Ability Office has a Linux version done with winelib, but I wanted to go whole hog and run the Windows version using wine 0.9.3. There were a few issues along the way. I started by downloading their normal Windows setup program: wget http://www.ability.com/download4/ability4_14/setup.exe wine setup.exe This failed with fixme:urlmon:URLDownloadToCacheFileW ((nil) L"http://www.abilitydownload.com/download4/ability4_14/Ability.MSI" 0x7bc80a88 520 0 0x7b91fb00)
Evidently setup.exe is just a little thing that downloads the real thing from their web site, but that doesn't work in Wine yet.
So I followed their alternate download procedure: wget http://www.abilitydownload.com/download4/zip/ability4_14.zip unzip ability4_14.zip wine Ability.MSI This failed because Wine doesn't know enough to run msiexec when you do this :-( But running msiexec by hand works: msiexec Ability.MSI I could then run ability write and create documents. Visually, things looked pretty good. Performance-wise, though, it really couldn't keep up with my typing, and took waaaay too long to start up. This is on a 2GHz system with lots of RAM, so it's kind of inexcusable.
Gotta go be a dad now, but thought this little bit of data would be interesting to somebody.
-- Wine for Windows ISVs: http://kegel.com/wine/isv