Ken Larson wrote:
I'm using wine to access a particular proprietary DLL (I don't have
the source for it) on Linux. The way I'm doing this is to write an
EXE that wraps the DLL, and makes all of the functions available via
socket request and response messages. My linux program has access to
the functions of the DLL by sending socket messages to the EXE running
under wine. 2 questions:
1. My DLL/EXE uses no calls to pop up graphical windows, so
theoretically no display is needed. Of course wine needs a display
because it does not know that an EXE won't make such calls. Is there
a way to run wine with a null or dummy display - so that it is
effectively running headless?
2. The sockets trick was the simplest way I could figure out how to do
IPC between a linux process and a wine process. However, is there are
any better or faster way to do this? As far as I know I can't use
winelib because I don't have the source to the DLL.
Thanks,
Ken Larson
If your program is a console-only app, it can run without an X server.
For example, the command "regedit /?" works without defining a DISPLAY
variable, even in a text console. If you write interesting information
to a logfile instead of the screen, you could even do "wine wrapper.exe
&" on the shell and put your app in the background.
About winelib, you could try making a winelib app that loads the DLL
dynamically. But this would only work for a true DLL (for example
"propietary.dll") on which you can call LoadLibrary(). If your library
is a static one such as "propietary.lib", with no companion DLL file to
load, then all the interesting code is in the LIB file itself and cannot
be loaded dynamically.
About faster communication, you could try running the Linux app, which
would fork(). One process runs your GUI or sets up your service, and the
other could then exec() the winelib wrapper. Before the fork, you should
set up a pair of pipes, or use socketpair() for communication. If you
are careful, this can even work for a pure Windows app linked with a
static LIB file, by connecting your pipe/socket to the stdin/stdout of
the wine process (see the manpage on dup2() for details).
Hope this helps.
Alex Villacís Lasso
