HISE on WINE

[modularsamples]

Currently my main laptop is in for repairs and I'm using an older machine running Ubuntu 20.04 for all daily computing tasks, naturally this includes HISE.

Unfortunately, HISE does not seem to be well optimized for this OS. Projects take forever to load, menu's are sluggish and everything is generally pokey. Here's a boring video of what that's like.

Running the Windows version via WINE improves things significantly (with a few caveats) Here's an equally boring, but mercifully quick video showing the difference.

Since there are a few steps involved to get things working, here's how I did it:

There are many ways to get up and running with WINE, I chose to use Bottles 'cos it provides a nice UI with lots of options.

1. The first thing we need to do is install the Flatpak package manager:

sudo apt install flatpak

2. Then add the flathub repository:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

3. Now we are ready to install Bottles:

sudo flatpak install flathub com.usebottles.bottles

4. Restart your computer

5. Allow bottles to access files outside the WINE directory:

flatpak override --user --filesystem=host com.usebottles.bottles

6. Open Bottles from the Applications browser

7. Click on Create New Bottle

8. Give your bottle a name & hit create

9. Select Run Executable

10. Change "Supported Executable" to “All Files” & then navigate to the HISE installer (I used the 4.0 installer found here

11. Complete the installation as normal

12. Once installation has finished, Click on Add Shortcuts..and navigate to the HISE app. This should be located at ~/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/bottles/HISE_126/drive_c/Program Files. If the EXE file doesn't appear, again change "Supported Executable" to “All Files”

By default, HISE's menu system will not work. To fix this we need to tell WINE to display it in a virtual desktop.

14. Click on Settings and then Advanced Display Settings

15. Enable Virtual Desktop and enter an appropriate resolution for your display

16. Start HISE by pressing the play button from the Bottles Programs section

It should go without saying that certain things will not work when using HISE with WINE. Most importantly, any attempt to export your project will fail. For this you will need to revert to the Linux native app, consider using the command line tool to speed things up here.

[d.healey]

@modularsamples The sluggishness is due to the font handler. Use my fork of HISE or disable it in the Projucer file

[modularsamples]

@d-healey Ah, that's so much simpler! thanks. I take it the definition needed is USE_LINUX_FONT_HANDLER=1?

[d.healey]

@modularsamples I think so, I'm not at my computer now so can't check

[modularsamples]

@d-healey I've tried USE_LINUX_FONT_HANDLER=1 on it's own, and then in combination with USE_LATO_AS_DEFAULT=0 . Neither made any discernable difference.

I'll play around with it some more tomorrow,

[d.healey]

@modularsamples It's possible I've made some other fixes in my fork that I can't remember - or possibly it just works on Debian better than on Ubuntu, but I don't think this is the case as it works well on Linux Mint which is based on Ubuntu