wine users - Jun 2009 - Re: Usage of "wine" s/w to open a windows based applic

Currently, the best way to test if an application in Wine is by trying it. This
can always be done by choosing to "open" the exe file with Wine in
your file manager of choice, or by opening a terminal, cd'ing to the
directory where the exe is, and running this command:

wine appname.exe

If the application is run through a file manager, one loses the ability to see
if the application crashes spectaculary or not (well, sometimes a Wine
"crash" window will open, but not always). Running the application in
the terminal will also provide you with any output that you can send to
bugs.winehq.org if the application does not run in the end. This will help the
Wine developers fix the bug at some point in time.

Another important note is that Wine can not usually handle special external
hardware directly (I can imagine plenty of scientific devices that communicate
directly with special scientific software); if any of the applications use such
devices they will probably not work in Wine. A workaround could be available if
the device itself is detected correctly by the Linux distribution, but this kind
of thing falls outside my own area of knowledge.

I hope that you get the application running without any problems. :)

There's the Desktop Zoom/Magnifier plugins for Compiz. Also ,at least on
Ubuntu(shameless plug), ships with Orca and gnome magnifier. I'm sure
there's lots more resources available then what I mentioned on the Linux
side , unless I'm totally missing what you're asking. :^)