553. Briefly: Drawing molecules on Debian Wheezy: ISISDraw under wine (very briefly)

I'm cheating here: this isn't a program for linux. Instead we're running a windows program under wine, which is not ideal. On the other hand, it's so easy to do that it's worth exploring as an option to 'pure' linux offerings.

I'll be posting about native linux offerings later.

Either way, I've kept a copy of ISISDraw 2.5 around since the early 2000s. Luckily, other people are mirroring the installation file for it as well. See e.g. http://fc.smcdsb.on.ca/~rszerminski/addl_files_for_web/DRAW24.EXE for ISISDraw 2.4

 You'll need to install wine:i386 and for that you'll need to enable multiarch if you're on amd64:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine:i386
wget http://fc.smcdsb.on.ca/~rszerminski/addl_files_for_web/DRAW24.EXE
wine DRAW24.EXE

As always, if you have problems with e.g. weird fonts, use winetricks to install at least corefonts, or ideally allfonts:

wget http://winetricks.org/winetricks
sudo mv winetricks /usr/bin/winetricks
chmod +x /usr/bin/winetricks 
winetricks allfonts

Then run ISISDraw:

A blank slate

 ISISDraw has a lot of options, including templates and journal settings.

Chem Inspector

 There's a bug under wine: to get the menus for the buttons on the left side to show up, click on the button on the left panel, and then move the mouse left while still holding the button down.

To get the menus to work, click and while still holding the left button down move right

 ISISDraw is not going to blow you away, but it's free and it works under wine.