Launchpad itself

When will an open-source version of DCOM be available?

Asked by Philip Ashmore on 2008-08-09

I found https://code.launchpad.net/~linuxdcom/ibuntu/LinuxDCOM
but not many details exist.

I tried software AG's version but it has some problems
1. local machine DCOM only ; local machine only DCOM = COM
2. not indicated to interoperate with Microsoft's DCOM ; isn't it a platform neutral architecture neutral standard
3. I tried it on Fedora and it was a bit of a "clunky" port ; it created a _real_ user "sag" for it's daemon.
4. the daemon itself wasn't 100% reliable
5. need to re-install it every 90 days

Any pointers?

Question information

Language:: English Edit question

Status:: Answered

For:: Launchpad itself Edit question

Assignee:: No assignee Edit question

Last query:: 2009-02-05

Last reply:: 2009-02-05

Link existing bug

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Curtis Hovey (sinzui) said on 2008-08-09:

This question is not about Launchpad, and I do not see project that I can assign this question to that could answer your question. I suggest you contact the linuxdcom team directly asn ask them about their plans.

https://edge.launchpad.net/~linuxdcom

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lkcl (lkcl) said on 2009-02-04:

wine has a lot of the required infrastructure, already, surprisingly. what it _doesn't_ have is a dcom "service" - the object broker / pinger. but if you can tolerate installing DCOM98.EXE or if you can find it DCOM95.EXE then you _should_ be able to create COM-compatible DLLs and EXEs, because that's exactly what wine is _already_ doing (look at the implementation of mshtml.dll for example - it's a COM dll!)

the wine midl compiler isn't perfect but it looks like it's "good enough".

do you still have software ag's version of DCOM?

lkcl

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Philip Ashmore (contact-philipashmore) said on 2009-02-05:

> do you still have software ag's version of DCOM?
Yes.

Unfortunately it's 32 bit and has the problems mentioned above.

In case I wasn't clear, I'm looking to develop COM/DCOM components for GNU/Linux.
If the architecture can also allow GNU/Linux COM/DCOM <=> Wine then so much the better.

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lkcl (lkcl) said on 2009-02-05:

hiya philip,

can you email me, <email address hidden>?

i've just managed to compile the "com in plain c" examples - search for that phrase including the quotes for the original - and the modified source (which didn't take much) including Makefiles is available at:
http://lkcl.net/dcom_linux/com_in_c_with_winegcc.tgz

widl even manages to compile the tlbs. it hadn't occurred to me that this would all be necessary to do, for wine interoperability, but of _course_ they had to do this.

the only fly in the ointment is that DCOM98.EXE.

splitting out the wine infrastructure to do "pure" linux dcom is going to be... awkward. i believe that you'd be better off compiling your apps as wine win32 applications and running them under wine (always). not least because you ... well, you can test it of course ... are quite likely to still need ole32.dll, oleaut32.dll and rpcrt4.dll "native" - supplied with DCOM98.EXE - at least for now.

but _the_ most important step appears to have been achieved a long time ago: a free software toolchain can be used to compile DCOM apps, even if they still require proprietary infrastructure to run.

_got_ to get an implementation of http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/samba/specs/draft-brown-dcom-v1-spec-03.txt