Various people have tried running Abiword on Wine in the past. I and one other person had trouble with 0.9 and 0.99: http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2001/08/0036.html http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/01/November/0005.html http://www.kegel.com/linux/winelog.html#abiword
I thought I'd see if things were working any better today, with Abiword 1.0.5 and Wine cvs (April 19, 2003). Installation on redhat 9 went perfectly -- I even got a nice desktop icon -- but when I ran Abiword, it used a dingbats font for the UI!
After I finished laughing, I ran --debugmsg +font, and saw trace:font:WineEngCreateFontInstance L"System", h=16, it=0, weight=400, PandF=22, charset=0 orient 0 escapement 0 trace:font:WineEngCreateFontInstance Chosen: L"Dingbats" L"Regular"
I'm running a vanilla Red Hat 9 installation, and I'd expect *some* system font to be a better match for System than the one Wine picked, "Dingbats". Amusingly, it looks like what's going on is that Abiword itself installs Dingbats into %WINDIR%/Fonts. Since I'm using a fake Windows, this is then the *only* font in that directory, and it's used for all matches. Heh.
OK, so I removed that one font. That lets AbiWord present a user interface (yay), but just try typing into it! Each successive line displays more or less directly on top of the previous one. This is the same failure mode I observed in my previous runs. Wine has evidently not progressed much in this area.
Guess it's time to open a bug report in the wine bug tracker (perhaps marking it as related to http://bugs.winehq.com/show_bug.cgi?id=698 ). (And ask the guy who rated AbiWord "works great" what he was smoking. Maybe he was using a real Windows installation?) - Dan