Flat Cap Electronics

This seems like a decent way to start out the bench notebook. I beat my head against something for several hours over three days and figured it out, and hopefully reasonable documentation and communication will prevail and spare someone else the grief.

Elsie is an excellent RF filter design program for Windows available over at Tonne Software. This is a go-to program for amateur radio folks and professionals working with analog RF filters.

Like most relatively undemanding windows programs I assumed it’d work just fine under Wine. I was only partly incorrect. I loaded up an existing filter and started plugging at all the tabs. Attempting a plot resulted in a crash.

Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0x00000000 in 32-bit code (0x7d8e17ff).

Ah crap. It may be advisable to start at the beginning in most things, but this appears to be . . . an exception.

Squinting at the backtrace like I knew what I was doing turned up some familiar faces. I recognised some of these DLLs, so it made sense that the last one before the page fault was my starting point. I’d never heard of windowscodecs before.

This sent me looking through Winetricks. Sure enough, windowscodecs is in there, but attempting to install it resulted in another crash.

Note: command 'taskset -c 0 wine wic_x86_enu.exe /passive' returned status 67.

Hmm. Poking around these bugs looking for ideas resulted in lots of ‘bug ignored as uninteresting’ style posts and dead ends. Advice in one caught my attention. Someone was insisting that a troubled party start a clean 32bit prefix before bug reporting.

What's a 'Prefix'? #

Wine uses the concept of a prefix to contain all the junk of a standard windows install like programs, registry, drive contents, and settings. The default is in a hidden folder in your home directory called .wine and may be revealed in Nautilus with Control-H.

I don’t have much in my wine prefix myself, and while it’s possible to have multiple prefixes I can’t say I have a good reason to struggle with sorting it out. I simply deleted my existing prefix. Renaming it might be a better idea for those with something to lose.

After that I opened a terminal window and ran the command I found in WineHQ's documentation.

WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=/path/to/wineprefix winecfg

Sweet. Now to try windowscodecs again. Open winetricks and:

• Select the default wineprefix
• Install a Windows DLL or component
• windowscodecs

Installed! Ok, now to install Elsie and try a plot.

It works! I’ll be damned. That caught me by surprise.

I suspect the problem might be fixed in a 64bit prefix with the manual install of windowscodecs, but that’s a bit over my head.

I have a report from an Arch user that this method proved ineffective using Arch Linux x86_64, kernel version 3.17.1-1, and Wine 1.7.29. User reports a runtime error when attempting to install windowscodecs from winetricks. I couldn’t verify they were using a clean wine prefix, and they didn’t want to persist in troubleshooting as they already had working what they needed. Can’t fault them there.

If anyone has more to contribute please let me know and I’ll amend this as needed.