PokerTracker under Linux using wine: a workaround

[yaqh]

Up until Beta 17 or so, PokerTracker worked well on Linux under the wine windows emulator. Then, it began freezing on startup. It appears that the program's splash screen is to blame. When it is created, PT does some sort of polling to make sure it runs, and this turns into an infinite loop because of some minor difference in the way wine and Windows work. It's sort of frustrating that such a non-essential component is keeping the whole program from running. So, again, an option to disable the splash screen would be hot.

But anyway, I'm just writing to let people know that the wine people have found a work-around. It turns out that minimizing the splash screen allows PT to finish loading correctly. The splashscreen is not usually a normal, minimizable window (depending on your wine version, etc) but it can be minimized using a utility such as wmctrl.

See http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15848 for more details.

Cheers

[kraada]

We've requested the ability to disable the splash screen, but in the meantime that's really good news; thanks!

[plexiq]

Thanks, works great for me. Simply hitting the "minimize all / show desktop" button does the trick.

[BatsShadow]

At some point when they released hud performance improvements, the splash screen and also the hud stopped displaying in wine - instead showing a gray box. This was especially bad for the hud because the gray box covered the entire poker window making it impossible to play. Is that now fixed? Can I use the hud in linux again?

[kraada]

Try changing the Performance Level in the Hud Options tab and see if that changes anything (I'd test except I don't have any working poker clients in Wine, I just play in Windows).

[plexiq]

I tried using the HUD with various performance levels, but always ends up with the gray box.

[kraada]

We do have a ticket about this floating around that is flagged for the development team's attention, I just don't know how soon a fix will be available. I don't know enough about the underlying code to be able to give any more specific ideas for workarounds at this point, though.

[plexiq]

Bump for b26 update: No real news, the Splash-workaround still works with b26, but HUD remains broken.

Anyone out there who has a recent PT3 HUD version working with wine?

[the other mike]

I use devilspie so wrote this to start PokerTracker3 in wine when I heard about this workaround (put it in ~/.devilspie/<filename>.ds):

Code: Select all

(if
    (and
   (contains (window_name) "PokerTracker")
       (and (not (contains (window_name) "v3.")))
    )
   (begin   
       (minimize))
)


However you start PokerTracker3 this will automatically minimize the splash screen (in mine the splash screen could sit for an hour without PokerTracker3 ever starting but now works fine).

I didn't check every possibility but this will also auto-minimize something like "Help -> About"; if I find any important ones I'll change this or someone else can.

Mike

[dumdidum]

OK, so with beta 28 PT3 starts again without the splash screen workaround. Database creation, importing, and retrieval of stats works fine. However, the HUD is still broken, it still covers up the whole window (i.e., table) with a black box and you can't see anything but the HUD stats.

Also hope this will be fixed at some point.