The Wine project provides a compatibility layer that allows Windows applications to be executed on non-Windows operating systems, including Linux and macOS. It can be used to run the CiderPress II GUI application, either by installing Wine as an application on the target system, or by packaging the application in a Wine wrapper.
Getting it to work can be a little tricky.
The first step is to get Wine working on your system. It's an open-source project, so you can download the sources and build it yourself, but it's usually easier to get pre-built binaries through your Linux distribution. Either way, go to the Wine project page, click Download, and work through one of the options.
Once you have Wine installed, run wineboot. This populates configuration
data in ~/.wine/. If you've run Wine before, this won't do anything.
Now we need to install the .NET runtime and some fonts. This is done with
a script called "winetricks", which may not be included as part of the base
Wine package, but should be available separately. Install it, with e.g.
sudo apt-get install winetricks.
Now run it: winetricks dotnetdesktop6 corefonts consolas tahoma
This might fail with a message indicating that dotnetdesktop6 is unknown.
If that's the case, your copy of winetricks is too old. (Even if you know
that your Linux distro is stale it's still useful to install the winetricks
package to get some dependencies, like cabextract.) Follow the instructions
on this page to get
a fresh script (it's just one file).
If the script succeeds, you should see a Microsoft Windows Desktop Runtime installer dialog. Click through it. Then click through it again (?). The script will then go and gather some fonts.
Wine is now ready to go.
Download a framework-dependent CiderPress II package for Windows. Both 32-bit
and 64-bit should work. For example, cp2_1.0.6_win-x86_fd.zip. Unzip it
into a new directory.
Run the application with wine CiderPress2.exe.
If you find that the application menus aren't rendering, you can try disabling Avalon 3D acceleration:
wine reg add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics" /v DisableHWAcceleration /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
The font rendering looks bad. The GUI font used by WPF is called "Segoe UI", which is not available via winetricks. Various attempts to make it available to Wine have not yielded an improvement. Installing the Tahoma font does seem to help, but it's unclear whether the blurry text is due to a missing font or to some issue with the font renderer.
Getting the Wine app installed isn't easy. First, you need to install a
package manager. Homebrew and MacPorts are suggested. Then the instructions
on the wiki direct you to install "(selected wine package)" without giving
you any sense for what that is. Fortunately, Homebrew offers up some
suggestions if you just enter "wine" (e.g. wine-stable).
As of early January 2025, the pre-built binary reported wine-9.0 when
queried with wine --version. This was released nearly a year earlier, and
does not work well with CiderPress II. While Wine is updated regularly, the
pre-built macOS binary is not.
Wrapping the application seems to work a bit better, and is more generally useful because it allows people to download a fully functional program without having to install and configure Wine. For macOS, the Kegworks project provides a reasonably user-friendly interface for this. The chief drawback to this approach is that the wrapped package is well over 1 GB.
As with Wine, getting started is a little bumpy. The project page on github has download instructions, again using Homebrew and MacPorts, but doesn't tell you what to do next. The installed program is not a command-line utility, but rather a GUI app called "Kegworks Winery" that can be found in the Applications folder.
When you launch the app, it will initially be a little blank. Click on the
buttons to install an "engine" and update/install the wrapper. CiderPress II
seems to work best as a 32-bit app with a 32-bit engine, so find the topmost
engine with "32Bit" in the name, e.g. WS11WineCX32Bit21.2.0, and install
that. (With a 64-bit engine there are significant visual glitches, e.g. the
menus may not render.)
Kegworks is now ready to go. Download the latest version of CiderPress II,
selecting the 32-bit (x86) self-contained Windows version. For example,
for v1.0.6 you'd grab cp2_1.0.6_win-x86_sc.zip from the releases page.
Double-click the ZIP to unpack it into cp2_1.0.6_win-x86_sc.
In Kegworks, select the 32-bit engine and click "Create New Blank Wrapper".
Choose an app name, such as CP2Mac.app, and click "OK". The application
will go off and do things for a while (about 45 seconds on a Mac Mini M4),
then hopefully report that the wrapper was created successfully. Click "View
wrapper in Finder". This will open the ~/Applications/Kegworks directory.
We now need to put CiderPress II into the wrapper. Double-click "CP2Mac".
Click "Install Software". Click "Copy a Folder Inside". From the Downloads
folder, select cp2_1.0.6_win-x86_sc, and click "Choose". When prompted
to choose an executable, select [...]/CiderPress2.exe, and continue.
At this point if you quit and double-click the icon, it will launch directly into the CiderPress II GUI. To access Wine settings, Ctrl+click or right-click on the app icon to open a menu. Select "Show Package Contents". Double-click "Contents" to open the folder, then double-click "Wineskin" to bring up the configuration buttons.
The CiderPress II GUI uses the default WPF font, which is called Segoe UI. For fixed-width elements, it uses a font called Consolas, which is shipped with Windows but not included in Wine by default. Without Consolas, all fixed-width content looks wrong.
Unfortunately, Segoe UI isn't accessible from Wine. Fortunately, Consolas is. To add it:
- Ctrl+click the app icon, select "Show Package Contents".
- Open the "Contents" folder, and double-click "Wineskin".
- Click "Winetricks".
- Expand the "fonts" item, and click the checkbox next to "consolas" ("MS Consolas console font").
- Click "Run".
This does a whole bunch of work. When it's done, you'll have a copy of the Consolas font family files in "Contents/drive_c/windows/Fonts". Unfortunately you can't just copy .ttf files in there and have them recognized; otherwise you could just copy them out of C:\Windows\Fonts and be done. (It's possible that the emulated app isn't finding Segoe UI for some other reason.)
Installing the Tahoma font helped on Linux, but had no noticeable effect on macOS (but macOS without Tahoma looks about the same as Linux with it).
The wrapped application can be copied into a ZIP archive and distributed. Others can download it and launch it directly, with one minor issue. When macOS downloads files from the Internet, it adds a "quarantine" attribute that prevents them from being executed. To undo this, it's necessary to run the following command in Terminal:
% cd ~/Downloads/<place where CP2 was unzipped>
% find . -print0 | xargs -0 xattr -d com.apple.quarantine
If you don't do this, a warning will appear claiming that the application is "damaged" and can't be run. It appears this step could be avoided by signing the app, but that costs money.
If you're having trouble accessing files from Terminal, go into System Settings, Privacy & Security, Files & Folders, and look for an entry for the Terminal app. It should be configured to allow access to Downloads and Desktop.
NOTE: when the ZIP archive was uploaded to Google Drive, the automated system flagged it as potential malware, which prevents it from being shared.
It may be useful to included a "README.txt" in the ZIP archive with the
quarantine removal instructions. Also, you should remove the CiderPress II
settings file, so users start with a fresh installation. In "CP2Mac.app",
navigate to Contents/SharedSupport/prefix/drive_c/Program Files. There,
you'll find the directory you installed (e.g. cp2_1.0.6_win-x86_sc).
Remove CiderPress2-settings.json from it.
Running x86 code on Apple Silicon requires Rosetta 2 to be installed. The
system will offer to install it automatically the first time an x86 application
is run, though this doesn't apply to command-line utilities. You can install
Rosetta 2 manually with the command:
softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license,
or use a trick: open the Applications folder, then Utilities, then Get Info
on the Terminal application. Check the "Open using Rosetta" checkbox, then
close and re-open Terminal. This should cause the system to install it.
- Sometimes the main window goes almost totally black. You can force a redraw by minimizing and restoring the application window.
- The UI font can seem a little blurry in spots. I don't know if that's because the correct font (Segoe UI) isn't available, or something to do with the rendering engine.
- The app can be a little slow to start, since it has to "boot" Windows.
Because this is a Windows emulation and not a native macOS application, the "host" file preservation mode (which uses file attributes and resource forks in the HFS+ filesystem) is not available.
My thanks to Eric Helgeson for figuring out a lot of this: discussion #34