Now that the DVD Profiler Knowledge Base (i.e. wiki) has had a bit of a push, I've added this information across there. Because of the better layout options available (e.g. easier to include images), I'm going to concentrate on make updates over there.

For instructions on how to install DVD Profiler on Linux or Apple Macintosh (Macs), please follow this link.

---- Historical post ----

With a little work, you are now able to run DVD profiler on Linux with the assistance of Wine (the Windows API implementation, not the drink, although I'm sure a little of both wouldn't hurt)! This thread aims to provide the information you will need in order to get the program working.

Wine can also run under Mac OS, albeit with a slightly different set of challenges. However, once Wine/Darwine is installed, the procedure to et DVD Profiler working is the same.

Updates
* 29 August 2007 - original version
* 10 October 2007 - added 'winetricks'; added information for Mac OS; amended Gecko installation instructions; added supporting DVD Profiler on Wine

Disclaimer
Before I begin, I wish to make something clear: DVD Profiler is a Windows application! Invelos has chosen to develop and support the application ONLY for the Windows 2000 and later environments. To my knowledge, Invelos has no plans to support DVD Profiler for any non-Microsoft operating systems. Therefore, you should understand that running DVD Profiler under Linux or Mac OS is done so at your own risk and Invelos should not be expected to provide assistance in the event of any problems. There is also the possibility that future updates to DVD Profiler may render the application unusable in the Wine/Linux/Mac environment, and in the event of this occurrence, no blame should be directed towards Invelos.

I'll also take a brief moment to thank Ken at Invelos for his support in getting us to this point. His assistance has proved invaluable in helping to develop workarounds and Wine bug reports, as well as some minor program changes that improve compatibility.

Now, on with the installation...

Install Wine (on Linux)
To run DVD profiler under Linux, you must use Wine ("Wine Is Not an Emulator"). DVD Profiler should work on any recent Wine release and the Wine version packaged with many Linux distributions will probably be recent enough to run the application. The latest binary packages are available for major distributions from WineHQ.org (direct link).

Remember to run Winecfg from a command prompt (not as root) before continuing.

Install Wine (on Mac OS)
Wine also compiles on Mac OS, but certain differences between the two operating systems present certain challenges. For this reason, a splinter of the Wine project, Darwine was created for the purpose of producing dmg packages that mirrored the latest Wine release. Sadly, this project is no longer maintained. Regardless, its spirit still lingers on and there are some very nice chaps out there who continue to produce unofficial Darwine equivalents for the latest Wine releases.

To download the latest dmg, click here.
For further helpful information on Darwine, click here.

As with Linux, remember to run Winecfg from a command prompt (not as root) before continuing.

Winetricks
Despite being very successful and widely used, it should be understood that Wine is still alpha software (i.e. in development and incomplete). That means that it is still a long way from the polished 'works out-of-the-box' state that it aspires to for it's first official (version 1.0) release. As such, it has many issues to be addressed and barriers to getting programs working as they do in Windows.

As a means of alleviating some of these issues, one user created a script that could be used to install a number of useful packages for Wine to use. Using 'Winetricks' as it is called is not necessary, but it does simplify several things, and I would suggest that it is worth using to help get DVD Profiler working.

Winetricks can be obtained from here. If you click on this link, you are likely to be presented with a script in your browser window. If so, you can get the script by either saving the page (using the 'save page as' (or similar) option) or copy and paste the script into a text document and saving it as 'winetricks' (without and extension, such as .txt).

Winetricks should be run from a terminal or command prompt. Before you can run the script, you need to make the file executable, You can do this by either right clicking on the file and changing the file properties, or run the following command from a terminal:

"chmod +x /[path]/winetricks"

Then you can run the various commands in the script from the terminal. The following are examples:

"./winetricks"                            - brings up information on winetricks and the different commands
"./winetricks gecko"                - installs Gecko
"./winetricks tahoma"              - installs tahoma.ttf font
"./winetricks corefonts"          - installs MS Times and Ariel fonts

The last of these has very little to do with DVD Profiler, but may significantly improve the appearance on Windows applications running under Wine (you should get an idea whether you will need them as soon as you run winecfg and get the configuration terminal). A word of warning though; winetricks does not restrict itself to open-source or GPL packages, and so licensing restrictions may apply. Tahoma, Times, and Ariel are all Microsoft owned fonts. Although I haven't seen anything to suggest that their use is in breach of any licensing or copyright laws, neither are they being used as Microsoft intended (i.e. for their products).

Install Gecko
DVD Profiler uses some HTML in it's layout, and so Wine requires access to an HTML parser to run the application. Wine's chosen solution to this requirement is to use Mozilla's layout engine, sometime referred to as Gecko. Although Wine has an inbuilt installer for Gecko which is started automatically the first time a program requests an HTML parser, myself and others have found it to be somewhat temperamental. I'm therefore providing a few alternatives for installing it (with the most recommended first):

1) Install Gecko with winetricks (see above)

2) Trigger the install before installing DVD Profiler
Simply enter this at a command prompt: "Wine iexplore http://www.Winehq.org" and you will be presented with a pop-up asking if you want to download and install Gecko. Choose yes, Gecko will install and you will be presented with a new window displaying the WineHQ web page.

3) Install automatically by running DVD Profiler
In theory, you could simply let it install automatically by running DVD Profiler for the first time. A pop-up will appear about half way through the startup (when the colour is just before the iris of the splash screen) asking if you want to download and install Gecko. Chose yes, and it _should_ install. However, you may have some issues, especially as the splash screen may prevent access to the pop-up.

Install missing font
Believe it or not, the main cause of the failure for DVD Profiler was a simple missing font. As you might imagine, this is easily fixed.

The easiest way to install the missing Tahome font is using winetricks (see above). Alternatively, download a version of Tahoma.ttf, from a location of your choice (it's easy enough to find) and copy the file into the following directory (adjust for your install): "~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts".

Whichever method you've used, you need to enter the font into the registry so that Wine knows it is available. From a command prompt, type "wine regedit" to load the Windows registry editor. Then navigate to this folder:

"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Miscrosoft/WindowsNT/CurrentVersion/Fonts"

Add a new string value (Edit - New - StringValue), and set the name to Tahoma and the data to Tahoma.ttf.

Install DVD Profiler
Download and extract the DVD Profiler installation file (which I will assume is called "setup.exe"). From command prompt enter "wine /[path]/setup.exe", where [path] is the location of the setup.exe file. You should be presented with a typical DVD Profiler installation procedure. Note that as part of the procedure, I opted to set an icon on the desktop, and this is where I run the application from. It may be worth viewing the command call of the new icon to understand how to add a link to start from other locations.

Note that DVD Profiler may not launch correctly from the final screen of the installation. Do not be concerned – it will start correctly from the new icon.

Running DVD Profiler
Once installed, DVD profiler will start normally from the desktop icon. However, towards the end of startup, shortly after the main screen starts to load, you will be presented with an error message saying “Invalid floating point operation”. This is an unresolved bug that occurs very time the program is started. Simply dismiss the error and startup will complete as normal.

You now have full access to the DVD Profiler application and all of it's features!

Known issues
* Invalid floating point *
Without installing the Tahoma font correctly, these incessant errors are crippling. However, with the Tahoma font installed only one remains. Work is under way to find and resolve the cause of this remaining error.

* Themes may not work *
Regrettably, the Windows themes feature is not well implemented in Wine, and so DVD profiler may appear noticeably different by default. Changing the DVD Profiler themes within the program will also have limited effect. However, you will be able to imitate the DVD Profiler themes that you know and love by loading winecfg and adjusting the "appearance" section of the "desktop integration" tab. Note that telling Wine to emulate 'Windows XP' on the 'Applications' tab of winecfg may also improve matters.

* Icon looks poor *
A limit to the ability of Wine to extract icons from executables means that the DVD Profiler icon is less than ideal. However, a top quality png icon (along with all DVD Profiler icons from the application) can be downloaded from:
here or
here.

* Selecting data items with long names *
Data items that are too long for the field in which they are contained (e.g. long titles and cast and crew) have the full data appear in a hint-style pop-up when you hover your cursor over them. Unfortunately, this pop-up acts as a shield in Wine, preventing you from selecting the data item underneath. This causes particular problems when trying to select items from lists. There are various workarounds, such as selecting a different column of the record or using the keyboard to navigate from other, selectable items.

* Some community plugins may not work *
Different community plugins have different system requirements, including requirement that are not available in Wine. Therefore, there is no guarantee that any given plugin will work. Having said that, most could be adapted for use cross-platform if you have the knowledge. E.g. plugins requiring .Net will not run, but could be adapted to work with both .Net and Mono.

Supporting DVD Profiler on Wine
We would not have been able to run DVD profiler on Linux and Mac at all if it were not for our work with the Wine project. Although we have the program running, there are still several improvements that could be made to the way in which it behaves. Please support DVD Profiler on Wine by both voting for the application (vote for a specific version) and confirming (or otherwise) and voting for the bugs to help get them resolved.

I was very excited to read that it might be possible to run DVD Profiler on Linux.  I'm a newbie to Linux (using Mepis).  I think I'm almost there...so close but not there yet!!  I finally think I've got the Tahoma font installed correctly & I no longer have the floating point errors popping up quicker than I could get rid of them!  I think my problem is installing Gecko.  When I typed in Wine iexplore http://www.Winehq.org...I got the message that it couldn't run the specified command.  When I tried the second option of running Profiler, it says it needs the Active X Controller & do I want to download & install.  If I say yes...this error message:
access violation at address 00A9#3Ar in module dvdpro.exe.  Write of address 00000014.
So I tried the 3 option of downloading Gecko.  Here's the rub...I can't for the life of me find "Wine/Winetrickscache!  I've tried a find for wine & have opened all of those folders but can't find it.  Are there any suggestions?  Please remember I'm very new to Linux (1 week) but at least I've gotten this far :-)
Thanks!

I am also a noob, but on a Mac. Things seem to be very similar though...

I would understand that /.wine/winetrickscache gets created when you run winetricks for the first time. I believe you have to make winetricks executable, something like chmod +x or chmod a+x.

Admittedly, I have tried winetricks on my Mac just last night and have not yet succeeded.

Stuart...thanks for the additional help.  Still not working for me.  When I went to the winetricks URL, I copied everything that was there & pasted into an editor.  Was that the correct thing to do (wasn't sure if everything was to be copied.)  I then did the command terminal procedure & this is what happened:
thasan@0[~]$ cd /home/thasan
thasan@0[~]$ chmod +x winetricks
thasan@0[~]$ winetricks gecko
bash: winetricks: command not found
Have I done something wrong??
Thanks!

Ok...little steps LOL!  I did some poking around at the winetricks website.
I typed in "cd /home/[user]"
"chmod +x winetricks
and then:
"sh winetricks gecko"
That did the trick...a download started and at the end I got the message that gecko had been downloaded & installed.  (And a file search did find winetrickscache this time!)
But...when I launched Profiler...I still got the message that it was needing an Active X Control and when I clicked yes...an access violation   
Has anyone verified that Profiler 3.1 works on Linux?

Thanks Stuart.  I'm having a lot of trouble finding files, where programs install to, etc.  What I'm using is find file/folders but that doesn't seem right.  When I search for "wine" in home/thasan it lists 2 files...do I delete both of them?  And if I remember correctly...a file search for dvd profiler turned up nothing!  Is there a better way to navigate around & find folders and/or programs?
As far as I can tell, the Wine version is 0.9.9-Oubuntu2 which I installed via Synaptic Package Manager.
Also, looking back at one of your previous posts, it looks like I should have a home/thasan/wine folder?  I don't think that I do...there's a home/thasan/dvd profiler folder but not a wine...does that make any sense?  I'm not sure where wine installed to actually!
The location of my winetrickscache is:  home/thasan/winetrickcache.  Shouldn't it be: home/thasan/wine/winetrickscache??
The only wine file under home/thasan is a smallish read-only file.  The largest wine folder is at usr/lib/wine.

Installing Wine from source

I was going to write a quick guide myself, but looking at the one www.WineHQ.org has done reminds me that it's not unclear as I thought it was. I'd suggest that you just read this page.

Additional pointers:

1) make sure you have a C compiler installed as an absolute minimum (e.g. gcc) - you'll find out pretty quick if you don't. A lot of distributions include this as standard, especially if you chose 'developer' installation packages when installin Linux (e.g. on my OpenSuse, I can choose to install desktop, server, basic development, advanced development, etc.).

2) Probably worth installing Fontforge and Freetype as well (again, pretty typical installs).

3) Run "$ ./configure"; "$ make depend"; "$ make" logged into a command terminal as either yourself or root. The final "$ make install" command MUST be done as root.

4) The "$ make" command will take a loooooong time, so don't get worried.

Stuart

I've installed this on my MacBook Pro. It went very easily, and it seems to work quite nicely (it's busy downloading from my online, which is quite slow for some reason, but I don't recall how fast that was on my PC).

It's slower than on my windows machine, but it shore looks purdy on my 17" MacBook screen ... It seems quite usable so far ...

The hardest part for me was figuring out which Wine to use. I finally decided to use the port stuff and build the current version of wine from scratch. It took a while and built a lot of other stuff, but there was no operator intervention required I had already installed the XCODE stuff from Apple, which I think is required  for the port program, but is also a simple download-and-click installation.