Hi again,
Now that all my 'issues' about installing Wine 20050930 are resolved, I'm running a clean install like a completely new user and taking notes so I can document what *real* new users might get confused by, and what they need to do (as such a long-term Wine user myself, there are a lot of things that used to need to be done that are no longer needed, and things that now need to be done that didn't need to before) to get the Wine base system running optimally.
(So far, Wine is doing quite well, btw-- I've only run winecfg and set up my drives, but the several sub-operations that I know needed to occur, such as creating the .wine directory, and correctly symlinking within dosdevices all did occur correctly, which is quite nice).
The thing is, there's a question on wine-users as to how to configure parallel ports in the absence of the config file. Since I was running winecfg, I looked, and I don't see any configuration possible for parallel (or serial, since that might also be needed) ports. I myself don't use my ports, nor do I use any programs that need to connect to said ports, so I can't confirm that they would be automatically detected and configured (although I would imagine/deeply hope that they are, if the ports are properly set up on the system as a whole).
However, naturally this user is not the only one who's going to want to know if they have to edit system.reg or something to configure their ports, and I certainly don't want to guess or assume in the docs. There's not even any 'status' output in winecfg, saying that there are parallel ports or serial ports detected and where, so how can a user verify said ports, and what must they do to change the port configuration if necessary?
This is probably also a valid question for external MIDI ports, which are important to the audio community (which seems to need Windows apps since the native pro sound apps are not yet quite up to par).
Any further information appreciated.
Holly