5.31 not usable!

[Alex Atkin UK]

I dont know if anyone else has experienced it but I have found 5.31 totally unusable in Wine.

I open a group, do a search, scroll down and then it will suddenly jump back to the top of the list and get stuck thinking im holding the left mouse button down. This stops me from being able to select anything so the only logical solution is to close Newsbin. Its done it every time I have tried.

So im back down to 5.30 for now though might go back to 5.31RC as it didnt seem to have the problem.

[DThor]

I'm sure it depends on the version of wine, but when the tweaks to allow more flexible drag and drop in post lists was implemented(the release you're talking about), I get some "funky" behaviour. In my case it acts as if I've always got the left mouse button depressed, but *only* in terms of highlighting. As far as the behaviour, I have yet to see it do what you're describing, though. I'll keep an eye out.

DT

[EDIT] Yah, I'm getting it now. You're right, makes it unusable unfortunately. I'll post back when/if this gets looked at.

[Alex Atkin UK]

It was only a matter of time, not so long ago I couldnt get Wine to work for ANYTHING so I was rather impressed it worked in the first place. Unfortunately 5.3 is randomly crashing on me too (just find its closed itself) so im going to have to figure out which version works sufficiently.

Its a shame there isnt anything as good as Newsbin for native Linux.

[DThor]

Don't discount it yet - this was a rapid release with a new feature(the drag and drop additions) that had little testing. There's been showstopper problems in the past on wine but Q's addressed it. He just can't *promise* he'll fix it, or determine when. I'll keep bringing it up(mainly since most of the time I'm on IRC I'm on Linux, so I'll be unable to test stuff ).

Btw, I realize it's a much larger effort to run, but vmware runs NB just fine.

DT

[Alex Atkin UK]

I run Newsbin on my LAN server because its the machine thats running 24/7 so it made sense to utilise it rather than have another machine heating the room and eating electricity. However I have enough problems with Linux without adding virtual machines to the mix.

Im mainly a Windows user but when its something thats running for prelonged periods (eg days) Windows is never the best option, especially if its a machine I might need to do other things on so might need to stop and reboot at some point. Using Linux is a lot easier because mostly if Newsbin fails I just reload, if Wine fails then its not hurting the rest of the server whereas if Windows fails then thats everything im doing out the window.

I would never use Linux to replace the desktop, I have tried and as such I try to use my Linux box as much as possible so that if it DOES become practical I will find myself using XP less and less. Alas it hasnt happened yet, im much more comfortable with XP although using the server for quick browsing is a lot quicker than booting XP. Anyway, I digress and I dont want to go too far off-topic.

[DThor]

However I have enough problems with Linux without adding virtual machines to the mix.

Lol I love hearing stuff like that..."problems with Linux" usually means that it doesn't work like Windows. See this - it's not a perfect analogy, but it's a pretty good one.

"Adding virtual machines" to the mix somehow causing you big problems means you haven't tried vmware. It's an app - it runs in a window - it boots an OS completely within that context and doesn't interfere with the rest of your session. There's no grief to be found anywhere. The only downside is, as I mentioned, it means waiting for a windows session to boot up - that simply takes more time than wine, that's all. You can keep working in Linux.

Anyway, it was just a suggestion. VMWare is free now, you might want to look into it. As far as dumping Windows - I'm still here on MS at home. It's not going anywhere in my world - I couldn't live without the games and music stuff. At work, I'm lucky enough to be able to drive what we use - and Linux is far superior for what we do.

DT

[Alex Atkin UK]

I have never tried VMWare or anything like that on my Linux box and quite simply I doubt it has the CPU cycles to spare for it. Not to mention it would be a huge waste of a GB or so of disk space JUST to run Newsbin but perhaps the saving in electricity would make it worthwhile - lol.
Perhaps I will give it a go sometime, but I doubt I have the RAM to spare either and if I didnt assign enough RAM we would have Windows killing my Linux performance by churning the virtual memory. So to say it wont have any effect on Linux is silly, its sharing resources so of COURSE it will have an effect especially when you have the overhead of Windows wasting more resources than simply using Wine does. Most of all I run Newsbin via nice (I have checked with and without, it doesnt affect the reliability) so that if the server is straining to play video it doesnt let Newsbin cause juddering. I already had to upgrade it to get video to playback properly as it is. Its STILL struggling to handle HDTV playback as it seems there is no hardware deinterlacing in a GeForce FX5200, although it only has that card because it was too crap to run any games on.

So basically, theres many reasons I want it to work on Wine. Its not the end of the world if I have to put up with an older version for it to work, but it would be nice to keep up to date.

Incidentally, im back on 5.31RC Build 7423 which seems to work okay for the headers list but has the 5.31 left mouse button bug in the newgroup list. Basically I can open 1 group but then it gets stuck thinking im trying to drag that group somewhere and never unsticks. Interestingly at the same time Wine is reporting "fixme:imagelist:ImageList_DrawIndirect ILS_ALPHA: unimplemented!" although it doesnt sound important. Other than that issue its a shame because the screen seems to update better than 5.30 does and so far I havent seen it randomly crash like 5.30 did. At least now I can get 1 newsgroup to open and then select posts, seems to be the happy medium between the two versions as im usually only downloading frolm 1 group at a time anyway.

[DThor]

An update - I found the latest(internal) worked great with crossover - although that's a pretty pricey option - but kept experimenting and found that, surprisingly, the dll versions weren't related. Turns out it appears to be a wine issue(the native Linux portion of it). I upgraded to the latest(wine-0.9.22) and it seems to be working fine - drag and drop behaves oddly if you do hold down and drag, but if you don't do that, it behaves as before(i.e. works fine).

Note this is with an internal release of Newsbin and Q had made some changes to it specifically to address this issue, so if you try this with the beta release and it doesn't work, don't panic. Should work with the next release.

DT

[Quade]

There's a flag I use to detemine if I'm in "drag" mode or not. I'm hammering it off now to try and catch this.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I just installed the latest Wine for Mandriva 2007 this week and I noticed 5.31RC wasnt glitching anymore. I updated to 5.32 and all seems good so far so it looks like the problem has been fixed in Wine.