Sibelius under Wine

Installing

The first step was installing it again, which was no harder than installing it on Windows, although I skipped the registration process. The only extra complication was in the prerequisites for the process, due to the machine running the 64-bit version of Ubuntu “feisty fawn” in which there are no wine packages for that architecture. One option was to wait a few weeks for “gutsy gibbon”, which does include it, but instead I set the sources.list to include this line:

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian lenny main

Wine very helpfully created a shortcut on the desktop and in the applications menu, so I launched the program and was greeted with a message about no sound card being found. Clicking past it, I noted both the absence of the start-up demo sound and the peculiar font used for text in the dialogs and menus of the program. Still, I managed to load a demonstration complex music file and press the “play” button, then watched as the score sprang silently into life. The program seemed completely usable apart from those two problems, and I was prepared to give up for another year, but someone assured me I was close, and this may have been what it took for me to stay up late and hit the forums online, trying to find whatever solutions were out there.

The two trials

The font problem turned out to be the simplest one to fix, and it was surprising that it had taken so long for me to find the answer. As a post in a thread on the Ubuntu forums said, if you have this fonts problem and have not installed msttcorefonts, then

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

might help. Sure enough, I ran that command (which is to say, I installed the suggested package) and it in turn downloaded and installed the individual Microsoft TrueType core fonts that Sibelius was missing.

Almost as easily, when you know how, was the solution to the sound problem. Again, a thread on the Ubuntu forums contained a post with some simple instructions (which were actually common to some other threads on the same forum) which boiled down to

click the audio tab, tick "OSS Driver" and select "Emulation" from the hardware acceleration drop down.

in the wine configurator, winecfg. The only comments I should add are that on this particular machine, it was the “ALSA Driver” that had to be ticked (although that was the only choice) and that at one point (possibly before the fonts were fixed) I had to use the clever “hold the Alt key while dragging inside the window” trick to be able to get to the “OK”, “Cancel” and “Apply” buttons that were off the bottom of the screen.

Just one more thing

Of course, one wouldn’t expect all the issues to be fixed in one release, otherwise the Wine developers wouldn’t have anything left to impress us with. It turns out that, as reported elsewhere, the numerical time signatures on scores are displayed incorrectly in Sibelius when run under Wine. Basically the bottom number is superimposed onto the top number, which for the common “4/4” time means the time signature simply appears to be missing the bottom half, but for something like “6/4”, a rather messy combination of those two numbers is drawn. Still, the music plays the same way, and if the problem is still present when printing (I didn’t have a printer available to check), it wouldn’t be too demanding to write the numbers on by hand later.

The important thing is, if this user’s Windows machine was incapable of being fixed, they could be up and running in Ubuntu without having to pay for a single extra piece of software, effectively avoiding the expensive upgrade treadmill. What’s stopping some company from offering new features and security updates to Windows ME? No, that’s an obvious one. All right: if you have to reinstall an old version of Windows on your new harddrive after your existing one breaks, do Microsoft still run the activation servers needed for it to trust that you’re not a criminal?