I made some more progress on a few fronts with this system last night. I made a few tweaks to the X11 configuration to enable direct rendering for my Radeon 9200 video card, thus adding a slight performance boost, as well as some edits to the World of Warcraft Config.wtf to boost audio and video performance. The audio still has a minor stutter, but is vastly improved and the frame-rates while outdoors is nearly acceptable – meanwhile it outperforms the Windows environment while indoors which I found interesting.

Further tweaks will need to be made to prevent some artifacts that appear with the UI icons, as well as the overall frame-rate. In order to fix the audio issue, I believe I will need to increase the priority of the Wine process to accommodate the extra layer of software processing required to output to the ALSA drivers. I’m holding out on too many more video modifications until I see what effect this has on overall performance.

Photoshop is at this writing still inoperable. Loading the installer failed to accomplish what I hoped as CS2 is using the Microsoft MSI format – I have since learned that Wine does in fact support this, if I pass the file to msiexec, which I hope to try this evening.

For a kicks, I tried installing a few common programs (that do not use MSI installers) to see the results. MSN Live Messenger installs, loads, and gets properly embedded into the task bar – however, I failed to get it to display the login / contact window thus negating any ability to actually use the program.
iTunes threw several errors and during the installation of the related QuickTime software blacked-out the screen several times. I was able to load and play a wave file through it, albeit the interface was laggy, leaving me to overall determine that Wine is capable of running this – as long as you don’t need iPod support. (I don’t)
My favorite text editor, Crimson editor, installed but fails to operate.
All three of these programs have perfectly usable and nearly identical alternatives on Linux so these where merely tests performed in vain for curiosity’s sake.

On the agenda for this evening is making the wireless network work without dropping to the command line every time I reboot, attempting to run the MSI installer for Photoshop, and increasing the process priority for Wine – particularly while runing World of Warcraft.