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Ideas in development Here are the implemented Ubuntu ideas for the Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal release.

Adding a Special Wine with USB Windows driver support  
Written by Nosferatu Arucard the 29 Jun 10 at 16:00. Related project: Wine. Implemented
Wine is a compatibility layer that allow user-mode programs written for Windows running in Linux.
This architecture don't work with Windows drivers, since use a hidden API, but there is an important exception: the USB devices that work with user-mode drivers.

An experimental implementation to support Windows drivers designed for USB devices is actually taken by some Wine's team members:
http://wiki.winehq.org/USB

However, there's no binary packages or any kind of special tools that could ease the tests with USB drivers with this modded version of Wine.

And finally, the current implementation lacks some tools to install the drivers. Actually, the drivers should be manually configurated by editing the Wine's Registry.



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Selected solution (#1): Official Support for a Modded Wine with Windows USB Drivers
Written by Nosferatu Arucard the 29 Jun 10 at 16:00.
My suggest is to support two versions of Wine in repositories: the stardard one and the modded with USB support with some tools to make easy to standard users work with it.
And also there's a special reason to separate the modded Wine of the Standard Wine: since it's a experimental implementation, and there some stability issues.

A command line (An hybrid Win32/Unix program) to install the driver and later a font-end applet to manage Wineprefix's with Windows Drivers is in my opinion a first step to support the future merge of Wine with USB to the standard Wine.

Once created this easy tools, a standard user can use the modded Wine to install and get to work some devices that lacks Linux support at some critical operations: like firmware updates, since needs a Windows program and a USB driver to communicate with the device.

Also it can be a last resource solution to get some printers and scanners to work, if there's no native Linux driver.

See the 5 comments or propose a solution >>