PgMDD-1.2.8: Wine out of the box

Preface

As was mentioned PgMDD entered beta-testing stage. Details have been promised. Voilà.

Crux of the matter

PgMDD-1.2.8 supports WineHQ out of the box. What mean supports?

• PgMDD always knows if it was launched under Wine or in pure Windows environment
• PgMDD offers several ways to bypass imperfect Wine functionality
• PgMDD disables the functionality which current Wine configuration cannot provide

Lets go on each item.

Imperfect functionality

Despite the fact of hh.exe (Wine’s HTML Help viewer) existence you probably will be absolutely disappointed with it’s functionality.

Because of this PgMDD will ask you about way you want to get help. You may choose on-line sources or use CHM file shipped with installation.

Step 1

Missing functionality

How can this happen? Often redistributable runtime libraries are needed to run programs in Wine. At this moment PgMDD needs MS MDAC for “MS Access Reverse Engineering” functionality. In a clean Wine package there is no MDAC installed. However, you always may do this using winetricks script. I already wrote post about winetricks using.

In current version “MS Access Reverse Engineering” functionality will be disabled till MDAC is installed. After that this functionality will be automatically enabled. (In pre-1.2.8 MDAC was required for actual installation of the Designer)

Step 2