A PhD in horribleness

Dr Horribles's sing-along blog

Dr Horrible’s sing-along blog; a new short released online seems to be popular on planet gnome (a release of tomboy was even named after it), considering this I was surprised to see that it was only downloadable via iTunes (though you could watch it online). I though that this would be an excellent opportunity to try the recently released Wine 1.0. I have previously attempted to run several games and iTunes in previous versions of wine with mixed levels of sucess; I found that while most older games (AOE 2 and AOE 1) ran almost perfectly, newer application seemed to be possible to get running but didn’t work for me.

Wine 1.0 is an amazing step forward in functionality, all I needed to do as install Wine from the repos with YaST or the command

su -c ‘zypper in wine’

then I could run the 32bit Windows installer (http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/) just as I would on Windows (except it took less than a tenth of the time) then I then I had a working copy of iTunes.

iTunes main window

It was nearly fully functional, it allows you to play music and use the online store; however there were a few small problems:

• It runs much slower than a native application; this is most notable when scrolling.
• Unless you launch winecfg and set it to disallow the window manager to control wine windows some buttons won’t work.
• It causes to screen to do black for a few seconds when starting.
• It is a bit prone to crashing.

Overall great job to the Wine developers and keep up the good work. When I had installed iTunes I discovered that the download was only available in the USA. I still feel that Banshee is a much better music player than iTunes but it is nice to know that Linux users now have another option.