[CORed]

If you are a true linux fanatic, and are willing to go through a lot of hacking, it is possible to run the Party Poker client in Linux. The Paradise client is much easier. I did it on a SUSE 9.0 distribution, kernel 2.4.21-192-default. I used "Crossover Office Standard 4.0", a commercial front-end for "wine", a Windows API emualation package to run windows executables on linux (or other UNIX and unix-like OS's).

I initially tried with the open source "wine" by itself. I got the Party client to run, after upgrading to the latest version of wine, but got a warning saying that I needed to install Internet Explorer. Also, the table list in the main window wouldn't display. The table number would display in the right side, above where the list of players seated at the table should display (this didn't display either), and would change when I used the up or down arrow keys. I could get to the table by clicking the "Join Table" button at the bottom of the lobby window. Once at a table, I could play normally, but the chat window displayed white text on white background (invisible unless you highlighted it by dragging the mouse). Well, I could live with the chat problem, but not being able to see the table list made it pretty useless. I initially though that getting IE working might solve that problem. Getting IE to work under Linux and wine proved to be a pain. Installing Crossover Office solved that problem. It can be done in plain vanilla wine, but it takes a lot of config file hacking, and you have to install some other packages from microsoft to make it work. Actually, a lot of this is necessary just to get the installer to run. Crossover Office does all of this for you for supported applications, including IE. It was worth the $40 purchase price just to IE running. This product also will allow installation of Microsoft Office products on Linux, as well as several other major Windows applications. It also has a nice GUI application for installing Windows apps, simulating a Windows reboot, etc.

Unfortunately, getting IE running got rid of the warning, but did not solve the problem of the table lists not displaying. As far as I can tell, the Party client just uses IE to display promotional BS, which often contains links into Party's web site. It appeared that one of the wine dll's was not working. Wine comes with it's own dll's to support Windows applications, and also allows you, in some cases to use actual Windows dll's. There is a text config file that tells wine whether to use it's own dll's or native Windows dll's as well as a trace mode which logs the dll's loaded by the Windows executable. I was pretty sure that the list display problem was related to comctl32.dll. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the version from my Windows XP installation (my machine is dual boot Linux and XP) to work with wine. I finally had the inspiration to dig commctl32.dll (and commctrl.dll, which it calls) off of my ancient Windows 95 CD. This worked. The table lists now display. This leaves only the chat box white on white display. Also, the sort buttons at the top of the table list don't display, but if you click at the top one of the columns, the buttons will briefly appear, and the column will sort, so this isn't a huge problem. Also, the brown background on the rectangles with screen names and stack totals doesn't show. It makes your own stack amount rather hard to read.

I also installed the Paradise client. It worked without any tweaking. The only problem is that the "chat bubbles" feature doesn't work, for anything you type in the chat gets it's first two characters replaced with a period, and gets displayed twice in the chat box. If you put two spaces in front of what you type, it will display (twice). I don't know whether Paradise's client requires IE, because I installed it after installing IE. Both clients, asside from the chat bugs, seem to run just as well (or just as badly in the case of the Party client) as in Windows.

Was it worth the effort? Well in terms of time spent vs. benefit, probably not, since I could already play by booting into Windows, but it was fun (yes, I know I have a bizarre idea of what "fun" is).