wine users - Feb 2011 - Forward-Compatibility with Ubuntu 11.04 (10.10 Netbook) plus

After testing some wine apps on Ubuntu 11.04 A2 today, and using 10.10 NE in
previous weeks, I've notice a few issues that may hinder the use of Wine on
this OS. These are mostly aesthetic and ease of use, but are worth noting in any
case.

1: Removal of Notification Area/System Tray
For those who aren't aware, 11.04 and 10.10N used the new Unity interface,
instead of the legacy GNOME GUI. In terms of functionality, this means that the
Notification Area has been removed, and so the normal Wine Dock has been
undocked. This creates a floating "Wine System Tray" window,
containing the notification icons from the normal systray.

As it's now a normal window, it can be hidden beneath the (potential) dozens
of windows that one has open, and means it might be difficult to sort out a
misbehaving Wine App.

2: Running Multiple Wine Apps in Unity - Visibility
The main feature of the new interface is the left-hand sidebar, containing some
pinned launchers, and all currently open applications, with all of one
application's windows compiled into a single link.

At a first thought this doesn't pose a problem, but on closer observation,
all Wine apps are shown with a (rather attractive, don't get me wrong) Wine
icon on the bar. This means it's not possible to identify (even by hovering
over, which returns the label "Wine") what the Wine app open is,
without scrolling through the windows. If I were running MS Word, Powerpoint and
Excel at the same time, with Spotify and Firefox all under Wine, I'd have
those 5 windows (or more, depending on number of instances), plus the Systray,
all under the same icon on the sidebar, making it impossible to navigate to
which program is needed, without scrolling through them all.

Finally, even if these programs WERE separated, they'd all have the Wine
icon, so the ability to tell what the programs are is STILL not there.

I hope that Wine can solve these issues... and that any other issues are
noted... before the release of Natty in Apr-11.

-A-

Both problems sounds like bugs in new distro and not Wine.

1. Removing doc area beaks Xorg standards - file bug with ubuntu.
2. Wine not showing application icon - same, bug in your WM. Wine properly sets
it's application icons, not Wine's default icon.

On 02/13/2011 04:12 PM, ATMarsden wrote:
> I hope that Wine can solve these issues... and that any other issues are
noted... before the release of Natty in Apr-11.
I hope this doesn't sound rude because I do not mean it that way, I'm 
honestly asking - wouldn't this be something for Ubuntu to fix, not 
Wine? Wine works fine, it seems to be UI changes Ubuntu has made that 
cause the problem so they would need to either fix that in Unity or make 
a custom build of Wine available in their repositories that ties into 
their UI. Wouldn't changes to Wine to accomidate Ubuntu's layout 
potentially mess things up for every non-Unity distro?

Excellent find.  Please file a bug at http://bugs.ubuntu.com for this,
and post a link to the bug here.
Thanks!

leeyn wishful thinking.

Wine follows standards because long term they are sane.   If ubuntu wants to
take a non standard path so be it.

Remember people have yelled a wine to include a pulseaudio driver.  Has it
happened no.  Will it happen no.   Pulse audio need to fix there alsa emulation
end of argument.

If Ubuntu wants to be wine incompatible so be it.