Wine and NetBEUI

[Plamen.Vassilev]

Hello,

A client of mine has this ancient software called VideoPrinter (working on Win98) and an ancient hardware that connects to the PC through both LAN cable and serial (COM) cable. I decided to give this software a try with wine 0.9.60 running on Slackware 12, kernel 2.6.24.4. The software installs without problems and after adding the appropriate registry keys the COM is recognized. But the software complains that it cannot find a NetBEUI-enabled network interface, and there is indeed none. I googled around for a while, searching for a clue how to enable NetBEUI support for linux, but the information in links was vague and rather old. Large amount of links explained that Samba's NetBIOS encapsulates NetBEUI frames over TCP/IP etc; but I was unable to find how to bind a NetBEUI protocol to a NIC, so that the application on wine can make use of it. So I am aware that the problem (at this stage) is probably not wine related yet, but I was hoping that someone with enough knowledge could shed some light on this problem. And if there is a way to bind NetBEUI to the network interface, do I need some special wine tweaking to get the software running?

Thank you for your time.

Plamen

[Plamen.Vassilev]

As an update - I found out that Linux actually does not support NetBEUI but TCPBEUI through Samba, and so it seems that this machine will continue to run Windows, which is a shame, because the application otherwise works without problems.

Well, I guess I'm on my own again, thanks for stopping by anyway.

Plamen

[oiaohm]

Linux does not support any form of BEUI at all. Linux supports NetBios.

Note NetBEUI is a dead protocol. There is a security flaw in it. NetBEUI cannot tell the difference between a locally sent packet/RPC command and a remote one. So even keeping a old computer running to operate that is still a security risk.

You could be looking to altering wine to lie that NETBEUI is there and redirect up threw tcp/ip and netbios.

Lot more details are needed to work out what kind of lieing could be used.

[Plamen.Vassilev]

Thank you for your reply. The point is that this computer controls an ancient video mixing hardware that has only NetBEUI stack (I think). So either linux kernel must speak NetBEUI (which it does not) or it's windows for the poor pc. I think I have to give up on this one. Thanks again for your reply.

Plamen

[Tlarhices]

There is an unofficial netBEUI driver for the 2.4 kernels.
it can be found here [url]http://zhubr.tamb.ru/netbeui/[/url]
You might try this but there are chances it might not work.

[oiaohm]

Plamen.Vassilev. Inspect the hardware really closely. It would be a really rare device not to have a tcp/ip or a apple network protocol hidden in there. Particularity thinking that the time of 98 that Mac's were still used a lot in video work.

What exactly is the hardware.

Don't use the unofficial netBEUI driver is unstable it will drive you nuts. It still need a lot of work to be stable. I don't class it as support.

[Plamen.Vassilev]

Tlarhices: I am aware of this driver but it's very outdated, not finished and flaky, I certainly don't want to use it in production environment.

oiaohm: Will do. The hardware is video mixer, DSC 545, manifactured by Digital Video Lab (a Russian (Latvian?) company I believe). I contacted their representative here in Bulgaria today, and obtained some obscure documentation that was not provided with the software installation CD. Because the representative is not a tech one, I guess I will just have to wait until he redirects my questions to the guys that manifactured the hardware and wrote the software, and they answer me. I guess this is the most that I can do for now. I will however keep this thread posted of my progress.

Thank you both for your attention and replies.

Plamen