NoteTab-Linux – Kairos Computers

My analysis of NoteTab on Linux with WINE. This is a work in process.

1. NoteTab on Linux – Re: [NTO] OpenOffice Beginner

From: “Larry Hamilton” <lmh@h…>
Date: Mon Jan 5, 2004 9:09 pm
Subject: NoteTab on Linux – Re: [NTO] OpenOffice Beginner

Fay,

I dual boot Windows XP Home and Red Hat 7.2. There is a free utility called WINE that mimics a Windows environment and allows Windows programs to run.

I went back to my MailBag archives of the Clips list, from January 14, 2003, and found the last post I made on this subject. I thought I made a post on this to the NTO list, but maybe I did not, or I lost the post….

*************
Message 1:
I got NoteTab Pro working under RedHat Linux 7.2 with Wine. I found a link that made it all very clear how to make a Windows program work under Linux.

Here is one link, but is not the one I am thinking of. I got it working and meant to put something together, but there is always something going on.

http://www.la-sorciere.de/Wine-HOWTO/ch-runapps.html

Found it! Here is the link that made it all come together for me. It has how to make sure Wine is working and how to make a Windows exe work.

http://wine.dataparty.no/install.html

I have to switch to my Unix partition to find my notes. I thought I had saved them off to my Windows partition.

I will find my notes and post more.

***************

Message 2:
Here is a follow up to my previous email. Further comments will be on the Off-Topic List.

Once you get wine installed, use these steps to actually execute the program:

cd to wine directory
cd to NoteTab directory (I named the directory NoteTab, remember Unix/Linux is case sensitive.)
winelauncher Notepro.exe (this is the command line to make it work.)

None of the above is hard, but it took me a while to find the winelauncher part.
**************

HTH,

Larry Hamilton

—– Original Message —–
From: “Fay” <feigh@i…>
To: <ntb-OffTopic@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, January 05, 2004 4:55 PM
Subject: Re: [NTO] OpenOffice Beginner

> Hi Larry,
> Mmm. I’ve been away too–in the garden. Thanks for your
> informative post, the most interesting part of which is
> I have gotten NoteTab to run in Linux.
> How, please?
>
> Fay

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2. NoteTab on Linux – Re: [NTO] OpenOffice Beginner

From: “lm_hamilton” <lmh@h…>
Date: Wed Jan 7, 2004 12:57 am
Subject: NoteTab on Linux – Re: [NTO] OpenOffice Beginner

I know there is a lot of interest of using NoteTab on Linux, here are some notes I took of a little journey this evening. I hit a few rough patches, mostly of my own creation. These are rough notes, I have my process and notes, ahas, and results. There are a few things that appear not to work, but is most likely due to the older version of Red Hat Linux (7.2) and WINE that is over a year old.

I hope this is useful. If I have time (Ha!) I will play some more and share the results. This is more fun than the work I should have brought home. 😉

NOTE: I built a clip with the ^!URL command to launch Yahoo Groups in Linux to write this message online. (cool!)

Below is the text of what I intended to be a web page to post online, but did not have time to dig into doing it that way….

Test Page Done by NoteTab In RedHat Linux 7.2

When first starting NoteTab via WINE it is quite slow, but if you exit and re-start NoteTab, it is blazing fast. Since Linux does not have a problem being running all the time, this is a bonus.

It runs clips ok, but the text portion of the editor shows a blinking cursor about 20 to 50 spaces over from where it really is. This makes it hard to judge where to insert if needed. I just used the HTML clip to make this quick page. I only have NotePro 4.91, so I do not know if 4.95 would be any better.

The spell check feature works. Some clip libraries with leading
underscores do not seem to want to work. Leading ! is fine. Those with spaces in the name have a problem and will not start. Also those with underscores in the middle of the clip library name do not work. Those with leading numbers do work. Highlighting words does odd things, if only part of the word is highlighted, the non-highlighted parts appear to have spaces added where the highlight ends. It will not launch the
default browser, not sure yet how to get around this.

Good News! – I figured it out! I first off did not have a browser set up in the INI! duh! Go to View -> Options click the Internet Tab, and enter the path to the desired web browser, for example, I used “Z:\usr\local\mozilla\mozilla.” without the quotes. Since WINE mimics the Windows environment, it uses a drive letter within NoteTab, but the drive gets assigned by WINE, I believe.
The only problem I have seen is that Mozilla/Linux does not know how to handle viewing the files open in NoteTab, due to the drive letter and colon sent by WINE. The good news is that the ^!URL command can launch a web site. I imagine that any other browser in Linux would work too. Part of the problem, I discovered is that the real path of the file is: “file:///home/larry/wine/linux_notetab_test.htm”, this is
what was sent to Mozilla: “file:///Y|/wine/linux_notetab_test.htm”. I have not tried tweaking Browsers.dat, since it will not let Mozilla open two instances of the same user. I know it can open multiple tabs,
just need to figure out the settings.

Based on the Mozilla experience, one should be able to get NoteTab to launch just about any program. Since it interfaces nicely with Perl, I am curious to see if this will work. I did try to send email, but no way to tell it the default email client to use off the menu, perhaps with a clip and the ^!Email command? Lots of interesting possibilities….

I forgot to mention earlier that the HTML syntax highlighting works.

I have NotePad in a Wine directory under my user name with the NoteTab directory sturcture.

NotePro looks weird when maximized, the editor window is small and has about 2 inches of blank gray to the right and bottom, and I cannot drag to change the size of the Clip Assistant or ClipBook.
The pasteboard feature highlights the tab, but does not paste in the copied items. I changed the size of the font and the odd “feature” of the cursor being too far to the right of its actual position vanished.
I Changed it to Courier 12 Regular. WINE has built-in support for a limited number of fonts.
I also figured this out. I copied in something from another location, Linux, at least RH 7.2 does not do a directory copy in GUI like Windows, it replaces the directory and contents, rather than just add new stuff and ask about duplicates. I blew away the clip libraries and clipbars. I had to kill the process, but surprisingly is save the INI settings! Must be another Linux difference.

One problem is that I cannot get NoteTab to exit. Not sure what to do about that. I also cannot view the chm style help files. It did offer to download the hlp sytle help. Not sure yet if it will work. I read somewhere that Linux supports chm files, but I have not found what to do to make it work.

I was able to create a new OTL file, but could not add anything to it.
It must have something to do with the support of Windows controls in WINE. (Wrong again, it was the fact that I overwrote my clipbars, and it flaked out NotePro. Whe I cam back in I could create and add topics to the OTL. The first one did not save. The links work and the brackets highlight!!) The version of WINE I have is from October 31, 2002, so it has undergone a lot of improvement since. I will try updating my version of WINE and see if that helps. I did get it to paste when I clicked the clipboard paste icon on the toolbar.

I just discovered that my NoteTab commandline creation clip will
launch another instance of NoteTab within WINE! Cool!

I had not done much with NoteTab in Linux until now, but am very
pleased with the results so far. I think with a newer version of Linux and WINE, there will be much better results, but I do not have time to do that anytime soon. I find myself in a familiar position, I check into a neat new gizmo and lose track of the time…. Well Off to bed!

Larry Hamilton

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3. NoteTab Pro with wine

From: “solo_polyphony” <skarp@w…>
Date: Thu Mar 25, 2004 9:33 pm
Subject: NoteTab Pro with wine

Greetings to all. My first visit to this list, though I’ve been
using NoteTab Pro for several years now.

I’ve recently made the move from XP to Linux, and I’m trying to get NTP working under wine. I’ve installed a recent version of wine (specifically, the March 9th build) and confirmed that it’s set up correctly by running several programs (Brawny Lads Joiner, QuickPar, and a couple of other things that I just haven’t found good Linux replacements for yet). I then ran the installer for NoteTab Pro 4.95.

It seems to have installed cleanly; at least there were no error
messages during the installation. Unfortunately, when I tried to run the program, it only got as far as displaying the splash screen, and then it pops up an application error: “Exception EStringListError in module NotePro.exe at 000B25A9. List index out of bounds (0).” Clicking OK drops me back to my shell.

Can anyone make some suggestions for how I can get this working? I’m willing to fall back to an older version of NTP if it’ll help…

Thanks in advance,

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4. Re: [NTO] NoteTab Pro with wine

From: “Larry Hamilton” <lmh@h…>
Date: Sat Mar 27, 2004 7:25 pm
Subject: Re: [NTO] NoteTab Pro with wine

S.,

I have not tried running the NoteTab install. I dual boot WinXP Home and RedHat 7.2.

I just copied NoteTab to a drive I can read from Linux and then moved it to the “fake” windows folder.

I have two email messages in the archives of this list that give my experience with getting NoteTab to run under Wine. They have the subject:
“NoteTab on Linux – Re: [NTO] OpenOffice Beginner” and were posted on January 5 & 7 of 2004. The message on the 5th gives links to sources for getting Wine to work and to get a basic understanding of it. The message of the 7th give my experiences with what does and does not work with NoteTab under Linux. Most of what does not work is easy to work around.

I have not really had time to play since then, but will try to answer any questions you may have.

HTH,

Larry Hamilton

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5. Re: [NTO] NoteTab Pro with wine

From: Steven Karp <skarp@w…>
Date: Tue Mar 30, 2004 12:57 am
Subject: Re: [NTO] NoteTab Pro with wine

Larry, thanks for the thoughts.

On Saturday 27 March 2004 04:25 pm, Larry Hamilton wrote:
> I just copied NoteTab to a drive I can read from Linux and
> then moved it to the “fake” windows folder.

I tried that first, actually, and got the same crash, so then I tried the “install it first” to make sure I had the cleanest possible configuration.

> I have two email messages in the archives of this list that
> give my experience with getting NoteTab to run under Wine.
> They have the subject:

Thanks for that. I did see your first message with the links before I posted my message, and tried several of the suggestions with no success. I’ll hunt up the second message and see if perhaps one of the things that you found not to work is trying to happen when I launch NoteTab.

> I have not really had time to play since then, but will try to
> answer any questions you may have.

Greatly appreciated. Perhaps you (or someone else) knows what actions NTP takes when launched. Since my crash is happening *after* it displays the splash page, but *before* the main window is displayed, if I knew what NTP was trying to do there, I might be able to short-circuit it. <grin>

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6. Ha! Success! (NotePro with wine on Linux)

From: Steven Karp <skarp@w…>
Date: Tue Mar 30, 2004 11:19 pm
Subject: Ha! Success! (NotePro with wine on Linux)

Problem solved!

I’m not sure *why* the fix works, but I’m satisfied (at least for the moment) because it *is* working.

The problem seems to have originated in how the wine configuration defines the Windows temp directory. My original configuration (the one that wine created) defined a Windows drive that pointed to my Linux /tmp directory:

[Drive F]
“Path” = “/tmp”
“Type” = “hd”
“Label” = “Tmp Drive”
“Filesystem” = “win95”

This was then defined as the location of Temp:
“Temp” = “f:\\”

For some reason, this totally fails to work — at least for me. <grin>

I simply created a directory called “Temp” in the Windows directory (~/.wine/fake_windows/Windows/Temp) and then changed the config file to use that for Temp:
“Temp” = “c:\\Windows\\Temp”

Ha! Take that, vile software! <laughter>

So, having solved that problem, on to the next:

I had to rename my Libraries directory to something else and create an empty Libraries directory, because otherwise I cannot close the active Library at the left side. Clicking it on the Library bar closes it for a couple of seconds and then it pops right back open. Any thoughts on how I can make the Librarys go away when I don’t need them, but still have access to them?

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7. Re: [NTO] Ha! Success! (NotePro with wine on Linux)

From: “Larry Hamilton” <lmh@h…>
Date: Wed Mar 31, 2004 9:53 pm
Subject: Re: [NTO] Ha! Success! (NotePro with wine on Linux)

Steven,

Glad you found a fix. I too vagly recall something with these settings.

For the libraries, I had some sort of issue, I think I made note of it in my detailed post in January. I have not had a chance to look at it. The biggest thing I found was for ligrary names that started with an underscore or any other non-alphanumeric character would not let me click the library tab at the bottom, and maybe change in the clipbar too.

For some reason, I cannot get RedHat 7.2 to work with newer versions of Wine. I have been too afraid of messing up my Windows partition to update to a newer version of RedHat. I am also a little miffed that RedHat dropped their support (another reason I have not upgraded to a newer version). I paid good money for a boxed set so I could get printed manuals…. Oh well, I guess they don’t want any more of my money….

I do not know what version to go to. I have not had time to really weigh my options.

I did get a copy of Knoppix and burn a CD, only had time for a quick test on an old PC at work to make sure the CD works. I may play with that next week.
I have a week off for the kid’s spring break. Plans changed, so we are staying home. If the honey-dos don’t take all my time….

Larry Hamilton

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8. Re: [NTO] Ha! Success! (NotePro with wine on Linux)

From: Steven Karp <skarp@w…>
Date: Fri Apr 2, 2004 9:37 pm
Subject: Re: [NTO] Ha! Success! (NotePro with wine on Linux)

On Wednesday 31 March 2004 06:53 pm, you wrote:
> For the libraries, I had some sort of issue, I think I made
> note of it in my detailed post in January. I have not had a
> chance to look at it. The biggest thing I found was for
> library names that started with an underscore or any other non-> alphanumeric character would not let me click the library
> tab at the bottom, and maybe change in the clipbar too.

That doesn’t seem to be an issue for me, since all of my libraries seem to start with letters. <grin> I did figure out the if I right-click the library panel and choose “Hide” it goes away, at least until I exit NotePro and restart it. That’s close enough to get by, anyway.

> For some reason, I cannot get RedHat 7.2 to work with newer
> versions of Wine. I have been too afraid of messing up my
> Windows partition to update to a newer version of RedHat. I am
> also a little miffed that RedHat dropped

Interesting. I wonder why that would be. As far as the upgrading RH goes, I strongly recommend getting a full-disk image backup program (I use Acronis TrueImage) and a second hard drive (in my case, I backup over the network to a second machine, but Acronis will support most USB, Firewire, or PCMCIA drives, as well as internal drives. The advantage is that if an install goes astray and you wipe out your Windows partition (or any other partition, for that matter) you can immediately restore it and get yourself right back where you were. It’s saved my rear end several times, usually when I did something stupid like install an OS to the wrong partition.

> I do not know what version to go to. I have not had time to
> really weigh my options.

I’ve heard good things about Fedora Core, which is supposedly the best Red Hat derivative, so it should be a fairly easy transition. Personally, I’ve used Xandros, SuSE, and Gentoo, and they all have good and bad points. If you’re comfortable with Gnome, though, I’d suggest that you stick with distributions
that use Gnome, rather than trying to make the switch to KDE or another window manager.

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9. Re: [NTO] NoteTab Light w/Wine

From: “Ed Brown” <ebrown27@b…>
Date: Mon Apr 19, 2004 10:49 am
Subject: Re: [NTO] NoteTab Light w/Wine

ADVERTISEMENT
I upgraded to the latest version of WINE which is a beta version still, then when using Mandrake 10.0 it works great, at least on everythng that I have tried. You might want to try the beta version of WINE. See http://www.winehq.com/ on top left side page.
Ed
—– Original Message —–
From: “Jim Lawrence” <scitizen2003@y…>
To: <ntb-OffTopic@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, April 19, 2004 6:52 AM
Subject: [NTO] NoteTab Light w/Wine

Running Lindows 4.0 (Debian linux) w/Wine but cannot
get NoteTab Light to work. Any help will be appreciated.
Jim

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10. Re: [NTO] NoteTab Light w/Wine

From: “Larry Hamilton” <lmh@h…>
Date: Mon Apr 19, 2004 9:05 pm
Subject: Re: [NTO] NoteTab Light w/Wine

ADVERTISEMENT
I sent a post about some more recent success with WINE using RedHat 8, but I do not see it in my inbox and don’t have time to locate it online.

I have not tried the beta version of WINE, but the newer version I am using does run much better. I am using NoteTab Pro. I have not yet tried NoteTab Standard or NoteTab Light.

I did find an older utility that makes it easier to configure the WINE configuration file from scratch. That is the trickiest part. I found it on Sourseford and it is called something like winesetuptk. It is a GUI that walks you through setting up the WINE config file. It is old and will eventually be discontinued, but it works.

Perhaps Ed can tell us if the WINE beta has a simple configuration
editor/creator?

Larry Hamilton

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11. Wine

Wine requires that you have a file called usr/local/etc/wine.conf
(you can supply a different filename when configuring wine)
or a file called .winerc in your home directory.
The format of this file is explained in the wine.conf man page
(http://www.winehq.com/wine-conf-man.html). The file wine.ini
(http://www.winehq.com/source/wine.ini) contains a config file example.
More explicit directions can be found in the README file
(http://www.winehq.com/source/README) that will be located
in the base Wine directory after you gunzip and untar the distribution file.

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12. Re: NoteTab on Linux WAS – Re: [NTO] I’m back

To: ntb-OffTopic@yahoogroups.com
From: Jody <kjv@…>
Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 08:58:57 -0600
Subject: Re: NoteTab on Linux WAS – Re: [NTO] I’m back

Hi Larry,

Thanks for posting this Larry! How does NoteTab Clip Code fair on
Linux and what are the best versions to use in your opinion for
it. I heard Wine (which my understanding is that it can run on
the different versions of Linux) runs it fairly well, but you
mentioned other main version types before. My main curiosity is
the Clip Code.

>>I finally got my NoteTab notes moved to my new website. It is not
>>yet linked from the main page, since it still needs some clean
>>up.
>>
>>I also have my Linux notes for NoteTab and the various email
>>threads involved. This ought to help. It will be even better when
>>I can put together a step by step guide.
>>
>>Until then, here it is: http://kairoscomputers.com/notetab/
>>
>>HTH,
>>
>>Larry Hamilton
>>Kairos Computer Solutions
>>http://www.kairoscomputers.com/
>>Sales Affiliate for Grisoft Anti-Virus
>Jody wrote:
>
>>>> Hi Randy,
>>>>
>>
>>>>>>I was wondering if maybe porting NoteTab to Linux and/or Mac will
>>>>>>happen someday? I’m guessing the answer is “not really” because
>>>>>>those OSs have their environments and NoteTab has its own
>>>>>>environment in Windows. Am I far off?
>>
>>>>
>>>> Like Don mentioned (for Linux), it has been discussed in depth on
>>>> this list. There are others, but Larry Hamilton appeared to have
>>>> a fairly exhaustive post on it at one time on this list. We do
>>>> not have any plans to support MAC computers. We have heard our
>>>> programs can be run on a MAC using programs like Virtual PC.

Thanks!
Jody

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13. Re: NoteTab on Linux WAS – Re: [NTO] I’m back

To: ntb-OffTopic@yahoogroups.com
From: “Larry Hamilton” <lmh@h…>
Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 12:58:12 -0500
Subject: Re: NoteTab on Linux WAS – Re: [NTO] I’m back

Jody,

My second note in the FAQ page I built has my detailed notes from
January 7, 2004. That was using Red Hat 7.2 and the version of Wine from
October, 2002.

I have not done a lot with Linux lately, but it is on my list….

A short synopsis from those notes:

Clips work, even one to launch another copy of NoteTab.

Clip Libraries have problems if their names have leading underscores, or
any underscores in their names.

If you set up the browsers.dat, it will launch the defined browsers.

HTML highlighting works, I do not see a note about clip code syntax
highlighting, but as I recall that it works.

Outlines work too.

Up to the present follows:

I now have Red Hat Fedora Core 3, and close to the newest version of
WINE. I have been too busy on some special projects that I do not have
time to figure out what I need to do to make the things that did not
work in Red Hat 7.2 work in Fedora Core 3. I do know that the newer
versions of Linux and the newer versions of WINE, just get better, and
easier to use.

I did try to get Linux Perl to work with NoteTab, but that did not work.
I did not try to get the Windows version of Perl to work. That just
seems wrong. 😉 I did not have a lot of time when I tried, so the
problem may have been lack of time to figure it out. I like this puzzle,
so I will be coming back to it.

I also like that WINE is free. I know that for about $100.00 you can buy
commercial products that allow you to run the whole Windows Operating
System on Linux. I would rather spend the $100.00 towards a new PC, so
the wife and kids can have the old one. 😉

I am also limited because Fedore Core 3 takes up so much more space than
Red Hat 7.2, that my Linux partition is full. I converted it to EXT3,
which my version of Partition Magic does not recognize, so I cannot
increase it. Messing with partitions is one thing I do not feel
comfortable with on my main PC without a GUI. I also do not want to
spend money on a new partition manager, when the one I have works fine
and I have plenty of disk space.

I need to take the plunge and do a clean install on a larger partition,
but I cannot do this until I have time to fix it if someting goes wrong.
I have a partition that has plenty of room, but everytime I mess with
even an update to the Linux Kernel, it changes my bootloader options and
I have to go edit it manually. I am not quite ready to have the default
boot option be Linux. My wife is not up to change on the computer, I
need to find that Windows XP emulator 😉 . But if I can get all of my
favorite software to work the way I want it on Linux, then I will make
the switch for sure.

I do have an old clunker with Red Hat 8 only, so I will try and update
it. Fedora Core 3 has an “easy” install, but you still need to do a lot
of tweaking to get it right, especially with a dual boot. I have also
read that updates of existing Linux installs are tricky. I know this is
true from my own update from Red Hat 7.2, to Red Hat 8, to Fedora Core 3.

I need to make my data partition separate from the rest, so I can do an
update without messing up my data on Linux. None of this is hard, just
keep in mind all the planning needed to minimize the hassles when you
get ready to take the plunge.

I think I did get NoteTab to work in Wine using Knoppix. I will check
into this too. I recommend getting a Knoppix boot CD to test your system
to see if it can run Linux before taking the plunge. It can also let you
play with all the things that come on most Linux distributions. It even
lets you save your settings. I really like it, since it can be used as a
rescue CD for messed up hard drives.

HTH,

Larry Hamilton
Kairos Computer Solutions
http://www.kairoscomputers.com/
Sales Affiliate for Grisoft Anti-Virus

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