Electronics assistant - menus appearing on wrong monitor

[Agent24]

I just installed Wine 1.7 latest on Ubuntu 12.04 64bit

I installed v4.31 of Electronics Assistant http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.p ... &iId=12731

It runs but starts on the wrong monitor every time. Even when I drag it to the correct monitor, all the menus appear on the other one. So do dialogs. See attached screenshot.

[Bob Wya]

@Agent24,

Tried this out in Wine 1.7.12. I see it runs on Wine mono - without installing .net 2.0 - handy.
Doesn't run so well on a 64-bit Wineprefix (drop down menus load with an bizarre offset) - but it appears to run fine on a 32-bit Wineprefix.

I see on my Arch Linux install and KDE Desktop. The application loads file open/save dialogues in the "default" desktop. On KDE it's quite easy to override the screen that this application opens dialogue windows to (I have a dual-monitor/shared Desktop setup) - a simple context menu GUI setup. On Xfce I'm not aware of this capability. This behaviour is unlikely to be fixed in Wine - as it's purely down to the DE where windows land.

Bob

Btw if you also interested in Circuit Design applications - you might like to try out Fritzing - which is GPL V3 Open Source and runs natively on Linux (without any .net bullshit).

[Agent24]

Looks like I have found the problem - My monitors were swapped on the video card with respect to the logical displays. ie: The monitor connected to physical port 1 was being used as display 2 and vice-versa.

After swapping the monitor signal cables around and re-configuring the displays, the program didn't start at all. I deleted the ~/.wine folder (there was nothing else there anyway and at that point I couldn't be bothered finding out that problem) and let Wine rebuild it, and tried again. This time the program and menus display on the correct monitor, even when moving the window to the other one. However, dialogs default to the primary monitor no matter what, though that's much less annoying.


I wouldn't normally use a .Net program in Linux but it's the most useful program of its type that I have found so far for free, and as far as I know there is no equivalent native Linux program.

I've heard of Fritzing. I've even used it a couple of times before. But it doesn't really do anything for me. The breadboard view is kinda neat but I don't need it. I've used KiCad for years now for Schematic capture and PCB layout instead, it does pretty much everything I need in that department.

[Bob Wya]

I've heard of Fritzing. I've even used it a couple of times before. But it doesn't really do anything for me. The breadboard view is kinda neat but I don't need it. I've used KiCad for years now for Schematic capture and PCB layout instead, it does pretty much everything I need in that department.

Sorry, yeh I knew that was a tangent... But the application was mentioned in the Linux Format magazine this month (so was on my mind).

Glad you've found the issue...

Bob

[Agent24]

I've heard of Fritzing. I've even used it a couple of times before. But it doesn't really do anything for me. The breadboard view is kinda neat but I don't need it. I've used KiCad for years now for Schematic capture and PCB layout instead, it does pretty much everything I need in that department.

Sorry, yeh I knew that was a tangent... But the application was mentioned in the Linux Format magazine this month (so was on my mind).

No worries, I appreciate the suggestion. I'm always interested in open source EDA software and such.

Glad you've found the issue...

Bob

Kind of. It must be a bug in xfce or something because the behaviour doesn't really make sense. It shouldn't matter which monitor is primary or which output it's plugged into. The solution that worked for me may be totally useless to someone else - I was able to swap the cables easily as both were DVI-D. But someone else might be using VGA and HDMI or some other combination and can't swap them.

Don't really want to say it but "Windows handles it fine" so really, Linux probably should be able to handle it, too.

I'd probably file a bug report if I had any idea what package to file it against.

[Bob Wya]

@Agent24,

The problem isn't so much with Xfce as it is with Wine and X11.

The Windows DirectDraw, etc. libraries handle windows in a very different way from X11/Linux Window managers. Wine can put hints about where windows should land - but it is probably best thought of as "throwing" windows at the screen. It's a miracle if they land in the right order (menus above application windows) - let alone on the right monitor!
So basically Wine has some hard coded hints that it will use for Windows to try make things operate in a similar manner to Windows. Things have gotten a lot better than the used to be. Lots of additional fixes are need of course to fix OS-X/Quartz support...

If you file a Wine bug for this issue - which is more of a "paper cut" than a real problem - it will probably get marked as "can't fix - won't fix", etc. There are very few active developers working on the Wine project - give the massive task they have bitten off! So bug fixes have to be prioritised to all the applications that don't yet run at all.

Bob

[Agent24]

Ah, OK. Well, I probably won't bother filing a report then.