(click to enlarge)

Preface

Following a hint by Gerardo, I tried Transgaming's Cedega (formerly called Winex). In April 2005, I subscribed to Transgaming ("subscribing" is their method to sell software, it is a minimum of $15 for 3 months), and installed cedega_4.3-1_i386.deb. The good news: BBO does run there.

Ups and Downs

BBO does not run in Cedega 4.4. It fails in the same way as plain Wine does. (You can log in, but can't do anything interesting like going to a table or chatting.) [Update 2005-07-16]

As said above, it works with Cedega 4.3. There are some glitches, though:

• the button bar is at the top instead of the bottom. It is fully functional, but it hides the stuff behind it. This is particularly annoying as you cannot your partner's (or North's) cards. Switching to the symbolic game diagram helps.
• the button bar is flickering nervously. (Mostly noticeably on not-so-fast machines, it is much less annoying on my new 2GHz AMD64.)
• the place where the button bar normally is does not redraw, i.e. it always shows what was there on the screen before (see the screenshots above).
• the score table ("bridge movie") sometimes needs additional clicks to "wake up", likewise does the chat window.
• the Ctrl-? keys do not work, i.e. you have to click on "Chat" instead of pressing Ctrl-S (you can still start chatting by typing at any time, but I am always afraid that this causes random bidding or carding since I have the keyboard control enabled).
• I have not yet found a way to resize the window (normally Ctrl-W does that).
• opening a bridge movie (*.lin) from the command line fails.

• it does work, and it is usable. Really.
• sound works.
• it even opens your native browser when you click on a URL in BBO.
• cut-and-paste works using Ctrl-V/Ctrl-C to and from GTK applications.

Fonts

Bottom Line