Trillian

What works

The program installs fine.

When you first start the program, it will crash.  This is because dwmapi.dll isn't implemented yet.

What does not

The program will not run.  It crashes on startup.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Only installation and start up were tested.  The program crashes directly after start up, so nothing further could be tested.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

A quick replacement of dwmapi.dll will reveal that this is the last major hurtle before the program will run.

Installation:

• Use Wine 1.1.43 or higher, the more recent the better
• Older versions will have problems with rendering and prevent any productive use
  
• Download the latest version of Trillian Astra (v.4.2.25 at this time, you can find it here)
• Install Trillian Astra
• Opt-out all the ask.com fields (pay attention, there are two!)
  
• When prompted that Flash is missing, answer the question whether to install it with "No"
• Start "winecfg" and set the Windows version to "Windows Vista" (others may work to, but Vista caused least problems for me)
  
• Launch Trillian Astra (it may auto-update when launching, just let it do so)

Using Trillian Astra:

All major functions of Trillian Astra should work fine. However, remember that your using a beta version of Wine and Trillian Astra is not approved for Linux, so don't expect it to run flawless. For example, Trillian Astra has still a few problems with window boxes and alpha-blending transparency. To reduce them I changed the following points:

• Go to "Settings" - "Skins" and change the default "Trillian Cordonata" skin to "Trillian Cobalt"
• Cobalt uses a much slimmer and lighter interface and doesn't depend on alpha-blending transparency
• Go to "Settings" - "Skins" - "Skin Settings" and turn off alpha-blending transparency. This should avoid the black boxes in the background of Trillian

With the standart settings, every contact sign-on or sign-off is shown by notification windows. However, these windows catch focus from all other programs, so you may want to turn them of by

• Go to "Settings" - "Notifications" and unchecking "Notify me when"
• A contact signs on
• A contact signs off
• A contact changes status (optional)
• A contact changes status message (optional)
  

If you use Trillian Astra on a second screen, you may want to change the location of the Notification windows. You can do so by going to "Notifications" - "Show notification windows at the bottom right corner of moniter ?"

 In case of crashes:

Some preferences screens, e.g. "Activity History", "File Transfers" and "Contact List" cause Trillian to crash. Since it won't allow you to start it again, you have to kill Wine with "wineserver -k". After that you can start Trillian again without any problems. However, settings you've changed in the last minutes before the crash may haven't been saved.

Last Update: 06/20/2011