CorelDRAW! X5 (OEM)

[Dark Owl]

I have a CorelDRAW! X5 installation CD I would very much like to run under Wine in Linux Mint in my migration away from Windows*. Pointing Wine at the installer on the CD gets nowhere.

I know the database rates CorelDRAW! as "garbage", but I figure the results are old and maybe nobody else is trying. A bit of help from experienced Winers would be welcome (please don't expect instant responses - I have another life!).

I found a YouTube video which appears to show somebody running CorelDRAW! in Wine under MacOS, but the commentary is not in English, and the video isn't detailed enough to read the screen text for settings etc. Maybe somebody can work out what's going on? https://youtu.be/WqO1sZV69G4


* Yes, OK, maybe I could take a look at LibreOffice Draw, but my skills were developed over many years using Corel.

[Bob Wya]

@Dark Owl

As someone who previously relied on an earlier version of CorelDRAW! I'd highly recommend you to invest the time to learn Inkscape. Since this application is actively maintained, doesn't lock you into non-native proprietary software/formats, and has excellent support for drawing vector graphics.

But if you want to perservere with Wine + CorelDRAW! ...

Could you make sure you have an up-to-date version of Wine or Wine Staging installed - currently version: 5.17
See: WineHQ Wiki: Ubuntu.

Your optical drive should be mounted, by Linux Mint, and will then be mapped to a Windows drive (letter), by Wine.

Then if you can test the applications installer, using a terminal window, and post the Wine debug terminal output in a forum post.
See: WineHQ User's Guide: 3 Using Wine.
See: WineHQ FAQ: 10.1.1 How can I get a debugging log (a.k.a. terminal output)?

If you post any terminal commands / logs, in a forum post, then please use the forum code tags:

Code: Select all

I AM CODE

- the </> button, immediately above the (full) forum edit box.

Also don't forget to post your working directory (i.e. the directory you cd'd to - before running the Wine command) and the actual Wine command you used!

Thanks
Bob

[Dark Owl]

Thanks for that. I am happy to follow up your recommendation for Inkscape - always nice not to be looked into closed proprietary software, and having given the documentation a quick skim I see that it can import my existing back-catalogue of .cdr files.

I admit it was a very long time ago, but I got put off looking at other graphics apps when my company wanted to go Visio - at the time it was almost unusable. Snapping nodes on shapes were not in the same places as if the shapes had been composed with lines (ie at the outer extremity of the shape instead of in the centre of the outline), and changing the resolution of the snap grid moved the origin of the grid!

I'll give Inkscape (and perhaps LibreOffice Draw) a whirl - install it, import a few existing drawings and see how I get on with it. I'll come back for guidance on Wine if that isn't working out for me.

Thanks again.

[Bob Wya]

np.

[Dark Owl]

Just for information, first impressions:

Inkscape appears not to support multi-page documents imported from CorelDRAW!, one has to choose one page at a time (and I presume save them one page at a time). Having imported, it makes a real hash of text. The idea it can only cope with a single-page drawing seems a significant restriction.

LibreOffice Draw does import a multi-page .cdr, and also makes a lesser hash of text - that might just be a question of font support and needing to add my Windows fonts to my Linux installation. Certainly Libre appears to be the front-runner at the moment.

[Dark Owl]

always nice not to be looked into closed proprietary software,

For "looked" read "locked".

[Dark Owl]

I found an Inkscape extension which adds multipage support, but doesn't seem to work with the latest version.

I think the best plan now is to allow that I might migrate to open source at some point, but to still see whether I can get Corel running in Wine (with a VM as fallback). I'll gather data and report back!