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HeroLab and Linux - a REALITY!

L

LongFist

New member
It works! It really works!

You'll need PlayOnLinux to make it work, but it works!

I installed PlayOnLinux on my Ubuntu Linux box (my RPG game machine), and then loaded/installed Wine 1.3.37 into PlayOnLinux - because it "identifies" itself as WindowsXP SP3. I then installed HeroLab with "Install a Non-Listed Program", and after a few minutes it came up! Fully functional! Well almost: I had to pay for/register HL to get full functionality - but now I run HeroLab natively under Linux - and it supports all of the features seamlessly.

In short: it works, and nobody had to code anything any differently.

And I get to stop running WindowsXP under VMWare just to access HeroLab. Not that VMWare isn't awesome, but I like not having to start XP (it takes forever sometimes) just to run my ShadowRun campaign. And now I don't have to.

I've been running like this for about a month now, with no ill effect whatsoever. Just wanted you people to know that. :D
 
PlayOnLinux: Easy to Install, Easy to Update

Yep. If it weren't, I'd never have mentioned it. Go here for some initial (basic) information, and Ubuntu has it available from the Ubuntu Software Center. (Search for PlayOnLinux to cut to the chase.)

I found that - because I want PlayOnLinux updates with my normal system updates - I needed to do the following:

Open a Terminal, and type this:

sudo wget http://deb.playonlinux.com/playonlinux_oneiric.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/playonlinux.list
sudo wget http://deb.playonlinux.com/public.gpg
sudo apt-key add public.gpg
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install playonlinux​

...when you're done, you will be running the latest and greatest version of PlayOnLinux - and be ready to have all the fun that comes with it... ...and when it comes time to update, the updates will get pushed along to you with your normal (system) updates. This truly rocks!

I'll be hanging around to provide some support, should you need it. But by and large, on the four machines I took a notion to install this on, this has worked flawlessly every time. (Crosses fingers, just in case...)

I'm still sounding the depths of this utility (PlayOnLinux), so I'm still learning all of the in's and out's of how it works. Right now, I'm delighted that "It just works". So far, so good!
1z5uhz7.jpg
 
Durring the setup you say to install v1.3.37 of wine. But you don't mention for x86 or for 64bit? I installed both.

After finishing installing HeroLab things look like they run ok but when I try to close the "add class levels" dialogue when making a pathfinder character it crashes. Have you seen that when using PlayOnLinux?
 
LovesTha said:
Durring the setup you say to install v1.3.37 of wine. But you don't mention for x86 or for 64bit? I installed both.

After finishing installing HeroLab things look like they run ok but when I try to close the "add class levels" dialogue when making a pathfinder character it crashes. Have you seen that when using PlayOnLinux?
Click to expand...
Bump.
I am slowly switching over to Ubuntu. Herolabs is one of the few things I have left to take care of.
 
Wine is not cooperating so I installed playlinuxonline.

I was asked to created a virtual drive, but then I got a message saying "No setup lcoation found in autorun.inf"
 
Hey there, first time posting here.

Does this method still work? I see that it was posted about a year ago and just want to make sure before I give it a shot.

I love Herolab and am currently using Windows 8... which I'm not sure I like too much. If it'll still work, I'll move to Ubuntu.

Thanks all!
 
Does this method still work? I just got a new computer with Windows 8... which I'm not sure I like all that much. If Herolab will work on Ubuntu, I think I'll switch. But if not, I guess I'll stick with it.

Thanks all!
 
PDF issues

Hey, I installed HeroLab using Playonlinux. Finally! A way to use HeroLab without Virtual Box!

However, I've noticed some issues when I print and especially with saving pdfs.

When I print or save a pdf, the symbol of the "u" with two dots over appears in several places. Not the end of the world but irritating.

The big problem is saving pdfs. If I ask Herolab to save pdfs, the pdf is created missing information. Just big empty sections of the pages.

Thoughts?
 
Unfortunately, saving to PDF has known issues on Linux that would be very hard for us to fix. For some reason, drawing text works differently enough on that OS that our PDF rendering is messed up. :(

Until Wine duplicates how Windows renders text exactly, I recommend seeing if you can find a PDF printer driver, if such a thing exists on Linux. That way you can print as if to a printer, but it should generate a PDF for you instead of printing onto paper.

Hope this helps!
 
Installing a pdf printer in ubuntu is realy easy:
sudo apt-get install cups-pdf
I haven't tested it with PoL->Wine->HeroLab, but otherwise it works well and put's the pdf in a folder called PDF in your home directory.
 
I am planning to purchase HeroLab provided I get HeroLab (in demo mode) running on Linux using PlayOnLinux. This is now the only thing that is holding me back from purchasing HeroLab.

Using PlayOnLinux, I manage to create virtual drive with HeroLab installed.

When I start HeroLab I immediately obtain an window titled "Security Warning" with error message "There is a problem with the certificate for this site." This occurs before selecting Demo option. Selecting Yes to continue, I choose Demo, and get to page asking for Game System to retrieve.

Those who managed to get HeroLab working under PlayOnLinux, could you tell us how you handled this error.
 
work around to PlayOnLinux download errors

raventower said:
i have hero lab installed in linux mint with win and have play on linux installed. it runs but wont download updates. help?
Click to expand...

I hit this too. I even installed the most recent available IE8 from PlayOnLinux, which had no trouble accessing the internet, but still Hero Lab errored out.

As a work around you can manually download the game data file from the Hero Lab download page (these are .hl files) and then click on the import file button in Hero Lab to import the downloaded file.
 
I've got this running on Ubuntu 15 just fine, but HeroLab didn't work for it right out of the box. I had to install the winbind packger (sudo apt-get install winbind) and made sure on the install of HeroLab with PlayOnLinux that I selected the option to set the version of Wine to use and tell it to get the latest Wine (1.7.50 at that time) and that seemed to work fine for me.
 
I've currently got Hero Lab working on my Linux partition on my laptop (openSUSE Tumbleweed.) I'm using the standard Wine method (current version 1.7.5x) as opposed to PlayOnLinux (POL uses Wine to achieve what it does but comes with easy pre-made configuration scripts and easier installation options.) There's nothing wrong with POL, I just tend to use plain old Wine so I can troubleshoot my own issues and learn possible workarounds that may help others.

The Hero Lab app itself tends to be a bit slower than on Windows (to be expected in many cases with Wine) and exporting to PDF, while functional, is quite slow. Hero Lab tries to open a Windows PDF viewer after an export to PDF and produce a message saying one could not be found, but the PDF file will be saved correctly in the directory where you choose to save it to. (If there's an option to not open an exported PDF automatically, please inform me of where said option can be located. It would be greatly appreciated.:)) I've tried installing a Windows PDF viewer with Wine, but Hero Lab still couldn't find one so I decided to stick to exporting PDFs.
There isn't much that I've found to not work so far.

If you want better app font/smoothing support, you can optionally install the Windows gdiplus library (it may or may not help, YMMV, but it I noticed an improvement on my system.) This can be done using the winetricks script (the openSUSE Wine package comes with this, but other distributions may package it separately or require a manual download of it.) To use it, log in to your user account (not root) and open up a terminal and enter the command winetricks gdiplus (sudo is not needed to execute the winetricks script command) and the library will be installed and configured automatically. Again, YMMV (your mileage may vary.)
There may be other optional Windows libraries that may help, but I've not tested any other than gdiplus. (Winetricks has a list of common ones that can be selected.)

If you have a printer set up, saving/exporting to PDF then opening the PDF in a native Linux PDF viewer is a viable option to get your file printed. (I haven't tested/looked into printing through Wine to a native Linux printer setup, so it may or may not be possible. Exporting to a PDF then printing that from a native viewer is likely the more convenient method to avoid issues.)

I'll soon be submitting my Wine results to the app database on the WineHQ website (the most recent entry was Hero Lab 4.3a with Wine 1.6.1, tested over a year ago.)
 
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