you want to do more work in that window, pressing Ctrl+C will get you a command prompt.

Integrating with the Eee simple interface

This involves some scary editing of a system file, but the end result is a simple Cardbox icon on the “Work” page of the Eee’s desktop.

Downloading the icons

First of all you need to download the following Cardbox icons. The first one will become the Cardbox icon on the desktop; the next four control the way the Cardbox icon will appear when you select it with the keyboard or mouse: there are four of them because the Eee has four different desktop modes.

Right-click on each icon in turn and tell Firefox to save it in your user directory (whose Linux name is /home/user). The exact location isn’t vital but it will be embarrassing if you save the icons and then can’t work out where they are!

Putting the icons in the right place

Now open a terminal window by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T. You will automatically find yourself in /home/user. Type the following command:

sudo cp -iv *cardbox*.png /opt/xandros/share/AsusLauncher/

This will copy the icon files to the correct directory.

Telling the system to display the Cardbox icon

Now you have the icon files in the right place, you need to tell the system to display an icon, and tell it what to do if the user clicks on the icon.

Note: when your Asus system installs a new package, it may restore its system files to the original state, in which case you will need to repeat this step in order to get your Cardbox icon back.

Right-click on this link and save the resultant text file into your user directory. Its name will be cardboxui.txt, and these instructions assume that its full name (including the user directory name) is therefore /home/user/cardboxui.txt.

Warning: you are about to edit a system file. If you get this wrong then your desktop may look a mess or not display at all. Double-check every step you take. If you have any doubts, DO NOT SAVE YOUR CHANGES: just close the terminal window.

Open a terminal window with Ctrl+Alt+T (or simply reuse one, if you already have it open) and enter the following command:

sudo nano /opt/xandros/share/AsusLauncher/simpleui.rc

Hold down Ctrl+V to scroll through the pages, until you get to the bottom of the screen. Then press the up arrow until the solid white cursor is on the “<” symbol in the line that says </simpleui> (if there is a blank line between </simpleui> and the preceding </parcel> line, you can also put the cursor there: it makes no difference).

Press Ctrl+R once. You will be asked to enter the name of a file to insert. Assuming that you have saved the text file in the right place, the filename will be:

/home/user/cardboxui.txt

Press the Enter key after typing the filename, and you should find that a new group of lines has appeared, mentioning Cardbox:

Press Ctrl+X to exit the editor. Press Y to say that yes, you do want to save the edited file. Finally press Enter to confirm the filename.

Viewing the desktop with the new icon

Shut down and restart the Eee in the usual way, and you should see a Cardbox icon on the Work page of your desktop. Clicking on the icon will start Cardbox.

(This forum entry said that you could press Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to redisplay the desktop without affecting anything else. It didn’t work for me – it just restarted the whole computer.)

1. Go to the Cardbox Client download page and click on the link that says “Cardbox 3.0 installer”. Firefox will say something like this:

• If for some reason Firefox doesn’t recognise the Windows Executable type, it will only offer you a “Save to disk” option. This seems to happen if you use versions of Wine that don’t set up Firefox properly (we came across the problem when using the latest version of Wine from Wine HQ, instead of the official one in the Debian repository). You can still install Cardbox, by saving the file to disk and then explicitly using Wine to start instcli.exe.

2. Once the file has been downloaded, Wine may warn you that it is about to start a Windows program:

If it asks you this question, say Yes.

3. Wine will start the Cardbox installer. It may also display another warning message:

This message will go away by itself after a while, or you can press Dismiss to get rid of it immediately.

4. The Cardbox installer will start.

Follow the instructions. At the end you will be asked whether to install icons on the desktop and the Start menu. With the present versions of Wine these icons never seem to appear anyway, but there is no harm in asking them to be installed: newer versions of Wine may make them visible.

5. It is now possible to run Cardbox. How to run it will be the subject of another posting, but just to encourage you here is a screenshot from the Eee.

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?

A commercial product based on Wine exists, and it’s called CrossOver Linux. Based on our experience with CrossOver Mac, CrossOver Linux is likely to be a stable, easy-to-use program; but it costs money. With a single-copy retail price of (currently) $40, it doesn’t cost much; but $40 is still money. The Eee is pitched at the sort of people who don’t buy software, the OLPC even more so. If CodeWeavers are planning to give away CrossOver Linux for the OLPC, I haven’t heard of it, so it’s worth seeing just how far one can go with Wine, which is free.

To use Wine, you have to install it. There are some excellent instructions here, which we have repeated and amplified a little on this page on the Cardbox web site.

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.

The problem lay with the TTN_SHOW notification that was sent by the tooltip to the toolbar window. The Microsoft documentation says, ambiguously, “This notification notifies the owner window that a ToolTip control is about to be displayed”.

Windows does this:

1. Prepare the tooltip window, giving it the correct size and position.
2. Send TTN_SHOW.
3. Make the tooltip window visible.

Wine does this:

1. Send TTN_SHOW.
2. Prepare the tooltip window, giving it a size and position.
3. Make the tooltip window visible.

This causes trouble for Cardbox. When Cardbox receives TTN_SHOW it asks the tooltip control for its size and position, and uses this information to decide where to put its yellow information box so that there is no interference. The bad screen display with Wine came about because the tooltip control didn’t have a size and position yet and so wasn’t taken into account when Cardbox was positioning its information box.

It was easy enough to get Cardbox to work round this (instead of handling TTN_SHOW directly, it posted a message to itself, which was processed after the tooltip had been made visible and given a size and position).

Nevertheless, this inconsistency between Wine and Windows is worth correcting in case other programs depend on the Windows behaviour. For example, Raymond Chen of Microsoft, in his Old New Thing blog, has a posting that refers to TTN_SHOW. He shows how a program can dynamically adjust the position of tooltips at the moment they are displayed. His technique can’t work if the tooltip resizes itself after TTN_SHOW has been processed, and many Windows programs are likely to be affected if Wine behaves the “wrong” (ie. non-Microsoft) way.

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”.

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.

The cause turns out to be the way that Wine handles the WS_EX_TOPMOST attribute. If a window is invisible and has WS_EX_TOPMOST, and you then make it visible, Windows displays it as a topmost window and Wine doesn’t (although WS_EX_TOPMOST remains set).

The cure is to use SetWindowPos(,HWND_TOPMOST,...) to force the window to be a topmost one after you have made it visible.

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:

Under CrossOver Mac, with no additional software installed, you will get this:

(When you try to close this window you will see that there are two identical windows with identical contents, one obscuring the other).

Under CrossOver Mac using a Win98 bottle in which Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 has been installed, you will get this:

Under CrossOver Mac using a Win2000 bottle in which Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 has been installed, you will get this:

Again there are two identical windows, one on top of the other. Quite often closing one of these windows will cause Cardbox to crash with an error reported in hhctrl.ocx, or to disappear without any message at all.

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.

Observation showed that this happened with any control that had a tooltip that popped up when the mouse was over the tooltip.It turns out that while Windows allows you to create tooltips with

CreateWindow(TOOLTIPS_CLASS,NULL,TTS_ALWAYSTIP|TTS_NOPREFIX,...

Wine requires you to use

CreateWindow(TOOLTIPS_CLASS,NULL,WS_POPUP|TTS_ALWAYSTIP|TTS_NOPREFIX,...

to prevent the tooltip from seizing the input focus.

Once this change was made, buttons behaved normally and only needed to be clicked once. Fortunately Windows does not object to the use of WS_POPUP, so there was no need for Cardbox to detect Wine and behave differently for it.

Programs such as Internet Explorer suffer from the same problem for the same reason, but of course no-one has access to Internet Explorer’s source code to make the necessary changes. Wine itself needs to be corrected.

With a one-line change we had got Cardbox working on Internet databases. Now the time had come to try it on local databases: that is, databases stored on the computer that is running Cardbox. This is worrying because it is more complex than the Internet case. With Internet databases, Cardbox communicates via TCP/IP with a remote server that is already running when Cardbox starts. With local databases, Cardbox has to launch a “hidden server” automatically and communicate with it using shared memory. This exercises many more components of Windows, including Microsoft’s dreaded COM/OLE – dreaded because it is an awkward implementation of an awkward design. You only have to look at how many versions of the OLE DLL files Microsoft have had to issue to see that even the inventor of the technology had difficulty coping with it.

We tried File > Open > My Computer, clicked on a database, and sure enough, Cardbox crashed.

Looking at the crash, we saw that a CoCreateInstance call that never fails under Windows had failed under Wine. We modified Cardbox so that it would report an error in this case, rather than crashing, and braced ourselves for the discovery that the COM/OLE implementation in basic Wine was so weak that Cardbox would never work.

That discovery never came. The bug turned out to be ours. The CoCreateInstance call is run in a separate thread, and it turned out that we had not called CoInitializeEx in that thread. For some reason Windows didn’t mind – probably because it automatically put the thread in the multi-threaded apartment, which is where we wanted it to be – but Wine (constructed independently from the Windows documentation) enforced the requirement. Putting

CoInitializeEx(NULL,COINIT_APARTMENTTHREADED);

at the start of the thread procedure and

CoUninitialize();

at the end removed the bug.

Now Cardbox could open local databases just as it could open Internet databases. It looked as if the whole thing was going to work after all.