Can Wine run Windows Gadgets?

[LarryM04]

I took the plunge and removed Win 7 from my laptop and gone whole hog Ubuntu 16.10.

So far so good with Wine running a couple video ripper/editors that I like as well as Usenet Explorer news reader.

What I'm really missing from Window tho is a couple "gadgets", one providing a graphical CPU usage, the other a graphical Wifi usage.

I tried clicking and selecting to run as a wine app, the little mouse points swirls for a couple seconds... then nothing.

Are there any tricks or such to get these gadgets to run?

thanks, Larry

[qwertymnb]

Could you post the names of the executables that you`re trying to run? Then we could give it a try ourselves as well, and try find out why they fail.
Side note: you do know that Ubuntu provides those gadgets as well?

[LarryM04]

From addgadgets.com its the CPU usage meter, and the network usage meter.

After posting here I did hear about Conky - is that what you're referring to as the Ubuntu equivalents? I did look at it a little bit, and it looks like a *great* program. Its not exactly plug-n-play tho, more of a summer project to get it programmed.

If Wine could run these two gadgets, that'd be great.

thanks, Larry

[DarkPlayer]

You are free to open bug reports in case such a tool does not work in Wine, but I am not sure if you will be happy with the solution. First of all, Wine misses a lot of features that are only used for informational purposes (like querying the CPU usage of a specific process) and secondly, Wine provides a virtual windows environment in which programs are separated from the rest of the system. A windows application in Wine will for example not see your Linux processes.

In your case I would suggest to take a look at the programs available for your host system before trying Wine. On Linux there is for example a tool called conky which is highly configurable and can display almost anything you want. Take a look at this example screenshot. You can see the network usage and wifi signal at the top right corner. It is a bit difficult to configure, but I am sure you will find some downloadable configuration that fits your need.

[Bob Wya]

From addgadgets.com its the CPU usage meter, and the network usage meter.

After posting here I did hear about Conky - is that what you're referring to as the Ubuntu equivalents? I did look at it a little bit, and it looks like a *great* program. Its not exactly plug-n-play tho, more of a summer project to get it programmed.

If Wine could run these two gadgets, that'd be great.

thanks, Larry

Yeah... Uhmm no... Even if you can get the windows gadgets to run under Wine - I'd advise against doing something like this.
Since the Windows desktop gadgets under Wine will run all the time - you'd better have a 4Ghz CPU and cycles to burn!
Wine is notorious for having serious overheads in this sort of usage scenerio - due to the way it's architected (with a single server process that handles all X events).
Never mind that Microsoft actually advised their users to stop using Windows gadgets due to security concerns - many years ago!!

Conky is easy enough to get going - if you install a frontend for it (e.g. Conky Manager)) that will provide you with a set of pre-baked scripts.
IMHO Conky is far more powerful than the stock Windows gadgets and will work accross all Linux Desktop Environments.

Bob

[DarkPlayer]

Wine is notorious for having serious overheads in this sort of usage scenerio - due to the way it's architected (with a single server process that handles all X events).

The wineserver does not process all X events, only input events. Since a user can only generate a limited number of input events, the additional round trip should not cause any noticeable performance difference. Even if there were a lot of events, the process sleeps while waiting for an answer from the wineserver and therefore does not consume any cpu time. The worst thing that could happen is that everything lags but not a significant increase of the cpu usage.

However, I could imagine that booting up a wine prefix during the user login could cause some unwanted delay.

[Bob Wya]

Wine is notorious for having serious overheads in this sort of usage scenerio - due to the way it's architected (with a single server process that handles all X events).

The wineserver does not process all X events, only input events. Since a user can only generate a limited number of input events, the additional round trip should not cause any noticeable performance difference. Even if there were a lot of events, the process sleeps while waiting for an answer from the wineserver and therefore does not consume any cpu time. The worst thing that could happen is that everything lags but not a significant increase of the cpu usage.

However, I could imagine that booting up a wine prefix during the user login could cause some unwanted delay.

Yeah... Sorry I wasn't clear... My thinking was the gadgets run in the background...
Every time a user crosses them - with a mouse cursor - it'll generate lots of input events to wineserver.
I bet Conky would be a significantly lighter weight candidate for this scenerio.

Bob

[LarryM04]

So I'm gathering that the answer to my question is "No, Wine probably can not run WIndows gadgets"

I had to give it a try, to see if maybe they'd work. I tried, they didn't so I thought there might be some trick I needed

I have installed Conky, and Conky-Manager, and found a post with literally hundreds, if not thousands of config-file samples. I had only time to try two of them, both had some sort of external dependencies and run on my laptop. Not the end of the world, but not the quick down-load-n-go I was hoping for.

Thank you for the help here. I always appreciate a quick reply. Larry