Trillian

What works

Logging in now works. Trillian Astra no longer crashes as in previous Wine versions. The main window appears and so does the preferences window on first run. Connections were made to at least the Astra IM service (not sure about others, app seemed to freeze or at least was running terribly slowly).

What does not

Trillian Astra makes heavy use of transparent images, which Wine appears to render with a black background. In addition performance is very poor and speed increases will be needed to make this app usable... already it is a serious CPU hog on Windows (it is an alpha build and has not yet been optimized for performance, so it is probably not worth it to try and fix this until it reaches beta) however it is worse in Wine. The main window is not properly rendered at all, and in addition does not have proper transparency applied to it (a Windows feature which allows for non-rectangular windows called layered windows).

Workarounds

What was not tested

Since the app performed so poorly it was unable to be properly tested past the opening of the main window.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

IMO this app has graduated from garbage to bronze, I believe due to a fix Cerulean Studios made which stopped Trillian from trying to call Vista DWM calls regardless of which Windows version it was run on (that was crashing it in Wine in earlier builds, as the DWM functions were/are unimplemented in Wine).

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