Hi all who use MACs and other PCs than Windows,
As you can imagine we continuously have demands to offer Notation Software on other operating systems than Windows. The demands are growing and for us such an offer is an opportunity.
In this thread as well as in that
one, proposals were made what is the best way going forward. However, the only acceptable solution of today is based on third party software. The solutions is either to run a second bootable image using Parallels + Windows, VM Fusion + Windows, Virtualbox + Windows, somehow directly using Codeweavers or others. The key downside is that it costs additional money and/or is complicated to use for someone who is not familiar with those configurations. On our side we are only able to provide basic support for a Windows environment.
Based on the recommendations in this and
this other thread we have started an investigation what feasible options we have to offer our software conveniently on other operating systems at low costs. I would like to share shortly the findings here. They are just a snapshot as of today (August 20th, 2014) but given the discussions in the past it might be interesting for some of you to know.
In a nutshell:
We used the free open source package
WineHQ. WineHQ meanwhile became very powerful and offers Windows applications to work on Mac OS X, Linux, BSD and Solaris. We used Ubuntu-Linux and were able - with tweaks in the Notation Software - to get Composer 3 installed and running on Ubuntu using the WineHQ package. Clearly, there is still work to be done before we can offer a final solution (from coding, testing, beta test to ordering). But due to the powerful capabilities of WineHQ it is worth spending more investigation effort to see if we can offer a convenient and cheap solution to non-Windows users based on WineHQ.
Please see a screen shot of Composer 3 on Ubuntu-Linux below
.
I am going to use this thread to keep you informed about our further directions.
Reinhold