super-good!

I was pleased to read that Google is contributing to Wine and was especially happy that they’d been doing so by funding Codeweavers. I’ve worked with Jeremy and other Codeweavers folks through Pixar. They’ve done great work for us, and are incredibly nice people too; they deserve all the good exposure and press they can get from this.

I’ve been keeping up with Wine’s git repository ever since I saw how well it can run The Orange Box, and I’ve been really impressed with the strides Wine has been making. After reading that Photoshop CS2 is now well-supported, I tried it out and it’s been just flawless.

The first thing that I did after seeing my Wacom tablet working perfectly in Photoshop was to download a trial version of Painter X. I love Painter and have always wanted to use it under Linux; though I haven’t been doing much drawing lately, when I was, Painter was the only reason that I was keeping an accursed Windows partition on my machine. Wine ran through the installer just fine, but Painter itself failed to launch.

I don’t blame the failure on Wine, though; I blame it on whomever at Corel made the stupid decision to integrate copy protection into Painter. Now, given that a Google search easily turns up cracks for Painter, this useless copy protection is no doubt lamely justified by Corel as “keeping honest people honest.” All it’s doing for me is stopping a trial version of Painter from running. Corel: Really? Are you feeling nostalgic for the 80’s or something? Why not just include a 5 1/4” floppy disk with bad sectors with Painter? (Ah, memories of Renegade and Maverick!)

I’m willing to bet that Painter would run pretty well if this Protexis bullshit weren’t standing in its way, and it’s a pity that such a fantastic program has to be hobbled by such shortsightedness.

The silver lining for me is that, while searching forums populated by legitimate Painter users who can’t run Painter because of problems with Protexis, I found someone who said they’d just use Artrage instead. Having never heard of Artrage, I grabbed the Starter Edition and, lo and behold, it seems to work as well under Wine as Photoshop does. It seems like a great little program that will serve my drawing needs just fine, so I think I’ll send them some money.

(Corel: see how that works? Don’t treat me like a criminal, if your product is good, I’ll pay for it. I was on the verge of paying a healthy chunk of change for Painter X, and I’m really glad I didn’t.)