Linux/Windows app connection, how?

[Joshua Scholar]

I really want to have some way to communicate between a Linux program and 
a Windows program running under WINE.  The connection doesn't need to be 
high speed, a stream is fine - I'm just sending some unicode text.  I'm 
writing both programs myself, so I can implement this in the easiest way, 
though if there was some way to create and call a Windows COM object from 
Linux, that would be the most direct solution...

But reading what I can about WINE, I'm guessing that the only easy thing 
to do is to write a Windows server application with winegcc and either 
connect to it through a socket - or to have it spawn a Linux application 
that it has a stream to.  But I need some sample code to know how to do 
this, since I don't have too much time to experiment.

Just to make it clear why I'm doing this - I have some wonderful TTS 
voices (Neospeech's SAPI5 Japanese voices) installed in WINE and I need 
to be able to invoke them from a Linux program.

Thanks in advance for any pointers,

Joshua Scholar

[Maarten Lankhorst]

Hello Joshua,

Joshua Scholar schreef:
> I really want to have some way to communicate between a Linux program and 
> a Windows program running under WINE.  The connection doesn't need to be 
> high speed, a stream is fine - I'm just sending some unicode text.  I'm 
> writing both programs myself, so I can implement this in the easiest way, 
> though if there was some way to create and call a Windows COM object from 
> Linux, that would be the most direct solution...
>
> But reading what I can about WINE, I'm guessing that the only easy thing 
> to do is to write a Windows server application with winegcc and either 
> connect to it through a socket - or to have it spawn a Linux application 
> that it has a stream to.  But I need some sample code to know how to do 
> this, since I don't have too much time to experiment.

This comes up from time to time, the solution is always compile a
winelib app with winegcc then use sockets or something to communicate.
In your server app you can use windows and linux code mixed together.

Regards,
Maarten.

[Josh Scholar]

OK.  I need to access COM to do this, and I notice that in "What it WINELIB"
it says "Also missing are some of the more exotic features of Microsoft's
compiler like native COM support".

I'm hoping that "native COM support" just means some new fancy add-on that
wasn't in Visual Studio 6.0, and that I still do COM, but will have to find
old C and IDL examples from Petzold or something like that.

Is that correct?

Unfortunately, I've never really understood COM very well.  Is there an IDL
compiler for WINE?  I  know I need that much.

Josh Scholar

On 11/5/07, Maarten Lankhorst  wrote:
> Hello Joshua,
>
> Joshua Scholar schreef:
> > I really want to have some way to communicate between a Linux program
>
> and
> > a Windows program running under WINE.  The connection doesn't need to be
> > high speed, a stream is fine - I'm just sending some unicode text.  I'm
> > writing both programs myself, so I can implement this in the easiest
>
> way,
> > though if there was some way to create and call a Windows COM object
>
> from
> > Linux, that would be the most direct solution...
> >
> > But reading what I can about WINE, I'm guessing that the only easy thing
> > to do is to write a Windows server application with winegcc and either
> > connect to it through a socket - or to have it spawn a Linux application
> > that it has a stream to.  But I need some sample code to know how to do
> > this, since I don't have too much time to experiment.
>
> This comes up from time to time, the solution is always compile a
> winelib app with winegcc then use sockets or something to communicate.
> In your server app you can use windows and linux code mixed together.
>
> Regards,
> Maarten.

[Juan Lang]

Hi Josh,

(please bottom-post on this list.)
> OK.  I need to access COM to do this...

I don't know why you need COM to do this.  If you're writing the app
yourself, why not just use a socket?
> Unfortunately, I've never really understood COM very well.  Is there an IDL
> compiler for WINE?  I  know I need that much.

If you insist on using COM, yes, there's widl.
--Juan

[Francois Gouget]

On Mon, 5 Nov 2007, Josh Scholar wrote:
[...]
> OK.  I need to access COM to do this, and I notice that in "What it WINELIB"
> it says "Also missing are some of the more exotic features of Microsoft's
> compiler like native COM support".

What won't work is if you're using statements such as '#import' in your 
C files. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317217 for a sample of this 
type of construct. This was present in Visual C++ 6 already.

As long as you stick to standard C code you should be fine.

[Jan Zerebecki]

> This comes up from time to time, the solution is always compile a
> winelib app with winegcc then use sockets or something to communicate.
> In your server app you can use windows and linux code mixed together.

If you don't need to use linux APIs in your windows application
you can also make a normal windows executable with a windows
compiler of your choice. So winegcc/winelib is not a requirement
for this style of client/server solution. (You could use winsock
to communicate over tcp with the linux application.)

Jan