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  #1  
Old 11-30-2004, 03:46 AM
CORed CORed is offline
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Default For geeks only: Party and Paradise clients under Linux (very long)

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).
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  #2  
Old 11-30-2004, 10:57 AM
stigmata stigmata is offline
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Default Re: For geeks only: Party and Paradise clients under Linux (very long)

Nice work.... I'm impressed.

I'm gonna stick to windows myself, but I'm sure some people will find this useful in the future. Maybe post it on a linux forum somewhere?

I did think about installing Party on linux once. I wanted to do something funky by parsing the Hand Histories. Then I discovered PokerTracker.... lol
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  #3  
Old 11-30-2004, 12:53 PM
BBill BBill is offline
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Default Re: For geeks only: Party and Paradise clients under Linux (very long)

Are you saying Wine and Crossover Office are required for the Party client? or just Crossover 0ffice?
This sounds interesting, I've got a box runnig Redhat release 9 and have been pondering how to get a poker client to run on it.
How is the performance after a successful install?
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  #4  
Old 11-30-2004, 01:25 PM
CORed CORed is offline
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Default Re: For geeks only: Party and Paradise clients under Linux (very long)

Crossover Office is basicly a front end for wine. It actually includes wine (I'm not sure if it's modified or not). From what I've found on the wine site, it is possible to get Internet Explorer, which the Party client needs to run, with just wine, but it takes a lot of configuration, which Crossover Office does for you. Crossover Office also has a some nice utilities which make it quite a bit easier to install Windows apps, etc.
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  #5  
Old 12-04-2004, 01:10 PM
CORed CORed is offline
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Default Update and bump

I got the Party chat window to work. I am now using native Windows riched32.dll and riched20.dll. The only remaining bugs are the bacground color of the box that shows the player name is transparent instead of dark brown, which sometimes makes the text hard to read, and that box does not show the player's action. These are both very minor.
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  #6  
Old 12-04-2004, 01:23 PM
itsmarty itsmarty is offline
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Default Re: Update and bump

Thanks for the update. Any chance of you putting together a how-to combining the first post with the steps as you would do them now?

Martin
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  #7  
Old 12-04-2004, 02:19 PM
Eratosthenes Eratosthenes is offline
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Default Re: Update and bump

Hi CORed--

Thanks for your work on this. Installing this is now on my list of things to do, right after getting my brother's MythTV box working correctly.

Two questions:
Does your setup multitable OK?
Do you use PokerTracker? It is an ACCESS application, so I expect that it works OK with crossover office.
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  #8  
Old 12-04-2004, 06:26 PM
CORed CORed is offline
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Default Re: Update and bump

Multitabling works fine. I don't have Pokertracker. It would probably work with crossover, but I don't think it's a supported application so it might require some configuration and native dll's. An alternative, if you have a dual boot setup, would be to put your hand history files on a Windows-readable partition. I have a 1 GB FAT32 partition on my PC so I have some space thats both readable and writable by both OS's. Of course, if you go that route, you would have to boot into Windows to look at poker tracker data, which would be a pain if you wanted to access it while playing.

If I can find the time, I will post some detailed instructions. I'm not sure which versions of comctl32.dll (the dll necessary to get the table list to work) work. I may try it from a WinME or Win98 PC that I may have access to. There are a lot of versions of this dll around, and IE installs often update it. All I know for sure is that the version from the original Win95 install disk, probably the very oldest there is, works. The version from WinXP SP2, probably the newest available, doesn't work. I don't know about the many versions in between.
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