Using Accordance With Linux: Has Anyone Tried Bottles?
Hi,
In the previous forum, people discussed how to use Accordance with Linux. I know it's not officially supported. I was going to ask my question there but apparently we can't sign in or post there anymore. So, if this question is considered off-topic, please advise as to where I should post. Thanks.
I know people have asked about using Accordance via WINE and the consensus is that it's difficult. I am fairly new to Linux but have come across something called Bottles which is a user interface for WINE. I'm wondering if anyone has experimented with Accordance using Bottles and how that went?
I would love to ditch Windows and my investment in Accordance is the last thing holding me back. Thanks!
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I doubt using bottles will make a huge difference as things still have to work with wine underneath. And I have been unable to get anything after accordance 10 to work m even worse, accordance 10 did not work on more recent versions of wine. So I am stuck with old accordance and old wine.
The only possible chance is that there is some combination of native libraries that will allow accordance to work. But you'd have to just use trial and error unless your debugging skills are amazing.
I fear our best option is the cloud version of it ever appears.
But post of you can make it work!
I only use Linux and do not have Mac or windows.
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We have an Accordance user who was trying to figure out why 13 and 14 were blacking out on WINE. if they manage to figure it out, They can post here.
In the meantime, we're pressing forward with Accordance Cloud which will be an option for Linux users once we can get it to beta.
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Thanks for the replies. I appreciate it.
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I wasn't able to install under Wine or Crossover but have installed under Virtual Box. It runs Windows 10 but I don't use much as Linux isn't my main computer. It is useable but the screen size is too small for me. That may be fixable but since I use Linux occasionally I haven't spent any time trying to figure it out but it is nice to have there anyway.
I don't know if still true but you used to be able to run Windows without a license but it lacked some features and you had to deal the occasional nags to buy a license. In my case I do have a license so don't know what their policy is now.
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After 30 days Windows won't work without a license.
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Thanks. They must have changed their policy because I used it that way for a few months. This goes back before Windows 11 was released. It also required a special installation from a download from Microsoft.
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Microsoft likes esuring people pay their Windows 11 licenses (or buy a new PC). :-)
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I used Winapps (https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps) with a libvert VM, and it's working quite well. It's pretty similar to virtual box, but it seems to integrate with the desktop better. I haven't tried using it too much, but so far it's been good.
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I tried with Proton and WINE, didnt get it working.
I'm never going back to Windows (10 was the last). And I'm starting to dislike the direction Mac is taking, so if Accordance is only available in MacOS or Windows in the next few years, it'll be a sad day for me to give up on my library. Hopefully, the cloud solution works out. That that'll mean a subscription model for it to be sustainable.0 -
I've been able to get Accordance 10 running with normal WINE in Linux Mint recently, but I see Easy Install isn't making the connection to Accordance. Moving the modules I have from a Windows 10 machine to the appropriate WINE directory isn't causing Accordance to recognize the existence of the modules. Any hints on having Accordance recognize them?
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Garrett O'Hara Nice work.
As an aside, which version of WINE are you running? I haven't tried a reinstall for a long time, but in the past I've had trouble on recent versions of WINE on my machine. I'm running WINE 5 which is ancient!
Installing modules is a pain in the neck. Sadly Accordance turned off Easy Install for version 10 (it used to work under Linux).
What you want can be done, but there's a few steps.
- I suggest you install version 10 on your Windows machine (or in a VM) otherwise, you'll potentially get modules downloaded that require a more recent version of Accordance than 10.
- Copy the modules across as you have done.
- Opening the module files is a bit fidly. Because they are directories, the file browser tends to either do nothing or navigate in to them rather than opening them. This is the method that works for me:
- Click on the module (e.g., NIV11.atext) so that it highlights (it won't appear in the “File Name:” text box).
- Click on the “Open” button (this will navigate you inside the directory).
- Click on the “Resources” folder (now for some random reason the “File Name:” text box is populated.
- Go back up to the parent directory (the “File Name:” text box remains populated)
- Click on the “Open” button again and now the module will open
- But you are not out of trouble yet. Accordance can't access the server to verify that you own the module, so it will ask you to enter an unlock code. Accordance support has always been happy to supply me with these if I email them.
- Once you have the code, enter it and the module will open and remain recognised in your library.
- Repeat until you run out of patience.
This is tedious, so I only install the modules I *really* want. I've had pretty good success getting texts and tools working. One random exception is the NRSV notes modules which refuse to install.
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Wouldn't it be much easier to port to Linux (The only platform anyone would need Cloud) then to create a whole new platform?
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I got Accordance 14.2 running with a modified version of Wine (11.20) with the help of AI. It's a bit slower than running it natively on Windows, but most text-related features work.
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Elijah . Ooo! That's interesting to hear. How complex were the steps to get it working? What kind of modified Wine? Did it require modifying the source and rebuilding? I'd like to make it work if I can.
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David Purton, currently it's in a private github repo, but I saw that you are also on GitHub. I can give you access, so you can take a look. Currently I'm not quite sure if I want to make the repo public yet, because the patches are AI generated and I didn't really review them.
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Elijah , yeah, I'd be keen to see. I can keep the code private. But building wine on my laptop would probably be painful (it's old). So I'm not sure how persistent I'll be. Share with dcpurton in GitHub
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David Purton I created a CI pipelines that generates an AppImage (see Releases). You don't have to compile wine to test it. More details are in the repo readme.
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Elijah you are a genius! I can confirm that your patches work (including the new ones to support X11).
I built the current Wine git master with your patches (took about 2 hours on my ancient laptop in a lightweight Debian VM). Install of Accordance 14.2 was pretty smooth. Had to restart downloads a few times. But got there in the end. It still thinks NICOT install is incomplete, but it seems to work.
It runs better than Accordance 10 in ancient version of Wine which is very flickery, plus I can actually get all my modules installed easily. Looks a lot nicer.
I'll test it a bit more in the VM to see if it does all the thinks I commonly use, but I'm likely to move this to my main machine.
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Elijah no pressure, but I think quite a few of us would be interested to tinker with this kind of thing - even if made available “as is” with no support and update promise.
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Yes, I will certainly echo what Joel said. I would love to have the opportunity to tinker around with this, it would be a lot simpler than what I do now.
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I agree with both of them, let us in.
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The current version can be downloaded here for now:
https://www.swisstransfer.com/dl/01a1a011-c773-703b-94e2-06228e3d26f5Keep in mind that there are known issues (listed in readme.md).
Contributions are welcome. I wanted to get the ball rolling, and I'm ready to hand it over to anyone who wants to continue the work. Ideally that would be someone with C and Wine knowledge who can review the patches and once in a while keep them up to date with new Wine releases (it doesn't have to be on GitHub).
Why I'm still hesitant to make the repo public is the that the AI-generated code of the patches has not been reviewed.
I can't promise to be able to address known/new issues. It seems to be in a usable state currently (tested with Fedora KDE 44). I didn't use it on my main PC.
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In a matter of mins I'm up and running. One thing though, you may want to see if its leaking memory and that may be why it slows down. You could also pass the modifications to wine to the wine team and see what they say about it.
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High RAM usage is also something I observed, but haven't find a cause yet after some initial troubleshooting. In my tests it didn't seem like an actual leak, because RAM usage didn't increase further, once everything was loaded (navigated to tabs, scrolled in text, …).
The whole Direct2D part that Accordance is using is something that is still actively worked on by the Wine devs. Direct2D is the main reason Accordance didn't run with Wine after Accordance 10.0 -
It works and this is already quite something ;)
Thanks for sharing, Elijah0 -
Elijah , to be honest I think you could make the repo public.
I wouldn't worry too much that the patches are AI written and you don't fully understand them. There's now a lot of low quality AI generated code used in all sorts of places. As long as you are transparent about things then people can use it at their own risk.
Neither do you have to promise ongoing support or bug fixes. There's plenty of open source projects that have been abandonned and then picked up by someone else who wants to make it work. The documentation you provided was more than enough for me to build Wine from source with the patches and get it working.
I know C enough to read and understand code and I've contributed to open source C projects in the past. But Wine is another matter. It's a big and complex project.
Still, starting conversations with Wine developers will be easier if the patches are public. I don't have time at the moment to run with it, but in the absence of anyone else doing something, I'd be able to get in contact with Wine developers and find out what they need to make Accordance run on stable versions of Wine.
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