Installing SmoothDraw on Linux

At the moment, SmoothDraw is my "one application" that means I have to keep my old dusty Windows box in the corner.

I investigated installing SmoothDraw on Linux under Wine, and the good news is that you can get it to work, but there are caveats.

To start with, the latest version of SmoothDraw (version 4) requires .NET Framework 4.0. I couldn't get this running properly under Wine.

But winetricks can be used to install .NET 3, and with this running you can get SmoothDraw3 to work. The only drawback is that tablet input loses its pressure sensitivity (think it's treated as a regular "mouse-like" device by the wine driver).

An option to get pressure sensitivity working was the SAI (1.5.5) version of wine specifically set up for this. But then I couldn't use winetricks, and only winetricks seems to "know" how to install .NET...

Anyway, having it work allows me to open, view and manipulate existing files, so it's worth having. This is the process for installing SmoothDraw3 under wine 1.4.1 (pieced together from my history...forgot to write it up at the time :/)

$ sudo apt-get install wine
$ export WINEARCH=win32
$ winetricks dotnet35
$ wine SmoothDraw3Setup.exe
$ wine .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/SmoothDraw/SmoothDraw3.exe