Linux player development should be abandoned in favor of making the Windows player more compatible with Wine

[Esinko]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. The Linux player is severely outdated and cannot display modern web content.

Describe the solution you'd like The development of the Linux player should be abandoned in favor of making the Windows player more Wine compatible. At this time, I've been able to run the Windows player (version v3-R301.1) with Wine (7.17-staging) using the dotnet472 and dxvk libraries installed with Winetricks. There are only a few issues currently:

• The watchdog program does not work at all. Either it gets stuck in a loop of spawning processes or starts leaking memory, causing the Linux kernel to terminate Wine all together once available memory runs out.
• Stability issues with random crashes. I'm still looking for the causes of some weird instability issues. I will update my findings and solutions later to this issue if anyone needs them.

The advantages of abandoning the Linux player in favor of making the Windows player more compatible with Wine should be self-explanatory: the development team can focus on only the Windows player with minimal overhead, while supporting Windows and Linux platforms.

Describe alternatives you've considered In theory just continuing work on the Linux player would be the ultimate solution, however, there does not seem to be any interest to do so.

Additional context

• dotnet472 is dependent on bunch of other .Net versions. Installing is a pain. Lots of clicking continue, but just one command with Winetricks.
• The Windows player does not run on Wine with Wine Mono. Fixing this would make running the Windows player on Wine much more user-friendly. Link: https://wiki.winehq.org/Mono
• dxvk is a compatibility library to convert DirectX calls to Vulkan calls. This is required for the player to be stable at runtime.
• Wine 7.17-staging must be used, because the stable version of Wine does not support the networking implementation of the Windows player at this time.
• Winetricks is a utility script for Wine: https://wiki.winehq.org/Winetricks

Short tutorial: How to run the Xibo Windows player with Wine

Note: Desktop of some sort required. I used plain X11.

1. Install Wine staging version 7-17 (or later!) https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_User%27s_Guide#Getting_Wine
2. Install Winetricks https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks/releases
3. Install cabextract (https://www.cabextract.org.uk/) and GStreamer (32-bit, https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/installing/on-linux.html?gi-language=c)
4. Install dotnet472 and corefonts winetricks -q dotnet472 corefonts
5. Install dxvk winetricks -q dxvk
6. Make sure Wine is configured as Windows 10 winecfg -v win10
7. Download the Xibo Windows player installer and run it wget "https://github.com/xibosignage/xibo-dotnetclient/releases/download/3R301/xibo-client-v3-R301.1-win32-x86.msi" wine ./xibo-client-v3-R301.1-win32-x86.msi 6.1. Disable the Watchdog by renaming the executable To know why, read the comments above mv "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Xibo Player/watchdog/x64/XiboClientWatchdog.exe" "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Xibo Player/watchdog/x64/DXiboClientWatchdog.exe" mv "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Xibo Player/watchdog/x86/XiboClientWatchdog.exe" "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Xibo Player/watchdog/x86/DXiboClientWatchdog.exe"
8. Start the player wine "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Xibo Player/XiboClient.exe" append o after the command as an argument to start the options program

[tgotowik]

I got it working to open the xibo-client but then it says: "Fatal Error initialising the application. Configuration system failed to initialize". Do you know this error and may have any suggestion for it?

[Esinko]

I got it working to open the xibo-client but then it says: "Fatal Error initialising the application. Configuration system failed to initialize". Do you know this error and may have any suggestion for it?

Could you give more details and logs perhaps? Which version did you use (Wine, .net, Xibo)?

To answer your question: No, but we can figure it out

[tgotowik]

Hey, sorry I was a little bit too hasty. After that I only get black screens when trying to launch Xibo. At the moment I'm trying to figure out whats wrong. Looks like the graphics are having some problem, but I am really unsure about that. If you want to have a look at it, you can find the log in the attachment.

Btw. I try to get it working for the latest stuff:

• Xibo Client: v3 R310.1
• wine 8.0.2
• dotnet472 log.txt